For over fifty years, the General Social Survey has asked a large, representative sample of Americans a battery of questions, including questions about religion. These data reveal a major problem—indeed, arguably the single biggest problem—for the Catholic Church in the United States. In 1973, 84% of all those raised Catholic still identified as Catholic when surveyed as adults. In 2002, that figure was 74%. By 2022, it had dropped to 62%. More and more of those raised Catholic are leaving.
Those figures concern whether a person raised Catholic continues to check the “Catholic” box on a survey. That is a pretty low bar as a measure of Catholic commitment. Perhaps a more salient question is how many of those raised Catholic still participate in Mass every Sunday. In 1973, about 34% of all those raised Catholic were attending Mass weekly (or more often) when they were surveyed as adults. By 2002, the number had fallen to 20%. By 2022, it had plummeted to 11%. We are losing nine out of ten cradle Catholics.
While many religious groups in the U.S. have experienced decline over this period, Catholics are doing particularly poorly. A 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) allows us to compare respondents’ childhood religious affiliation and their adult religious affiliation to see how conversions into, and disaffiliations out of, a religious group have affected membership overall. To illustrate, if 3% of those surveyed reported having been Jewish as children, but 4% reported being Jewish now (as adults), then Judaism would have experienced a one percentage point net gain, and more people would have converted to Judaism than left. As shown in the table below, White Catholics suffered a six percentage point net loss in this large, representative sample. That is, about 6% of the American adult population are White ex-Catholics. For Hispanic Catholics the numbers are only slightly better: a 3.4% net loss. For every one Catholic convert, about nine or ten Catholics leave. That translates to roughly 15 million Catholics gone from the Church. In the same survey, White evangelical Protestants and Hispanic Protestants experienced small net gains. But the biggest winner is the category of the religiously unaffiliated—almost a 16% net gain. And that is where most ex-Catholics have gone: the majority of those leaving the Church become religious “nones.”
Continue reading at Church Life Journal