Almost 44 % Of Americans Changed Their Religion, Study Says

By Matthew Williams
09:52, February 26th 2008

According to a national survey conducted by the Pew forum on Religion and Public Life, over 25 percent of the Americans gave up the religion they were born in and turned to another one or none at all.

The big number of immigrants succeeded in keeping the number of Catholics in the church constant even though 10 percent of the U.S. adults have left the church. The Catholic immigrants are from Central America and Asia and came mostly to California.

John Green, a Pew senior fellow said: "Immigration is what is keeping them afloat. If everyone who was raised Catholic stayed Catholic, it'd be a third of the country," the Washington Times reports.

The survey shows that Protestants are to become a minority in the U.S. with a percentage of 51 American adults in the church.

Almost 44 percent of the Americans changed their religion they were born into, while 28 percent left entirely religion, San Francisco Chronicle informs.

Sixteen of those who left their childhood religion turned to other Christian denomination.

The 143-page U.S. Religious Landscape Survey was conducted on over 35,000 adults in summer and is based on a massive 45-question poll.

Over 78 percent of the 220 million adults in the U.S are Christians, according to the survey.

Evangelical Protestants is the largest group, outnumbering the Catholics, with 26.3 percent (59 million) of the adult population.

Other Protestant denomination, like Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, have a smaller percent and it continues to shrink. Now they have an 18.1 percent of the population.

The black churches represent 6.9 percent of the population.

Catholics represent 24 percent of the population being a constant number in the last 35 years.

Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum, said: "There is no question that the demographic balance has shifted in past few decades toward evangelical churches. They are now the mainline of American Protestantism."

According to the survey, the number of agnostics and atheist represent almost 2.4 and 1.6 percent of the adult population.