How Many Christian Churches Are in America? Over 318,000

There are well over 318,000 Christian churches in America. That is how many Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant congregations the 2020 U.S. Religion Census counted, and it missed some. Adding Latter-day Saint and Jehovah’s Witness congregations gives about 345,000, but most churches do not count those two bodies as Christian, because neither holds the doctrine of the Trinity.

Counting the church is as old as the church. On the day of Pentecost, Luke tells us, “there were added unto them about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41), and a few verses later, “the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved” (Acts 2:47). Luke counted people, not buildings. Those first believers met “from house to house” (Acts 2:46), and Paul could send his greetings to “the church that is in their house” (Romans 16:5). The census counts congregations, and a congregation is just such a gathering: people who meet in Christ’s name, week after week, in a place their neighbors can find.

What counts as a church?

The researchers count congregations, not buildings or denominations. The U.S. Religion Census defines a congregation as a group “of individuals who meet regularly (typically weekly) at a pre-announced time and location”. A parish with three Sunday Masses is one congregation; a church plant meeting in a school gym is one too. A denomination, such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the Catholic Church, is the body that many congregations belong to, and the census counted 372 such bodies of every faith in 2020. How many denominations there are worldwide is a different question, taken up in how many Christian denominations there are.

The census also counts adherents: members, their children, and other regular attenders who are not members. That is why its figures are larger than a church’s membership roll and smaller than the number of Americans who call themselves Christian.

How many Christian churches are in the United States?

The 2020 U.S. Religion Census, run by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, found 356,642 congregations of every faith in 3,141 of the nation’s 3,143 counties. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches made up 318,249 of them: 199,694 conservative Protestant, 69,865 mainline Protestant, 23,483 Black Protestant, 19,522 Catholic (19,405 of them in the Catholic Church itself), 2,921 Orthodox and about 2,800 others. The census lists the Latter-day Saints (14,631 congregations, almost all of them in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (12,285) as traditions of their own; with them the figure is about 345,000.

Both of those bodies see themselves as followers of Christ. Asked “Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christians?”, the Witnesses answer “Yes”, and add that they believe “Jesus is the Son of God, not part of a Trinity”. The Latter-day Saints teach that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are “three separate beings”. Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches hold that God is one God in three Persons, and so they do not count either body as Christian in the creedal sense; in 2001 the Catholic Church ruled that Latter-day Saint baptism is not valid. By the measure those churches use, the firmer count of Christian churches is the 318,000.

The census reaches most congregations but not all, since a body must take part to be counted. In recent decades, estimates of the true total have ranged from 268,000 to 414,000. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research, on its website in 2026, puts it at about 373,000, a figure it places between the census count and a higher survey-based estimate of 384,000 published by the sociologist Simon Brauer in 2017. Within that total it counts roughly 335,000 Protestant and other Christian churches, 23,000 Catholic and Orthodox churches, and 15,000 congregations of other faiths.

Which denominations have the most churches?

The Southern Baptist Convention has more congregations than any other body, and the Catholic Church has by far the most people. The table counts single church bodies rather than whole traditions, so its Catholic and Latter-day Saint figures are a little lower than the totals above. These are the eight bodies with the most congregations in the 2020 census, Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses included:

The two columns tell different stories. A Catholic parish in 2020 served about 3,200 people on average, a Southern Baptist church about 340. The independent churches with no denomination, counted together, are now the second-largest group by both measures.

One number in the table has already changed. In the years after 2019, following the denomination’s long dispute over same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy, about 7,600 United Methodist churches left it, a quarter of its churches in the United States, according to final figures published in January 2024. They left the denomination; they did not close. Lovett Weems of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership noted “the decision of disaffiliating churches to remain independent of any denomination, at least for now”. They still belong in America’s count of churches, but no longer in the Methodist one. Membership figures for each denomination are compared in the largest Christian denominations in the U.S.

Is the number of churches growing or shrinking?

The number of congregations is still growing slowly; the people in them are not keeping pace. Among the 212 bodies that took part in both the 2010 and 2020 censuses, congregations rose 2.2% and adherents 6.5%, while the population of the United States grew 7.4%. Within that total, non-denominational churches added nearly 9,000 congregations and nearly nine million adherents in ten years, while the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church each lost about two million adherents.

In the pews, the change shows plainly. The Faith Communities Today survey, the largest survey of American congregations, found that the median weekly attendance fell from 137 in 2000 to 65 in 2020. Between 2015 and 2020 half of all congregations shrank by at least 7%, the first time in twenty years of surveys that the median church was declining.

Among the people, the Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62% of American adults call themselves Christian: 40% Protestant, 19% Catholic and about 3% other Christians. That is down from 78% in 2007 and 71% in 2014, though the share has held between 60% and 64% since 2019.

How big is the average church in America?

Small. In the Faith Communities Today survey of 2020, 70% of congregations had 100 or fewer people at weekly worship, and only 10% had more than 250. Yet those larger churches held about 70% of all worshippers, while the many small ones held only 14%. The Hartford Institute’s most recent figures, from its 2025 survey, put the median at 70 regular worshippers and find that 78% of churchgoers attend the largest 13% of congregations.

The sociologist Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute defines a megachurch as a congregation with at least 2,000 people attending each weekend, and by the institute’s count there were roughly 1,850 Protestant megachurches in 2020. Their average Sunday attendance was 4,092. They are a sliver of the whole, about one church in every two hundred, and the Hartford Institute finds that the share of Americans attending one has kept rising.

Where in America are churches most concentrated?

In the South. The 2020 Faith Communities Today survey found half of all congregations in the South, which has 38% of the population; the West has 24% of Americans but only 14% of congregations. By the 2020 census, Texas has the most congregations of any state (29,750), followed by California (23,567) and Florida (17,511). For its size, Arkansas has the most, about 247 congregations for every 100,000 people, with Mississippi, West Virginia, South Dakota and Alabama close behind; Nevada has the fewest, about 50. These state figures include congregations of every faith.

The countryside is full of churches built when more people lived there. In the 2020 Faith Communities Today survey a quarter of congregations were rural and another 22% stood in villages and small towns, while the Census Bureau’s 2020 count put 20% of Americans outside urban areas. The definitions differ, but the gap is plain. Many of the smallest churches stand in villages that have thinned around them, and their people still gather, as the letter to the Hebrews asks, “not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25).

Every one of those congregations gathered in his name is the same promise kept: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). The next census of congregations is due in 2030. The Lord’s own count is larger, and John saw it: “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Revelation 7:9).

Related reading

• Largest Christian denominations in the U.S., ranked by membership
• How many Christian denominations are there?
• What is a non-denominational church?
• How many Christians are there in the world?