Fewer than half of Americans have formal church membership

While America remains a highly religious nation with seven in ten claiming affiliation with some kind of organised religion, for the first time in nearly eighty years, fewer than half of them now say they have formal membership in a specific house of worship, according to a new Gallup analysis.
The Gallup Institute reports that in 1937, when they first measured formal membership in houses of worship, some seventy per cent of Americans had formal church membership and that measure remained steady for the next sixty years until it began a steady decline in 1998.
The Washington, D.C.-based analytics and advisory company was able to highlight several factors for the decline through responses from more than six thousand U.S. adults each time across three-year aggregates from 1998 to 2000, 2008 to 2010, and 2018 to 2020 when formal membership in houses of worship first dipped below fifty per cent.
One of the biggest factors Gallup found strongly correlates with church membership is age. Some 66% of traditionalists — U.S. adults born before 1946 — have formal membership in a church, compared with 58% of Baby Boomers, 50% of those in Generation X and 36% of millennials. Current but limited data on members of Gen Zers who’ve already reached adulthood suggest their church membership rate is similar to millennials.
Source: christianpost.com