Religious Switching: Catholicism Is Losing Its Flock

More than one in three U.S. adults (35 percent) have switched religion over the course of their lives, according to a survey by Pew Research Center. The most common shift involves individuals who were raised religious but no longer identify with any faith, accounting for 20 percent of all U.S. adults. The next most frequent transition is between religions, with 10 percent having left their childhood faith to join a different one. Far fewer adults had moved in the opposite direction: just 3 percent reported having no religion as children but identifying with a religion later in life, while two percent did not give a reason for the religious change.

Among religious groups, Catholicism has experienced the highest rate of attrition. As the following chart shows, for every one person who joined the Catholic Church in the United States in 2023, 8.4 people left it. This rate is substantially higher than among Protestant Christians, whose departures outpaced arrivals by a ratio of 1.8 to one. In contrast, the religiously unaffiliated population has seen net growth, attracting far more newcomers than it loses. For every individual who moved away from being unaffiliated, 5.9 people began identifying as atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular”.

Pew researchers also examined the reasons people gave for leaving their childhood religion. Nearly half (46 percent) of those raised in a religion they later left cited a loss of belief in its teachings. Others said religion was no longer important in their lives (38 percent) or that they just gradually drifted away over time (38 percent).

Despite these shifts, a majority of U.S. adults (56 percent) still identified with their childhood religion at the time of the survey. An additional nine percent of respondents said they had no religion as a child and still have no religion now.

Pew further found that the timing of religious switching tends to skew younger. Most U.S. adults who had changed their religious affiliation did so before the age of 30, with only 15 percent saying they had done so after that point.