Church and Congress

New members of the 111th Congress will be sworn in today, and almost all of the representative and senators share something in common: a stated religious affiliation. Only five members of the new Congress (about 1%) do not specify a religious affiliation, according to information gathered by Congressional Quarterly and the Pew Forum. And while one-in-six (16.1%) American adults described themselves as not affiliated with a particular faith in the Pew Forum’s Religious Landscape Survey, no members of Congress specifically said they were unaffiliated. Protestants account for roughly half of the new Congress, about the same proportion as their share of the U.S. population, while Catholics, Jews and Mormons are better represented in Congress than they are in the population as a whole. Read More