NEW YORK - The share of Americans who identify as white and Christian has dropped below 50 per cent, a transformation fueled by immigration and by growing numbers of people who reject organized religion altogether, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

Christians overall remain a large majority in the U.S., at nearly 70 per cent of Americans. However, white Christians, once predominant in the country's religious life, now comprise only 43 per cent of the population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, a polling organization based in Washington. Four decades ago, about eight in 10 Americans were white Christians.

The change has occurred across the spectrum of Christian traditions in the U.S., including sharp drops in membership in predominantly white mainline Protestant denominations such as Presbyterians and Lutherans; an increasing Latino presence in the Roman Catholic Church as some non-Hispanic white Catholics leave; and shrinking ranks of white evangelicals, who until recently had been viewed as immune to decline.

The trends identified in the survey are fueling anxiety about the place of Christians in society, especially among evangelicals, alarmed by support for gay marriage and by the increasing share of Americans — about one-quarter — who don't identify with a faith group. President Donald Trump, who repeatedly promised to protect the religious liberty of Christians, drew 80 per cent of votes by white evangelicals, a constituency that remains among his strongest supporters.

About 17 per cent of Americans now identify as white evangelical, compared to 23 per cent a decade ago, according to the survey. Membership in the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant group, dropped to 15.2 million last year, its lowest number since 1990, according to an analysis by Chuck Kelley, president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

"So often, white evangelicals have been pointing in judgment to white mainline groups, saying when you have liberal theology you decline," said Robert Jones, chief executive of PRRI. "I think this data really does challenge that interpretation of linking theological conservatism and growth."

The PRRI survey of more than 100,000 people was conducted from January 2016 to January of this year and has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Previous surveys had found that the Protestant majority that shaped the nation's history had dropped below 50 per cent sometime around 2008. The PRRI poll released Wednesday included a more in-depth focus on race and religion. Jones said growth among Latino Christians, and stability in the numbers of African-American Christians, had partly obscured the decline among white Christians.

The survey also found that more than a third of all Republicans say they are white evangelicals, and nearly three-quarter identify as white Christians. By comparison, white Christians have become a minority in the Democratic Party, shrinking from 50 per cent a decade ago, to 29 per cent now. Forty per cent of Democrats say they have no religious affiliation.

Among American Catholics, 55 per cent now identify as white, compared to 87 per cent 25 years ago, amid the growing presence of Latino Catholics, according to the report. Over the last decade, the share of white Catholics in the U.S. population dropped from 16 per cent to 11 per cent. Over the same period, white mainline Protestants declined from 18 per cent to 13 per cent of all Americans.

___

This story has been corrected to show PRRI has corrected the figure on the percentage of Democrats who identified as white Christians a decade ago to 50 per cent instead of 47 per cent.

News from © The Associated Press, 2017