Less than half of American adults pray daily as church membership continues to decline and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated swell, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center.
Data from a nationally representative group of respondents found that 45 percent of U.S. adults say they pray daily compared to 58 percent who reported doing so in 2007 and 55 percent who said they prayed daily in 2014.
Some 32 percent said they seldom or never pray, which is close to the 29 percent of U.S. adults who identify as “nones”—people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular,” the study says.
The nation’s share of religious “nones” is now six percent higher than it was five years ago and ten percent higher than it was a decade ago. Christians now only make up a collective 63 percent of the adult population. When the Pew Research Center began measuring religious identity in 2007, Christians outnumbered “nones” 78 to 16 percent.
The decline in the number of Christians was mostly concentrated among responding Protestants. Their numbers declined by ten percent in the last decade and four percent in the last five years.
Some 58 percent of white Protestants identify as born-again, while 66 percent of blacks did so. Black evangelical Christians were the most faithful churchgoers, with 70 percent of them attending services monthly, compared to only 56 percent of white evangelical Protestants.
Leonardo Blair, taken from The Christian Post .
Taken from Prayer Connect magazine.
