Non-Denominationalism Is the Strongest Force in American Religion

...and maybe in American society, too.

A lot of what I do is talk about decline. I am painfully aware of that fact. Religious attendance is down in the United States. The proportion of young people who identify as Christian has declined significantly over the last couple of decades. The share of Americans who don’t believe in God has risen, as has the share of folks who take an agnostic view of God. Many religious groups are significantly smaller now than they were twenty years ago. That includes evangelical groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, but also every mainline denomination. The United Methodist Church just went through a huge schism - losing about a quarter of all their members in one fell swoop.

But are there religious groups actually growing in size? There are a couple that seem to be reporting more members like the Anglican Church of North American (ACNA) and the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). But, to be honest, those denominations are incredibly small in the grand scheme of things. Neither has more than half a million members in a country of 330 million people.

However, there is one group that is much larger and is growing. It’s not really a denomination. And it’s not really a tradition. They are united by what they reject - that is the idea of organized denominations. I always tell people that the rise of the nones (those who reject religion entirely) is the biggest story in the faith space. But the second most important story is the rise of the nons - that is those folks who identify as non-denominational Christians.

Just how much have they increased? The General Social Survey can offer a pretty solid estimate. They’ve been asking about the religious denomination of the respondent since the survey was established in 1972.

In the early 1970s, non-denominational Protestants were little more than a rounding error. Just 2% of all respondents said that they were non-denominational - it was 3% of the Protestant sample. You could forgive any religious demographer for ignoring this part of the sample. Both figures slowly began to increase over the next couple of decades. But, really noticeable growth would not begin until the mid-1990s. By 2000, about 10% of all Protestants and 5% of the entire sample were non-denominational.

By 2010, the percentage of Protestants who were non-denominational would rise to about 20% and they were about 10% of all Americans. In the most recent survey, which was collected in 2022 - one in three Protestants did not identify with a denomination like Southern Baptists or Evangelical Lutherans. That was a twelve point increase from just a few years earlier. Nearly 15% of all American adults identify as non-denominational now. For comparison, about 22% of the sample said they were Roman Catholic.