NEW YORK (AP/WMOT) — The number of Christians in America continues to decline, but Tennessee seems to be bucking that trend.
The Pew Research Center released its annual religious affiliation surveythis week. The survey tabulated responses from more than 35,000 Americans.
Researchers say that the number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. has fallen to 70 percent, dropping 8 percent since 2007. The number of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated rose over the same period by about seven percent.
Besheer Mohamed is a Pew Research Associate. He says religious affiliation in Tennessee has remained relatively steady, thanks to its unusually large population of Evangelical Christians.
“In 2014 what we found is 52 percent of Tennesseans were evangelical compared to 51 percent in 2007. Now, those are about even numbers given the margin of error of this survey. So we would read that as actual stability more than an increase.”
The number of Tennesseans claiming to be religiously unaffiliated rose two percent compared to seven percent nationwide. Only Tennessee’s mainline protestant churches lost a statistically significant number of members.