Medieval and Manuscripts

Christianity in the United States

Christianity is the predominant religion in the United States, although estimates vary among sources. According to a 2024 Gallup survey, approximately 69% of the U.S. population—about 235 million out of 340 million people—identify as Christian. A plurality of Americans identify as Protestant (45%), followed by Catholics (22%). Smaller Christian groups include members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1.5%), Eastern Orthodox Christians (0.5%), and other Christian denominations (0.4%). The United States currently has the largest Christian population in the world, comprising nearly 235 million Christians. However, while the U.S. leads in absolute numbers, several other nations have a greater proportion of their populations identifying as Christian. The United States has the largest Protestant population globally, numbering more than 150 million adherents of different Protestant denominations, and is also the world's fourth-largest country with the highest number of Catholic followers. Christianity was introduced to the Americas during European colonization beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. European missionaries sought to spread Christianity among indigenous North Americans through conversion and Christianization, and immigration further increased Christian numbers. Going forward from its foundation, the United States has been called a Protestant nation by a variety of sources. When the categories of "irreligion" and "unaffiliated" are included as religious categories for statistical purposes, Protestantism is technically no longer the religious category of the majority; however, this is primarily the result of an increase in Americans, such as Americans of Protestant descent or background, professing no religious affiliation, rather than being the result of an increase in non-Protestant religious affiliations, and Protestantism remains by far the majority or dominant form of religion in the United States among American Christians and those Americans who declare a religion affiliation. Today, most Christian churches in the United States are either Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, or Catholic. The Public Religion Research Institute's "2020 Census of American Religion", carried out between 2014 and 2020, showed that 70% of Americans identified as Christian during this seven-year interval.

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See also

• ▸Buddhist meditation
• ▸Barry Zuckerman
• ▸Hardman & Co.

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.