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.The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism by Martin E. Marty, chapter 1 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.God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, p 284, Philip Jenkins - 2008.
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. In a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 65% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians. They were 75% in 2015, 70.6% in 2014, 78% in 2012, 81.6% in 2001, and 85% in 1990. By 2005, around 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation. online at Google Books. The 2023–2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey in the United States found that 40% identitied as Protestant and 19% as Catholic.
All Protestant denominations accounted for 48.5% of the population, making Protestantism the most common form of Christianity in the country and the majority religion in general in the United States, while the Catholic Church by itself, at 22.7% of the population, is the largest individual denomination. The nation's second-largest denomination and the single largest Protestant denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention. Among Eastern Christian denominations, there are several Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, with just below 1 million adherents in the U.S., or 0.4% of the total population. Christianity is the predominant religion in all U.S. states and territories. Conversion into Christianity has significantly increased among Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans in the United States. In 2012, the percentage of Christians in these communities were 71%, 30% and 37% respectively.
History
Christianity was introduced during the period of European colonization. The Spanish and French brought Catholicism to the colonies of New Spain and New France respectively, while the British and Germans introduced Protestantism. Among Protestants, adherents to Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Quakerism, Anabaptism, Methodism and the Moravian Church were the first to settle in the American colonies.
European Christian colonists introduced Christianity to indigenous communities in North America. The term Praying Indian was used in the 17th century to refer to Native Americans who had converted to Christianity and assimilated to Christian practices. Christianity played an important role in the cultural assimilation of Native Americans in the history of the United States.
Early colonial period
Dutch colonies The Dutch founded the colony of New Netherland in 1624; they established the Dutch Reformed Church as the colony's official religion in 1628. When Sweden established New Sweden in the Delaware River Valley in 1638, Church of Sweden was the colony's religion.
In 1657, some thirty residents of the small settlement at Flushing petitioned Director-General of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant requesting an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. The Flushing Remonstrance is considered a precursor to the United States Constitution's provision on freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights.
Spanish colonies Spain established missions and towns in what are now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and California. Many cities and towns still retain the names of the Catholic saints these missions were named for; an excellent example of this is the full legal name of the city of Los Angeles: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, or The Town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula River. The city was founded by Franciscan friars, who named their tiny church and later the town that formed around it after the Virgin Mary, also known to Catholics as Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. Similar patterns emerged wherever the Spanish went, such as San Antonio, Texas (named for Anthony of Padua), Santa Fe, New Mexico (named after Francis of Assisi,) and Saint Augustine, Florida (named for Augustine of Hippo), as was Saint Lucy County and Port Saint Lucy in Florida named for Saint Lucy/Santa Lucia although Saint Petersburg, Florida was not named for St. Peter, but for the city of the same name in Russia.
Conversion of Native Americans to Catholicism was a main goal of the Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits. This was common in places where French influence was strong, like Detroit or Louisiana. However, Christianity is also implicated in the deaths of one third of the indigenous population of California.
British colonies
Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the 17th century by men and women, who, in the face of European religious persecution, refused to compromise passionately-held religious convictions and fled Europe.
Virginia
An Anglican chaplain was among the first group of English colonists, arriving in 1607. The Church of England was legally established in the colony in 1619; with a total of 22 Anglican clergymen having arrived by 1624. In practice, "establishment" meant that local taxes were funneled through the local parish to handle the needs of local government, such as roads and poor relief, in addition to the salary of the minister. There never was a bishop in colonial Virginia; the local vestry consisted of laymen controlled the parish. The colonists were typically inattentive, uninterested, and bored during church services, according to the ministers, who complained that the people were sleeping, whispering, ogling the fashionably dressed women, walking about and coming and going, or at best looking out the windows or staring blankly into space. There were too few ministers for the widely scattered population, so ministers encouraged parishioners to become devout at home, using the Book of Common Prayer for private prayer and devotion (rather than the Bible). The stress on personal piety opened the way for the First Great Awakening, which pulled people away from the established church and into the unauthorized Baptist and Methodist movements.
New England A group which later became known as the Pilgrims settled the Plymouth Colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, seeking refuge from persecution in Europe.
The Puritans, a much larger group than the Pilgrims, established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 with 400 settlers. Puritans were English Protestants who wished to reform and purify the Church of England in the New World of what they considered to be unacceptable residues of Catholicism. Within two years, an additional 2,000 settlers arrived. From 1620 to 1640 Puritans emigrated to New England from England to escape persecution and gain the liberty to worship as they chose independently of the Church of England, England being on the verge of the English Civil War. Most settled in New England, but some went as far as the West Indies. Theologically, the Puritans were "non-separating Congregationalists." The Puritans created a deeply religious, socially tight-knit and politically innovative culture that is still present in the modern United States. They hoped this new land would serve as a "redeemer nation."
Christianity's expansion had consequences for the indigenous people of the U.S., dating back to King Philip's War, 1675–76. From the pulpits of New England's Puritan divines came "an unvarying message" of the "evil native genius" that needed to be dealt with.
Tolerance in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania Roger Williams, who preached religious tolerance, separation of church and state, and a complete break with the Church of England, was banished from Massachusetts and founded Rhode Island Colony, which became a haven for other religious refugees from the Puritan community. Some migrants who came to Colonial America were in search of the freedom to practice forms of Christianity which were prohibited and persecuted in Europe. Since there was no state religion, and since Protestantism had no central authority, religious practice in the colonies became diverse.
The Quakers formed in England in 1652, where they were severely persecuted in England for daring to deviate so far from orthodox Anglican Christianity. Many sought refuge in New Jersey, Rhode Island and especially Pennsylvania, which was owned by William Penn, a rich Quaker. The Quakers kept political control until Indian wars broke out; the Quakers were pacifists and gave up control to groups that were eager to fight the Indians.
Beginning in 1683 many German-speaking immigrants arrived in Pennsylvania from the Rhine Valley and Switzerland. Starting in the 1730s Count Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren sought to minister to these immigrants while they also began missions among the Native American tribes of New York and Pennsylvania. Heinrich Melchior Muehlenberg organized the first Lutheran Synod in Pennsylvania in the 1740s.
Maryland In the English colonies, Catholicism was introduced with the settling of Maryland. Catholic fortunes fluctuated in Maryland during the rest of the 17th century, as they became an increasingly smaller minority of the population. After the Glorious Revolution of 1689 in England, penal laws deprived Catholics of the right to vote, hold office, educate their children or worship publicly. Until the American Revolution, Catholics in Maryland, like Charles Carroll of Carrollton, were dissenters in their own country but keeping loyal to their convictions. At the time of the Revolution, Catholics formed less than 1% of the population of the thirteen colonies, in 2007, Catholics comprised 24% of US population.
Great Awakening