Christianity in the United States

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.

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. 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.

Christianity was introduced to the Americas during European settlement beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. Immigration further increased Christian numbers. Going forward from its foundation, the United States has been called a Protestant nation by a variety of sources. 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.