Stolen from Pew Research.
If recent trends continue, Christians could make up a minority of Americans by 2070. That’s according to a September report that models several hypothetical scenarios of how the U.S. religious landscape might change over the next 50 years, based on religious switching patterns.
Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”
Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely – the last of which is not plausible because it assumes all switching has already ended – the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to somewhere between 54% and 35% of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from their current 30% of the population to somewhere between 34% and 52%.
A growing share of adult TikTok users in the U.S. are getting news on the platform, bucking the trend on other social media sites, according to a survey fielded in July and August. A third of adults who use TikTok say they regularly get news there, up from 22% two years ago. The increase comes even as news consumption on many other social media sites has either decreased or stayed about the same in recent years. For example, the share of adult Facebook users who regularly get news there has declined from 54% in 2020 to 44% this year.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the partisan gap in views of the court grew wider than at any point in more than three decades. While 73% of Republicans expressed a favorable view of the court in an August survey, only 28% of Democrats shared that view. That 45-point gap was wider than at any point in 35 years of polling on the court.
The current polarization follows a term that included the ruling on abortion and several other high-profile cases that often split the justices along ideological lines.
Growing shares of Democrats also say the Supreme Court has a conservative tilt: 67% said this in August, up from 57% in January. And about half of Democrats (51%) said in August that the justices on the court are doing a poor job of keeping their own political views out of their judgments on major cases, nearly double the share who said this in January (26%).
About 5% of Americans younger than 30 are transgender or nonbinary – that is, their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth, according to a survey conducted in May. By comparison, 1.6% of those ages 30 to 49 and 0.3% of those 50 and older say that their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. Overall, 1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary – that is, someone who is neither a man nor a woman or isn’t strictly one or the other.
While a relatively small share of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary, many say they know someone who is. More than four-in-ten (44%) say they personally know someone who is trans and 20% know someone who is nonbinary. The share of adults who know someone who is transgender has increased from 42% in 2021 and from 37% in 2017.
In focus groups with trans and nonbinary adults, most participants said they knew from an early age – many as young as preschool or elementary school – that there was something different about them, even if they didn’t have the words to describe what it was.
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