Religion in the United States

[15][16] Religious figures (Carrie Nation, William Jennings Bryan, Martin Luther King Jr., Wallace Fard Muhammad, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Falwell), have played a significant role in American politics.

[20] They supported (and opposed) measures to abolish slavery, further women's rights, enact prohibition, and reform education and criminal justice.

Social scientists have noted that beginning in the early 1990s, the percentage of Americans professing no religious affiliation began to rise from 6% in 1991[23] to 29% in 2021[24][25][26] — with younger people having higher rates of unaffiliation.

[34][35] Ever since its early colonial days, when some Protestant dissenter English and German settlers moved in search of religious freedom, America has been profoundly influenced by religion.

Despite these, and as a result of intervening religious strife and preference in England[39] the Plantation Act 1740 would set official policy for new immigrants coming to British America until the American Revolution.

[40] The text of the First Amendment in the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

[48][49] The modern official motto of the United States of America, as established in a 1956 law signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is "In God We Trust".

[51] According to a 2002 survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly 6 in 10 Americans said that religion plays an important role in their lives, compared to 33% in Great Britain, 27% in Italy, 21% in Germany, 12% in Japan, and 11% in France.

[35][56][57] There have been variant proposed explanations for secularization including lack of trust in the labor market, with government, in marriage and in other aspects of life,[29] backlash against the religious right in the 1980s,[58] sexual abuse scandals, particularly those within the Southern Baptist Convention[59] and Catholic Church.

[79] Historians agree that members of mainline Protestant denominations have played leadership roles in many aspects of American life, including politics, business, science, the arts, and education.

[81] Traditionally Episcopalians[82] and Presbyterians[83] tended to be wealthier and better educated than most other religious groups, and numbers of the most wealthy and affluent American families as the Vanderbilts[82] and Astors,[82] Rockefeller,[84][85] Du Pont,[85] Roosevelt, Forbes, Fords,[85] Whitneys,[82] Morgans[82] and Harrimans were Mainline Protestant families,[82][86] although 2015/2016 (Pew) studies found households affiliated with Judaism and Hinduism to be more likely to have incomes over $100,000 per year than those in the mainline tradition Protestants, with other American religious groups having lower median incomes.

[87][88] Some of the first colleges and universities in America, including Harvard,[89] Yale,[90] Princeton,[91] Columbia,[92] Dartmouth,[93] Pennsylvania,[94][95] Duke,[96] Boston,[97] Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury,[98] and Amherst, all were founded by mainline Protestant denominations.

Though small in number in the beginning, Catholicism grew over the centuries to become the largest single denomination in the United States, primarily through immigration, but also through the acquisition of continental territories under the jurisdiction of French and Spanish Catholic powers.

Irish, Hispanic, Italian, Portuguese, French Canadian, Polish, German,[106] and Lebanese (Maronite) immigrants largely contributed to the growth in the number of Catholics in the United States.

Although small Western European communities initially developed and grew, large-scale immigration did not take place until the late 19th century, largely as a result of persecutions in parts of Eastern Europe.

There are, however, small numbers of older (and some recently arrived) communities of Sephardi Jews with roots tracing back to 15th century Iberia (Spain, Portugal, and North Africa).

[116] According to a 2016 Gallup poll, Islam is the third largest religion in the United States by numbers, after Christianity and Judaism, with 0.8% of the population identifying as Muslim.

They also face the pressure of keeping the religion alive because many Druze immigrants to the United States converted to Protestantism, becoming communicants of the Presbyterian or Methodist churches.

The first prominent US citizen to publicly convert to Buddhism was Colonel Henry Steel Olcott in 1880 who is still honored in Sri Lanka for his Buddhist revival efforts.

An event that contributed to the strengthening of Buddhism in the United States was the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893, which was attended by many Buddhist delegates sent from India, China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

[178] Taoism was popularized throughout the world by the writings and teachings of Laozi and other Taoists as well as the practice of qigong, tai chi, and other Chinese martial arts.

[191] Since 1889, in accordance with the millenarian teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka, the Ghost Dance ceremony was incorporated into numerous native belief systems.

Wicca advanced in North America in the 1960s by Raymond Buckland, an expatriate Briton who visited Gardner's Isle of Man coven to gain initiation.

These churches share a spiritual, metaphysical and mystical predisposition and understanding of the Bible and were strongly influenced by the Transcendentalist movement, particularly the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[212] A 2001 survey directed by Dr. Ariela Keysar for the City University of New York indicated that, amongst the more than 100 categories of response, "no religious identification" had the greatest increase in population in both absolute and percentage terms.

[61] They state that surveys showing so suffer from methodological deficiencies, that Americans are becoming more religious, and that Atheists and Agnostics make up a small and stable percentage of the population.

[275] The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has made annual estimates about religious adherence in the United States every year since 2013, and they most recently updated their data in 2020.

Significant difference in results from other databases include the lower representation of adherents of (1) all kinds (62.7%), (2) Christians (59.9%), (3) Protestants (less than 36%); and the greater number of unaffiliated (37.3%).The table below shows the religious affiliations among the ethnicities in the United States, according to the Pew Forum 2014 survey.

[282][283][284] Gallup survey data found that 73% of Americans were members of a church, synagogue or mosque in 1937, peaking at 76% shortly after World War II, before trending slightly downward to 70% by 2000.

[297] In 2006 Keith Ellison of Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to Congress; when re-enacting his swearing-in for photos, he used the copy of the Qur'an once owned by Thomas Jefferson.