Protestants may soon account for less than half of the U.S. population for the first time since the country's founding, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
While still outnumbering the next biggest group -- Catholics -- roughly two to one, Protestant denominations have been losing members, people who now identify themselves as having no specific religion, the report from the University of Chicago said.
While Protestant membership stood at 63 percent of the population in 1993, it fell to 52 percent in 2002 and will drop below half in the next year or two, if that hasn't happened already, it added.
The information came from a survey that has been tracking societal trends for 32 years. Tom Smith, general director of the National Opinion Research Center, said the Protestant decline is another example of how the United States is on it way to being a nation of minorities.
"Many scholars have noted that the numbers of people who say they have 'no religion' is increasing, but they haven't noted what faith group these people have been leaving. It is clear that many of these people are former Protestants," he said.
It is also possible that a small number of the people who formerly identified themselves as Protestant have now decided to identify themselves simply as "Christian" in which case they would be in the "other" category on the survey, Smith said.
The survey found those who said they were Catholic in 2002 remained fairly steady at about 25 percent of the population.
People who said they belonged to other religions, including Eastern faiths and Islam, Orthodox Christians, interdenominational Christians and native-American faiths, increased from 3 percent to 7 percent between 1993 and 2002, it said, while the number of people who said they were Jewish remained stable at slightly under 2 percent.
Those who said they identified with no religion totaled nearly 14 percent in 2002 compared to 9 percent in 1993.
Protestants are in decline, the survey found, because younger adherents are dropping out. Immigration will likely further dilute the Protestant numbers but will keep Catholic rates stable, Smith said.
The study defined Protestants as those belonging to all post-Reformation Christian churches such as Baptist, Methodist and Episcopalian, including Mormons and New Age Spirituality adherents. The survey included 2,765 people 18 and older and there was a margin of error of plus or minus two percent for the 2002 statistics.