Gallup: Only 5% of Religious Americans Are Non-Christians

By Barbara Hollingsworth

CNSNews.com) – A recent Gallup poll refutes the claim made by Barack Obama on March 9, 2008 that “we are no longer a Christian nation.”
Gallup found that three quarters of all Americans - a supermajority - identify themselves as Christians, with only five percent saying they are practicing members of a non-Christian faith.
“We find, looking at our data, that America does in fact remain a predominantly Christian nation,” Dr. Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor in chief, said of the poll released on Christmas Eve.
“Now, our overall estimation of what percent of Americans identify with the Christian religion depends a little on which of our various polls we look at, but I would estimate that about three-quarters – 75, maybe up to 77 percent of Americans - identify with the Christian religion.
“About half of Americans are Protestant or some other non-Catholic Christian faith, and another 23, 24 percent are Roman Catholic. About 2 percent are Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
“Now, does that mean that a quarter of Americans identify with a non-Christian religion? Not so, because we have about 17, 18 percent of Americans who don’t identify with any religion, the so-called ‘religious nones’ as we call them.
“And so that reduces down to about only 5, or maybe 6 percent, again depending on how we do the definitions, of Americans who explicitly identify with a non-Christian faith.”
Newport added that contrary to popular belief, Americans are actually more religious now than they have been at various times in the past. Fifty-six percent told Gallup that religion is “very important in their daily lives,” up about four percentage points since the 1970s and 80s. And although weekly church attendance has declined since its peak in the 1950s, Newport added that it is “no lower now than it was in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s.”Thirty-nine percent of those polled said they attended a church service within the past seven days, compared to 41 percent in 1939 and 37 percent in 1940.