Research, including a new analysis from PRRI, supports the idea that Americans are becoming increasingly estranged from religious institutions and traditions. In 2013, a fifth of respondents to PRRI’s national poll indicated that they were religiously unaffiliated: atheists, agnostics or simply not part of any religious tradition. In the most recent iteration of the poll, conducted last year, more than a quarter identified that way.
But there’s another important part of that new PRRI data. While most of those who now identify as unaffiliated after growing up in a religious tradition say their reason for abandoning their religion was that they stopped believing its teachings, nearly half said that the reason was their childhood religion’s hostility to gay and lesbian people. In 2016, only 3 in 10 identified that reason.
Much of the erosion in religious affiliation came among Americans who grew up Catholic. In 2016, when PRRI spoke with Americans who had grown up in that religious tradition, they found that a substantial number had walked away — far more than had joined the church. (About 31 percent said they’d grown up Catholic; only 21 percent still said they were.) The most recent data shows a similar trend. About 30 percent said they had grown up Catholic, most of them White (18 percent of Americans). But now only about 20 percent identify as Catholic, a bit over half of them White.
The pattern among nonevangelical White Protestants is less dramatic, with a big chunk of those who were Protestant in their childhood leaving the faith but a number subsequently joining. In the most recent data, the net shift was a 4.4 percentage point decrease in the number of White Protestants since childhood.
Among White evangelical Protestants, a shift seen in 2016 wasn’t replicated in 2023. The number of people who told PRRI last year that they’d left evangelical Protestantism was about the same as those who said they’d adopted it.
Then there’s “unaffiliated.” In 2016 and 2023, only about 1 in 10 respondents said they’d grown up outside a religious tradition. Over time, substantially more people adopted that identity.
Again, almost half of those who indicated that they are now religiously unaffiliated — nearly a fifth of the country — say their former religion’s hostility to LGBTQ+ Americans played a role.
This makes sense. The unaffiliated (a third of whom used to be Catholics and more than half of whom used to be Protestants) skew younger, and younger Americans are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ and reject moral condemnations of same-sex relationships. Among unaffiliated people under 30, 6 in 10 pointed to religious teachings about LGBTQ+ relationships as a reason for abandoning their childhood religion, nearly as many as said they no longer believed the religion’s teachings.
PRRI also found that non-Christian and Black Protestant Americans hadn’t seen similar erosions in religious identity. Among Black Protestants, for example, there was erosion since childhood seen in the 2016 and 2023 data, but only a subtle one.
That said, the decline in Christian religious identity, the drop that sits at the heart of so much of Trump’s rhetoric, is real and heavily centered among White Christians. But while Trump uses this decline to advocate for right-wing policies, hostility to LGBTQ+ relationships — an element of right-wing and particularly conservative Christian politics — is one of the reasons for that decline in the first place.
In other words, attempting to restore the sort of Christian power that Trump embraces would probably have the effect of pushing more people away from Christianity.
