Christianity In The United States
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Christianity is the most popular religion in the United States, with around 73% of polled Americans identifying themselves as Christian in 2012. This is down from 86% in 1990, and slightly lower than 78.6% in 2001. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation. In the mid-1990s the United States had the largest Christian population on earth, with 224 million Christians.
Protestant denominations accounted for 51.3%, while Roman Catholicism, at 23.9%, was the largest individual denomination. A Pew study categorizes white evangelicals, 26.3% of the population, as the country's largest religious cohort; another study estimates evangelicals of all races at 30–35%. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) is the fourth largest church in the United States, and the largest church originating in the US.
Christianity was introduced to the Americas as it was first colonized by Europeans beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. Today most Christian churches are Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, or Roman Catholic.
Read more about Christianity In The United States: Major Denominational Families, History
Famous quotes containing the words united states, christianity, united and/or states:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“What’s the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there’s cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)