While Maryland was the first Catholic colony in what later became the United States, only 15 percent of the state’s population was Catholic in 2014, compared to the national average of 20.8 percent -- 34th among all states.
Mississippi’s population has the lowest percentage of Catholics, while Rhode Island has the highest. Overall, New England and Southwestern states with large Hispanic populations are more Catholic than states in the Southeast, where evangelical Protestants dominate.
The Catholic Church emerged in Rome and spread to people throughout Western Europe (into Spain, Portugal, Ireland, etc.), so it’s not a surprise that many Catholics are their descendants. In fact, nine in 10 Catholics in the U.S. are white or Hispanic.
In the U.S., slightly more than half of Catholics are women, while there are slightly more Jewish men than Jewish women. The U.S. was 50.5 percent female in 2014. Accurate data for Muslims was unavailable.
Aside from Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics have the lowest levels of eductional acheivement of any religious group. A third of Catholics earn less than $30,000 per year, in line with other major U.S. religions. The one exception: Judiasm, with only 16 percent of that group in the lowest income rung.
The Catholic orthodoxy maintains that marriage is a permanent bond and having children out of wedlock is a sin. So it's surprising that about one in 10 Catholics is divorced or separated. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey also found that Catholics are more open to non-traditional families, including 48 percent who think it's acceptable for unmarried parents who live together.
Catholicism is on the decline, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study. In 2014, Catholics made up 20.8 percent of the total population, compared to 23.9 percent seven years earlier.
The Catholic population is aging and the church is failing to bring in enough young people to replenish its ranks. Half of Catholics are older than age 50, unlike Muslims and those unaffiliated from any religion whose 50 and older populations are 18 percent and 28 percent, respectively.
It doesn't help that Catholics are also leaving in droves. For every American who joins the Catholic church, an average of 6.5 leave it. The opposite trend is happening for religious "nones." Meanwhile, mainline Protestants' ratio helps its population decline more slowly.
Another Pew Research Center study in 2013 on the shifting religious identity of Hispanics in the U.S. found that one in four are former Catholics. For a racial group that makes up about one-third of all Catholics, this kind of shift is not a reason for optimism for the church.
Race seems to play a larger factor into party affiliation than religion for Catholics. Hispanic Catholics are more likely to be Democratic-leaning than white, non-Hispanics. This partisanship divide also explains how Catholics, as a group, are torn on social issues in 2015.
Fewer than half of Catholics say engaging in homosexual behavior is a sin, while it's an even split on whether the church should recognize same-sex marriages.
Meanwhile party affiliation seems to determine whether a Catholic believes in climate change and whether it's caused by human activity. 71 percent of Catholics believe in it — mirroring the 68 percent of all Americans. Catholics who are Democrats are almost twice as likely to believe it exists than Catholic Republicans.
