Pew Report: “When the U.S. Congress convenes for its 119th session on Jan. 3, it will have marginally fewer Christians than it did in the previous session (2023-25), continuing a gradual, 10-year decline. Christians will make up 87% of voting members in the Senate and House of Representatives, combined, in the 2025-27 congressional session. That’s down from 88% in the last session and 92% a decade ago. Overall, there will be 461 Christian members of Congress when the 119th Congress meets, compared with 469 in the previous Congress and 491 during the 2015-17 session. It will be the lowest number of Christians since the start of the 2009-2011 congressional session, the first for which Pew Research Center conducted this analysis. (This analysis does not include three vacant – or soon to be vacant – seats whose eventual occupants are unknown, including the Ohio Senate seat of Vice President-elect JD Vance.) And yet, at 87%, Christians still make up the lion’s share of the Congress, far exceeding the Christian share of all U.S. adults, which stands at 62% after several decades of decline. In 2007, 78% of American adults were Christian, according to Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study from that year, and in the early 1960s more than nine-in-ten U.S. adults were Christian, according to historical Gallup polling. The new Congress is also more religious than the general population by another, related measure: Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) are religiously unaffiliated, meaning they are atheist or agnostic or say their religion is “nothing in particular.” But less than 1% of Congress falls into this category, with three religiously unaffiliated members: incoming Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington, both of whom are Democrats, and incoming Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona, a Republican. While the share of the U.S. public that is religiously unaffiliated – sometimes called “nones” – has risen rapidly in recent decades (from 16% in 2007 to 28% in our recent polling), the corresponding share of Congress has remained miniscule. Prior to the 119th session, the only member of Congress who was categorized as religiously unaffiliated in our analyses was Kyrsten Sinema, independent of Arizona, who served from 2013 through the Congress that is just ending. (She did not run for reelection in 2024.Pew Research Center’s analysis is based on data from CQ Roll Call, a publisher in Washington, D.C., that has closely covered Congress for decades…”