Southern Baptists make up nearly 7 percent of the United States adult population, according to a new Pew study that also shows evangelicals outnumbering mainline church members and Catholics.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey was released Feb. 25 and was based on interviews with 35,000 Americans. It showed that 6.7 percent of 225 million American adults (18 years old and older) say they are Southern Baptist, which makes it the largest-represented non-Catholic denomination in the survey. Adults affiliated with the United Methodist Church total 5.1 percent of U.S. men and women, while every other denomination makes up 2 percent or less of the adult population.
More than three-quarters of the adult population (75.8 percent) say they are affiliated with a Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox church. Protestants – which, in the survey, include evangelical churches, mainline churches and historically black churches – make up 51.3 percent of the adult population, followed by Catholics (23.9 percent) and Orthodox members (.6 percent).
Evangelical Protestant churches – which include Southern Baptists – comprise 26.3 percent of adults and outnumber Catholics and mainline Protestants (18.1 percent).
Pew compared data from the survey to data in past General Social Surveys (GSS, another well-known survey) and found that Protestants are declining as a share of the population. But that decline may not be among evangelicals.
“What scholars who have analyzed the GSS data have found,” Pew reported, “is that the proportion of the population identifying with the large mainline Protestant denominations has declined significantly in recent decades, while the proportion of Protestants identifying with the large evangelical denominations has increased.”
Both the Pew report and the GSS findings are in line with the results released in 2002 by the Catholic-affiliated Glenmary Research Center which showed growth among conservative evangelical churches and decline in liberal mainline denominations. – BP