But the United States has a greater number of religious groups than any other country in the world, and Adherents.com has literally thousands of adherent statistics for the U.S. This page provides some summary lists of the largest religious groups in the United States. Most of the tables on this page are based on self-identification data (which religious groups people actually say they belong to when surveyed), but some lists based on organizational reporting (membership figures from individual denominations) are shown as well:

• Twenty Largest Religions in the U.S.
• Largest Branches of Christianity in the U.S.
• Ten Largest Denominational Families in the U.S.
• Largest Denominational Families, based on church attendance
• Top 10 Largest Religious Bodies in the U.S.
• Gallup Polling Data over the Last Ten Years
• Top 10 Religious Bodies with Most Churches
• Most Ubiquitous Churches in the U.S.
• Religious Bodies which are the Largest Church in One or More States

• Washington Post report on extensive year 2000 study: Faith Communities in the United States Today
  Replacement Social Security Card
  
• Barna Poll on actual religious beliefs - shows diversity in belief among American Christians: mainline Protestants, Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, Latter-day Saints, Pentecostals, etc.

This table was published in a study titled "Americans Struggle with Religion's Role at Home and Abroad", released on March 20, 2002.

The authors listed are:
Andrew Kohut, director of The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press
Melissa Rogers, executive director of The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Methodology:
"The nationwide survey of 2,002 adults, conducted Feb. 25 - March 10 by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life..."

Page 49:
Now, a few questions about your religious affiliation.
Q.18 What is your religious preference -- do you consider yourself Christian, Jewish, Muslim, other non-Christian such as Buddhist or Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else, or don't you have a religious preference?

Christian includes Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox, and other, including non-denominational. Christian respondents were further broken down into branches. See below.

The ARIS data is published online at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/aris_index.htm

The following three tables comes from the NSRI and ARIS data:

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

Christianity. Note that in the NSRI and ARIS studies, based on self-identification, Christianity includes: Catholic, Baptist, Protestant, Methodist/Wesleyan, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Episcopalian/Anglican, Mormon/Latter-day Saints/LDS, Churches of Christ, Jehovah's Witness, Seventh-Day Adventist, Assemblies of God, Holiness/Holy, Congregational/United Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarine, Church of God, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical, Mennonite, Christian Science, Church of the Brethren, Born Again, Nondenominational Christians, Disciples of Christ, Reformed/Dutch Reformed, Apostolic/New Apostolic, Quaker, Full Gospel, Christian Reform, Foursquare Gospel, Fundamentalist, Salvation Army, Independent Christian Church, Covenant Church, Jewish Christians, plus 240,000 adults classified as "other" (who did not fall into the preceding groups).

Islam. In recent years Muslim leaders in the United States have optimistically estimated that there were approximately 6.5 million Muslims in the country (Aly Abuzaakouk, American Muslim Council, 1999). In 1998 a Pakistani newspaper even reported that there were 12 million Muslims in the United States (4.2% of the total population)! After the events of September 11, 2001, many newspaper accounts included an estimate of 8 million American Muslims. This would equate to 3% of the U.S. population, or roughly 1 in every 33 people in the country. No comparable figure has ever been confirmed by independent research similar to the Kosmin or Glenmary studies, or the Gallup, Harris, Pew, Barna polls. Currently, surveys consistently report less than 1% of people surveyed identify themselves as Muslims. Muslim community leaders say that many American Muslims are relatively recent immigrants who either do not have telephone service, do not participate in surveys or are afraid to identify themselves as Muslims for fear of anti-Muslim discrimination. Researchers generally agree that the estimate of 300,000 Muslims in the Kosmin study (1990) and Kosmin's adjusted estimate (to 500,000) are too small to reflect current (year 2005) numbers of American Muslims. In 2004 the National Study of Youth and Religion conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (sample size: 3,370 teens nationwide) found that less than one half of one percent (0.5%) of American teens were Muslim, a proportion right in line with the adult Muslim population, based on other studies. Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago is a nationally recognized expert in survey research specializing in the study of social change and survey methodology. Smith published "Estimating the Muslim Population in the United States" in 2001. This is probably the most thorough academic study of this topic in recent years. This study concluded: "The best, adjusted, survey-based estimates put the adult Muslim population in 2000 at 0.67 percent or 1,401,000, and the total Muslim population at 1,886,000. Even if high-side estimates based on local surveys, figures from mosques, and ancestry and immigration statistics are given more weight than the survey-based numbers, it is hard to accept estimates that Muslims are greater than 1 percent of the population (2,090,000 adults or 2,814,000 total)." Additional articles and links are here: Number of Muslims in the United States.

Jews and Judaism. The American Jewish Identity Survey of 2000, conducted by Barry Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar at the Center for Jewish Studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, concluded that there were 5.5 million Jews in the United States. Of these, 1.4 million were aligned with a religion other than Judaism, 1.4 million were secular or non-religious, leaving 51% of American Jews (just over 3 million people) whose religion was Judaism. The study surveyed 50,000 randomly selected adult Americans. More.

Baha'i. Some representatives of the Baha'i Faith have questioned their omission from the 1990 NSRI "Top 10" list. The NSRI study indicated there were 28,000 self-identified Baha'is in the United States in 1990, making them the 11th largest religion in the country. If one excludes the "nonreligious" and "agnostic" categories from this list, then the Kosmin study would place Baha'is as the 9th largest religion in the U.S.

Although the Kosmin study is well-respected, it should be noted that even with a random sample of such unprecedented size (113,000 respondents), the practical margin of error for this study was high for relatively smaller groups -- those with less than 300,000 individuals. In this study, there were a few more respondents who said they were Scientologists or Native American religionists than said they were Baha'is. But given the margin of error, it is possible that in 1990 there were actually more Baha'is. This would be the case especially if, as some Baha'is suggested in response to these findings, there were a high proportion of Baha'is who lived communally and did not have phones for each family, or were recent Iranian immigrants reluctant to identify their Baha'i affiliation over the phone because of past persecution. In 1990 the Baha'i world faith itself claimed 110,000 adherents in the United States. If there were 110,000 self-identified Baha'is in 1990 they would have ranked as the 9th largest U.S. religion (assuming that the other Kosmin figures are accurate).

It is quite possible that growth within this group during this last 9 years has outpaced growth of some other groups, and that Baha'is are now among America's ten largest religions. But this proposition has not been verified empirically and similar claims of recent growth have also been made by the other groups. Current official estimates from the Baha'i National Spiritual Assembly for the U.S. Baha'i population are about 113,000, or about 0.05% of the U.S. population. On 31 March 2000 received information from the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly listing the number of U.S. Baha'is at 133,709. A non-Baha'i historian from the University of Michigan who has scrutinized American Baha'i statistical practices has estimated a current (1999) figure of about 60,000 self-identified Baha'is in the U.S. But, with the ARIS survey now estimating 84,000 adult self-identified Baha'is in the U.S. in the year 2001, it appears that that historian's estimate is too low. If children are included and a slight undercount assumed, it is quite possible that there were closer to 100,000 (perhaps more) Baha'is in the U.S. in 2001.

It may also be noted that Baha'is are ranked as one of the world's ten largest international religious bodies and are among the top ten largest organized religions in the world, based on their current reported estimated membership.

Neo-pagan/Wiccan: There were 768,400 Neo-pagans (largest subset were Wiccans) in the U.S. in the year 2000, according to the Wiccan/Pagan Poll, conducted by the Covenant of the Goddess (CoG) beginning in late July, 1999. [Online source: http://www.cog.org/cogpoll_final.html] The Covenant of the Goddess (CoG) poll methodology is not comparable to methodology used in the Kosmin NSRI/ARIS studies, Harris Poll, Gallup polls, or Glenmary study. In 2004 the National Study of Youth and Religion conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (sample size: 3,370 teens nationwide) found that fewer than one-third of 1 percent of U.S. teens identified themselves as adherents of paganism (including Wicca). This indicates that the Wiccan/pagan population in the U.S. skews young; the proportion of teens identifying themselves as adherents is up to 3 times the proportion of the total population (0.3%, according to ARIS, 2001).

Another source, published before ARIS data was available:
According to the 2001 edition of David Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia, the largest non-Christian organized religions in the U.S. are:

• Jews: 5.6 million
• Muslims: 4.1 million
• Buddhists: 2.4 million
• Hindus: 1 million

The table below was published on page 49 of the Pew report at http://pewforum.org/publications/reports/poll2002.pdf:

The percentages shown in this table reflect the number of members of each branch as a proportion of the total U.S. population, not just the Christian population. So the Catholic percentage of 24% for 2002 means that 24% of Americans identified themselves as Catholic in 2002.

This table matches data from Gallup, Barna, and other polling organizations, which all show that Protestants are clearly the largest branch of Christianity in the United States, followed by Catholics, who have about half as many members. Latter-day Saints (Mormons) are the 3rd largest branch, comprising about 2% of the U.S. population. Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians are all branches as well as denominational families, but the Protestant branch of Christianity comprises multiple denominational families. More detailed denominational family statistics are shown below.

This table was published in a study titled "Americans Struggle with Religion's Role at Home and Abroad", released on March 20, 2002.

The authors listed are:
Andrew Kohut, director of The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press
Melissa Rogers, executive director of The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Methodology:
"The nationwide survey of 2,002 adults, conducted Feb. 25 - March 10 by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life..."

People who identified their religious preference as Christian were asked about which branch of Christianity they belonged to:
"Q.19 Are you Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox--such as Greek or Russian Orthodox--or something else?" (page 49)

Please note that in this list, the estimated number is only of the adult population. The figures for total "adherents" given in the "Largest Religious Bodies" list which follows is not limited to adults.

Also note that the ARIS and NSRI data are based on a self-identification surveys, while the "Largest Religious Bodies" list presents the most recent available data and is based on organizational reporting. The sample size for NSRI was over 130,000 American adults. The sample size for ARIS was 50,000.

This table includes denominational families regardless of what religion they belong to. Judaism and Islam, for example, are typically thought of as religions, but may also be described as "denominational families" in this context.

In looking at the table above, keep in mind that the "2004 Est. Total Pop." column is based on a direct extrapolation based on 2001 survey estimates of the adult population of each group, and the 2004 figure has not been adjusted for each religious group's different average numbers of children per adult. Some groups (e.g., Episcopal, Congregational, Judaism) have fewer children proportionate to their total population, and some groups (e.g., Catholic, Pentecostal, Latter-day Saints) have higher proportionate numbers of children, in which case the un-modified extrapolation to the total population would yield an undercount. For example, in 2004, 2.5% of American teenagers said they were Latter-day Saints (National Study of Youth and Religion, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; sample size: 3,370 nationwide), a figure higher than the 1.3% of American adults who identified themselves as Latter-day Saints in 2001. If this 2.5% figure were extrapolated to the total population, it would yield a figure of 7,334,574 total Latter-day Saints (children, teens and adults) in the U.S. for 2004 - a number nearly 2 million higher than counted in official membership records. This difference in survey results between adult and teen populations indicates that this group's U.S. membership skews young. Similar differences (pushing a group's actual numbers higher than extrapolated if it skews young and lower than extrapolated if it skews old) would be expected for all groups.

For some, religious identification may well be a social marker as much as a marker designating a specific set of beliefs. For others, it may be a reflection of a community or family anchor point to one's sense of self. For other still, it may simply be the "gut response" evoked by the question, "What is your religion, if any?" without any wider emotional, social or philosophical ramifications. This survey made no attempt to define for people what the meaning of any religious identification might be.

The following table combines self-identification statistics from the ARIS report (2001) with church attendance figures obtained from the Barna survey. The Barna survey was conducted from January 2000 through June 2001, and had a sample size of 6,038 adults. The survey asked people if they attended a church service, other than a special event such as a wedding or funeral, in the past 7 days. The proportion responding affirmatively can be thought of as the highly active segment of a particular denominational community.

ARIS: Total number of adults, U.S., 2001: 207,980,000

* The Barna poll did not report attendance figures for the United Church of Christ/Congregationalists. Figure used here is from the sociologically similar Episcoplians.

All of these figures are collected from independent surveys with large sample sizes, and do not come from any religious organization. Thus, they constitute a set of numbers which are highly uniform in methodology, and are not subject to internal institutional variations in the way that membership and activity is counted or estimated.

The resulting figures in the last column are estimates of the total adult U.S. population attending church services of a given denominational group during a given week. So, while 24.5% of American adults identified themselves as Catholics in 2001, in any given week, 11.74% of all Americans attend Catholic church services. However, this does not necessarily suggest that only 11.74% of Americans are "active Catholics": religious groups generally consider a member "active" or "practicing" who practices less than weekly church attendance.

Different religious groups exhibit wide variation in the proportion of their adherents who are active members. But for the most part, this table's estimation of regularly attending adherents does not change the relative size of the denominational groups. When counting only active members, the changes in relative order among denominational groups are: Episcopalians drop below both Latter-day Saints and Church of Christ members, and there are more active Assemblies of God members than Congregationalists/United Church of Christ members.

Finally, note that the Barna survey data report the proportion of self-identified adherents who reported church attendance. This is not necessarily the same as the attendance rate as a proportion of official church membership. A religious body's membership estimate may be more or less than the number of people who actually identify themselves as members. For example, in 2001, 3.5 million American adults said they were Episcopalians. But in 2000 the Episcopal Church reported a total constituency of 2,317,794 people, including fully-commited members and inclusive adherents. This signifies a gap between those who are affiliated with the church (on membership rolls), versus those who self-identify with a particular denominational label but in most cases have no practical connection to the denomination and do not attend services.

The full Business Wire report on this year 2000 Harris poll is available here.

Keeping in mind that these the Harris poll used different methodologies and sample sizes than the NSRI/ARIS surveys, some observations may be made tentatively. Many figures are similar between the 1990 and 2000 surveys (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Latter-day Saints). The survey indicates a significantly larger number of agnostics (and atheists), but current Gallup polls show that the overall percentage of Americans who profess a belief in God is essentially unchanged between 1990 and 2000. The higher number of agnostics in this Harris poll indicates that a higher proportion of Internet users are agnostic than in the general population. Note that the Harris data shows a much higher figure for Jews in 2000 than the ARIS survey does. This may be because the ARIS includes only Jews who said that Judaism is their religion, while the Harris probably includes ethnic-only Jews. Also, the difference may also be attributed to the higher socioeconomic status of Jews and associated higher proportion of Internet users.

The proportional decrease in the number of Baptists make sense given data and trends indicated by other sources. Many congregations and individuals who formerly called themselves Baptist have become non-denominational, especially in the last five years. But the drop from nearly 20% to less than 13% is probably also attributable partially to the lower proportion of Internet users who are Baptists. Note that in the NSRI and ARIS surveys, both done by Kosmin and both using similar methodology, the biggest decline in percentage of the population ("market share") was exhibited by Baptists: from 19.4% in 1990 to 16.3% in 2001. [See related articles.]

NOTES

Some of America's largest religious bodies are fairly new, some of them representing recent schisms or mergers.

Notes about some groups not among America's ten largest religious bodies:

Ethics & Religion reporter recounted a researcher's experience in trying to find accurate National Baptist Convention (NBC) numbers (http://www.marriagesavers.org/Columns/C933.htm):

Dr. Nancy Ammerman, a researcher with Hartford Seminary, recently went to NBC's new Nashville headquarters, built by Lyon. She was shocked to discover, "There is no denominational headquarters. There is a building, but there is no national staff. I found an empty building. I rang a doorbell, and the only person who was answering the phone by herself, would not open the door." Indeed, when I called, I only got a recording, referring me to other numbers if I wanted to come to the NBC convention. No one is counting church membership.

Episcopalians: Observant readers of these lists may notice that the Episcopalians appear on the list of largest denominational families, yet the Episcopal Church (the only Episcopalian/Anglican body of a statistically appreciably size in the U.S.) is not listed as one of the largest religious bodies.

One reason for this discrepancy is the difference in years between the two lists. Between 1990 (when the NSRI study was conducted) and 1997 (list of religious bodies) there was some decline in the size of the Episcopal Church, and growth on the part of some other religious bodies. But much more importantly than this is the fact that a large number of Americans who call themselves Episcopalian (the basis for the NSRI self-identification list) are not affiliated officially with the Episcopal Church and not included in Episcopal Church membership counts. Kosmin reports that "The Episcopal church, which has 1.7 million fully confirmed members on its current roll, had nearly twice as many, over 3 million, appear on the NSRI" (Kosmin; One Nation Under God; 1991). The year 2000 edition of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches ranks the Episcopal Church as the 15th largest denomination in the U.S.

African Methodist Episcopal Church: Some sources show a membership estimate of 3.5 million for the AME Church. This is the figure the AME Church provided the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches in 1991. The independent Glenmary and Kosmin NSRI studies, however, did not corroborate that figure. The version of the Yearbook published in 2000 shows a 1999 membership estimate for the AME of 2,500,000, which may be an inclusive/adherent figure. That Yearbook ranked the AME Church as the 12th largest U.S. denomination. The current figure from the AME's official web site is 1,200,000 members.


Other studies: Glenmary and Kosmin NSRI:
In the 1990 Glenmary study, which published denominational statistics for every county and every state in the United States, the National Baptist Convention (U.S.A.), the National Baptist Convention of America, the Church of God in Christ, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church were not among the 133 denominations data was collected for individually. (The figures for these religious bodies are probably part of the aggregate figure in this study's "Black Baptists Estimate" category.) The other religious bodies in this "Top 10 Religious Bodies" list (from Kosmin) were also detailed in the Glenmary study. (The entire Glenmary data set is available at American Religion Data Archive, and in parsed-out HTML table form as part of the Adherents.com main data set.) The existence of two extensive studies: Glenmary (based on organizational reporting) and Kosmin/NSRI (based on statistical sampling of self-identification), both for 1990, provides a high degree of reliability and an interesting opportunity to correlate self-identification figures with organizational reporting figures.

The data in the table below is from a summary article released by Gallup on 13 April 2001. The figures for 2001 are from a poll conducted in February 2001. The other figures represent aggregate figures from more than one poll conducted during the year shown.

The article describes the methodology for the February 2001 poll:

The results reported here are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national sample of 1,016 adults, 18 years and older, conducted February 19-21, 2001. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 3 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

These figures are the results of responses to two questions. The first determined people's general religion: What is your religious preference -- Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish or an Orthodox religion such as the Greek or Russian Orthodox Church?

Then, if the respondent said they were a Protestant, a follow up question was asked: What specific denomination is that?

* Indicates a result less than 0.5%

Observations
Some observations can be made about the Gallup polling data. One important point is that the Gallup polls are based on smaller sample sizes, and thus have a higher margin of error, the Kosmin/NSRI study. The sample size for years previous to 2001 are not indicated in the report and may be smaller than the approximately 1,000 people surveyed in 2001.

In asking about religious preference, the Gallup poll specifically offers four choices: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox. Prior to 1977, the question excluded Orthodox and simply asked: What is your religious preference -- is it Protestant, Roman Catholic or Jewish?

It is possible that the wording of this question leads to an undercount of groups not specifically mentioned in the question.

Muslims are another group which is not specifically mentioned in the question. Gallup and other polls clearly indicate that Muslims do not comprise 3% of the U.S. population (as many Muslim organizations currently claim), but it is difficult to make a fair assessment based on these data for a variety of reasons. For one, "Muslim" isn't a choice offered in the questioning. Also, many American Muslims are new immigrants and do not have phones, or are reluctant to participate in phone interviews, due to their alternative legal immigration status. Also, the Gallup reports do not indicate how many of the respondents included in "Other specific" are Muslims.

It should also be noted that because of the limited sample size and subsequent 3% margin of error, minor fluctuations in the percentages shown are not likely to represent actual changes. For example, the polling data shows that about 2% of Americans said they were Episcopalians throughout the ten year period, except in 2000, when the figure was 3%. It would be illogical to conclude that in the year 2000 1% of Americans suddenly joined the Episcopal Church, and then left it again by February 2001. Indeed, the official records of the Episcopal Church indicate that there were no such dramatic changes. Minor changes such as that are only a result of statistical sampling error.

In fact, the only really dramatic, significant change in the Gallup data is a decline in the proportion of Americans who identified themselves as Southern Baptists. From 10% in 1993, the figure declined steadily to 6% in 2001, a change greater than the margin of error, and a change verified by data from other sources. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention itself, reported a membership decline in 1998, and for other years, in which it has reported growth, the reported growth has been far smaller than the national population growth.

(Click on map to see a larger version.)


(Other map: Largest non-Catholic Religious Body in Each State, by number of adherents.)

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