New Poll Finds Most Americans are Christian
By Movieguide® Contributor
A new Gallup poll has found that the majority of Americans are Christians.
“According to an average of all 2023 Gallup polling, about three in four Americans said they identify with a specific religious faith,” Gallup reported. “By far the largest proportion, 68%, identify with a Christian religion, including 33% who are Protestant, 22% Catholic and 13% who identify with another Christian religion or simply as a ‘Christian.’”
The poll also found that 45% of Americans say religion is “very important” in their lives.
However, the Gallup survey reported that church attendance was declining, with just 32% of Americans saying they had attended a religious service in the past seven days.
“The trends are clear that we are secularizing in some sense. There is a decline in participation in organized religion and in belief in God, but those are not necessarily the same thing,” Joseph Backholm, a senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “The one clear thing is that some belief in a higher power is persistent. People can’t shake the idea that the universe didn’t create itself.”
This can be seen in surveys conducted on members of Gen Z. A 2023 Barna study found that “two-thirds of teens (65%) and nearly half of young adults (48%) in the U.S. identify as Christians.”
77% of the teenagers surveyed said they were “motivated” to keep learning about Jesus throughout their lives.
Movieguide® previously reported on a poll that looked at Gen Z’s growing interest in Christianity:
The 2023 State of the Bible report shows that Gen Z is still interested in learning about faith, though the number of those willing to do so is declining.
“The majority (56%) of younger Gen Z adults (ages 18-21) reported being curious about Jesus and/or the Bible, whereas only 34% of older Gen Z adults (22-26) said so,” the report revealed. “These percentages are down from 2022 when around 77% of all Gen Z adults showed curiosity in Scripture.”
While the interest in faith is trending negative, the data shows that Gen Z is more interested in the Bible than the general population may think.
Nearly half of Gen Z says that the Bible has transformed their lives. Forty-nine percent of those aged 18-21 report this to be true, while 52% of those aged 22-26 say the same.
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