What Is the Future of Evangelicalism, According to the Pew RLS?

The 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey (RLS) may have painted a bleak picture of the state of mainline Protestantism, but the survey data offers a much more hopeful prognosis of evangelicalism. As far as numbers go, evangelicalism is thriving and appears well positioned to continue to thrive – but not in quite the same way that it has in recent decades.

According to Pew, evangelicals make up 23 percent of the overall US population and more than one-third of all US Christians. While that’s slightly lower than their share of the population in 2007 (26 percent) or 2014 (25 percent), evangelicals’ modest numerical decline in recent years is far less than the decline in the numbers of Catholics or mainline Protestants during the same period – and it suggests that evangelicalism is likely to be with us for quite some time to come.

But its future will be different than its past, the data suggest. That’s not so much because of changes within evangelicalism itself, but because of changes in the rest of the religious landscape.

Who counts as an evangelical?

There are different ways to define who is an evangelical, and each method results in a different answer to the question of how many evangelicals there are in the United States. Pew’s RLS uses denominational affiliation to define which people count as evangelicals. Southern Baptists are in; Episcopalians are out.

While no method is perfect, I think that Pew’s method, which counts all charismatic and theologically conservative Protestant denominations that have historically been majority-white as evangelical, is about as good as any other method. It also counts members of nondenominational churches as evangelical – which is important, since nondenominational churches are experiencing significantly higher rates of growth than any organized denominations are.

Pew’s approach, I think, avoids the dilemma that some social scientists have raised about whether people really understand the meaning of “evangelical” when they’re responding to surveys or whether they have political rather than religious categories in mind. Pew’s survey cuts through that debate and gets to a much more objective question: What percentage of the population is Southern Baptist (or evangelical Presbyterian, or nondenominational, etc.)?

Pew’s approach also avoids restricting the definition of “evangelical” to whites alone. Other social scientists who have tried to measure evangelical opinion have sometimes restricted their analysis to whites only, in the belief that “white evangelicals” have very different political views than non-whites who are “born again” Christians. By restricting evangelicalism to whites alone, social science researchers such as those at PRRI have concluded that evangelicalism is much smaller than Pew suggests – and they have also argued that this population is rapidly declining. But Pew shows that in predominantly white evangelical denominations (or non-denominational churches that can be classified as evangelical), nearly 30 percent of evangelicals are non-white or Hispanic. That’s important data, I think, because it accurately shows the multiracial nature of contemporary evangelicalism. In producing these figures, the Pew RLS is not measuring members of historically Black denominations who might hold evangelical beliefs; it instead is showing what is actually happening in denominations that have historically been white.

And while the survey does bring in some people who are not very actively religious but who still identify with a Christian tradition, the vast majority of those that are classified as evangelical using Pew’s definition really do hold evangelical beliefs and engage in evangelical Christian practices. Fifty percent attend church weekly. Seventy-two percent pray at least daily. Eighty-two percent believe in the existence of hell. Eighty-five percent consider the Bible “extremely important.” While perhaps 15-25 percent of those classified as evangelical are only nominally so, the remainder seem to exhibit behaviors and beliefs that are in keeping with what we would expect from evangelicals: They affiliate with theologically conservative Protestant churches, they hold theologically orthodox views on some of the basic Christian doctrines, and they pray and go to church. I think we can therefore use this survey sample as a guide to the identity of contemporary evangelicals.

The Present and Future of Evangelicalism

So, with these definitions in mind, what can we conclude about the present state of evangelicalism and its future direction?

The future of evangelicalism is southern. Fifty-two percent of evangelicals live in the South, according to Pew – which is a slightly higher figure than either the 2007 or 2014 Pew RLS studies suggested. But the actual extent of the southern regional concentration of evangelicalism is likely considerably higher, because what Pew is measuring is not the percentage of people in each region who identify as evangelical or who hold evangelical beliefs, but the percentage of people in each region who belong to denominations that can be classified as evangelical.

Historically, many evangelicals in the North belonged to mainline Protestant denominations, such as Presbyterian, Methodist, or American Baptist Churches USA. So, in previous surveys, those northern mainline Protestants who leaned evangelical were not counted as evangelical; they were counted as mainline. What we have seen in the past decade is a dramatic decline in the number of mainline Protestants of any stripe (whether liberal or conservative) – a phenomenon that means that the North is far less churched than it was before. And in addition, the Pew survey data indicates that identifiably evangelical denominations (such as the Southern Baptist Convention, Assemblies of God, nondenominational community churches, etc.) have also experienced a retreat in the North and a comparative growth in the South.

This is true even when Pew counts (as it does) all of the conservative splinter churches from the mainline (such as Global Methodist, ACNA, PCA, EPC, and ECO, etc.) as evangelical. In other words, even when we account for the fact that ten years ago, all Methodists (including the conservative Methodists of the Midwest who would later join the Global Methodists) were classified as mainline, while today the Global Methodists are counted as evangelical, evangelicalism has still experienced a decline in the North – but not in the South.

This suggests, I think, that we will soon see an even greater regional polarization of American religion than we already do. This is a very recent phenomenon. Fifty years ago, church attendance rates in New England were about as high as they were in the South, and evangelical institutions in the North were arguably just as strong as they were south of the Mason-Dixon line. While Southern Baptists were always disproportionately concentrated in the South, the North (and especially the Midwest) had plenty of evangelicals, which is why so many evangelical publishing houses and Christian colleges were located in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Chicago suburbs. Those Midwestern evangelical institutions tended to rely heavily on the conservative wing of mainline Protestantism. But today mainline Protestantism has rapidly shrunk (even while becoming less evangelical), while the center of evangelicalism has shifted decisively to the South. This will have important political and cultural implications for evangelicalism, as I will explain below.

The future of evangelicalism is Baptist, charismatic, and nondenominational. While the Southern Baptist Convention’s membership is declining, this appears to be mostly offset by the rise of Baptist-like nondenominational churches. Twenty-three percent of all Americans are Baptists (12 percent), Pentecostals (4 percent), or affiliated with nondenominational Protestant churches (7 percent). Compared to these behemoths, the favorite denominations of many evangelical academics or intellectuals – the 125,000-member ACNA, the 400,000-member PCA, and the like – comprise only a tiny fraction of evangelicalism that barely registers in the statistics. So, while these small liturgical or Reformed conservative Protestant churches may have intellectual influence, when we think of both the present and future state of evangelicalism, we need to picture a Baptist, charismatic / Pentecostal, or nondenominational church – because those three categories account for the vast majority of evangelicals in the United States.

The future of evangelicalism is among the non-college-educated, just as has long been the case. Only 28 percent of evangelicals have a four-year college degree, according to Pew. While that’s higher than it was in 2014, it’s still lower than the education rate for the general population – and as a result, we should expect that as Americans become polarized along educational lines, evangelicals will side overwhelmingly with the non-college-educated group.

The future of evangelicalism is less white. With nearly 30 percent of members of historically white denominational traditions (or nondenominational churches) now non-white or Hispanic – up from 24 percent in 2014 – it seems that evangelicalism’s future is likely to be increasingly multiracial. And as this happens, a new version of the Christian Right will continue to emerge – one that looks less like the Christian Right of the white conservative suburbanites who supported the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s and a lot more like the multiracial coalition that supported Donald Trump in 2024. African Americans who attend multiracial nondenominational churches are much less likely to be Democrats than African Americans who are members of historically Black denominations are – and Hispanic evangelicals are even more likely to be Republican. Perhaps we should quit talking so much about “white evangelicals” and recognize that there is a large – and growing – coalition of non-white evangelicals who may not have identified with the Christian Right of the previous generation but who are increasingly drawn to the antiestablishment, working-class Republican Party of today.

The future of evangelicalism is politically and socially conservative. Even as evangelicalism is becoming more multiracial, it has retained its socially conservative views. Sixty-five percent of evangelicals want abortion to be illegal in all or most cases, and 62 percent oppose same-sex marriage – about the same percentage as held these positions in 2014. Seventy percent identify as Republican and only 24 percent as Democrat. Fifty-nine percent self-identify as political conservatives, compared to only 7 percent who identify as political liberals.

What does this mean for how we understand evangelicalism?

As the United States becomes polarized along educational and regional lines, evangelicalism appears poised to identify firmly with the southern, working-class, socially conservative side of that divide. College-educated northern or urban evangelicals are likely to feel increasingly less at home in this evangelical coalition, but their traditional preferred refuge – the conservative wing of mainline Protestant churches (or, as is the case today, the recently formed small denominations that have split off from more liberal mainline denominations) – is likely to shrink even further, since it’s already statistically non-significant.

But pronouncements of evangelicalism’s imminent demise are incorrect, I think. Evangelicalism is shrinking in the North, but it appears poised to continue to flourish in the South – not solely because of white membership but because of evangelicalism’s appeal among Hispanics and working-class people of color.

Twenty-seven years ago, the sociologist Christian Smith described American evangelicalism as “embattled and thriving.” Today, the same thing could be said about evangelicalism. Evangelicals may feel embattled, as they perceive their shrinking influence in parts of the United States. But the demographic evidence suggests that they are still well positioned to maintain regional influence in the Bible Belt – and if this is the case, we can say that evangelicalism, despite all of its challenges, is still thriving, at least as far as numbers are concerned.