(Newswire.net — May 13, 2015) — While the Christian population in America has declined, the group of believers who didn’t declare has grown to 56 million in recent years, according to a Pew Research Center study. Called “nones’ the group grew to be the second largest group in America, behind evangelicals, Pew Research reported Tuesday.
According to Pew, Christians are still the largest religion in the US, as every 7 in 10 Americans stated as Christian.
In a once predominantly Protestant country, Christianity is still the dominant faith by far. While 7 in 10 Americans identify with the tradition, Christianity actually fell from about 78 to 71 percent.
Americans who described themselves as atheist, agnostic or of no particular faith grew from 16 percent to nearly 23 percent, the report says, explaining the decline of Christians.
According to ABC News, the researchers have long debated whether people with no religion should be defined as secular, because the category includes believers who just don’t consider themselves as a part of any particular religious group.
The findings “point to substantive changes” among the religiously unaffiliated, said Greg Smith, Pew’s associate research director, adding that secular groups become more organized “to counter bias against them and keep religion out of public life through lawsuits and lobbying lawmakers.”
ABC News reported that the growth of “nones” has political significance as well, as the folks who are declaring themselves as atheists or nonaffiliated tend to vote for the Democrats, while Evangelists traditionally vote for the Republicans. The report showed overall rise of Evangelists to around 62 million people.
According to research, Protestants declined from 2007 to 2014 by 5 million with a count around 36 million, and Catholics now count around 51 million followers, or just over one-fifth of the Americans, a drop of about 3 percent from 2007 to 2014.
However, other major researchers found different results. Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which tracks American Catholicism, puts the US adult Catholic population at 61 million.
The Pew report find Muslims and Hindu members group slightly grew, but still less than one percent of US population declares as Muslim or a Hindu.
The number of Jews rose slightly over the period, from 1.7 percent to 1.9 percent of Americans, Pew found.
The survey of 35,000 people, titled “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” was conducted in English and Spanish from June 4 through Sept. 30 of last year and has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points.