In this report, Pew Research Center has incorporated estimates of “intergenerational transmission of religion” into our projections for the first time. religious groups depend partly on rates of religious transmission – whether parents pass their religious identity on to their children. For religious populations, projections also need to include data on “switching” – voluntary movement into and out of religious groups.
This report seeks to answer the question: What might the religious makeup of the United States look like roughly 50 years from now, in 2070, if recent trends continue? We try to address this not with sweeping predictions or grand theories, but with mathematical projections that combine techniques standardly used in demography (the study of human populations) with data we have collected in surveys on religion.ĭemographers project the growth or shrinkage of populations based on factors such as age, sex, fertility, mortality and migration.