Churches: Keeping Up

• Share

By the numbers, the churches are holding their own in the U.S. According to the newly published Yearbook of American Churches for 1964, the increase in church membership since the 1963 Yearbook was 1.6%, equaling the rate of national population growth. The report says that 117,946,002 Americans claim an affiliation with some religious organization; this figure represents 63.4% of the population, just .2% less than the record of 1960.

Yearbook statistics, which are compiled by the mostly Protestant National Council of Churches, show that Roman Catholicism continues to make the greatest gains. The U.S. now has 43,847,938 Catholics, an increase of 2.3%. The largest Protestant denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention (10,191,303), which took the lead for the first time since the organization of the present Methodist Church (now 10,153,003) in 1939. But in relationship to the total U.S. population, Protestant affiliation declined by .3% since the previous year.