Poll: Nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian

As Christmas nears, more than three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christian, Gallup reports.

Pollsters found that 78 percent of Americans identify with Christianity.

Overall, more than 82 percent of Americans have a religious identity, with this breakdown:

— Protestant/other Christian: 52.5 percent

— Catholic: 23.6 percent

— Mormon: 1.9 percent

— Jewish: 1.6 percent

— Muslim: 0.5 percent

— Other non-Christian religion: 2.4 percent

— None/atheist/agnostic: 15 percent

— No response: 2.5 percent

The findings fit the trend of an increasing percentage of Americans who do not embrace a formal religious identity. In 1951, 1 percent of Americans did not have a religious identity, compared to 24 percent identifying as Catholic and 68 percent claiming a non-Catholic Christian faith.

Gallup reports new low in religious confidence

(RNS)  Americans’ confidence in organized religion, slowly but steadily declining since the 1970s, slipped to a new low in the latest survey, the Gallup Organization reported.

Today only 44 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in “the church or organized religion,” Gallup said. It was 68 percent in the mid-1970s.

Pollsters did not name any church or religion in particular, letting respondents define that as they wished, the organization said.

Most Protestants, 56 percent, expressed confidence in the church, but only a minority, or 46 percent, of Catholics did.

But Lydia Saad, Gallup senior editor, pointed out that the question deals with churches and organized religion. Americans are still generally a very religious people, although increasingly on their own terms.

Nearly Half of Americans Believe God Created Humans, Survey Finds

By Anugrah Kumar , Christian Post Contributor

Forty-six percent of Americans hold the creationist view, believing God created humans as they are today within the past 10,000 years ago, a new Gallup survey has found.

An additional 32 percent believe in the "theistic evolution" view that humans evolved under God's guidance, Gallup reported Friday. Those who hold the secular evolution view are just at 15 percent.

Adding the numbers of those who hold the creationist and theistic evolution views, some 78 percent of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, the USA Today/Gallup survey noted.

Gallup's editor-in-chief, Frank Newport, observed that the prevalence of the creationist view remains unchanged for three decades.