Engel Martinez, 27, grew up Catholic, attending Sunday catechism classes and celebrating his First Communion and confirmation; his grandmother had even urged him to become a priest.
Martinez, of San Diego, now considers himself religiously unaffiliated.
The share of Latinos who, like Martinez, say they are religiously unaffiliated grew last year, while the share of those who are Catholic continued to slide, a Pew Research survey released Thursday finds.
In 2022, 30% of Latinos considered themselves religiously unaffiliated — on par with overall U.S. adults, and up from a quarter of Latinos the previous year.
“The demographic forces shaping the nation’s Latino population also have impacted religious affiliation trends,” Pew senior writer Jens Manuel Krogstad wrote in the report. “Young people born in the U.S. — not immigrants — have driven Latino population growth since the 2000s.”
Among U.S. Latinos ages 18 to 29, about half (49%) now identify as religiously unaffiliated. By contrast, only about one-in-five Latinos ages 50 and older are unaffiliated.
While 43% of Latinos still identify as Catholic, that’s down 3 percentage points from 2021. The share of Latinos who are evangelical Protestants — 15%, a small bump up from 2021 — lagged behind those who are unaffiliated or Catholic.
Latinos who identify as not affiliated with a religion have steadily increased since 2016. The share of evangelical Protestants has remained generally steady, according to the Pew study of 7,647 adults, including 3,029 Hispanics, which was conducted Aug. 1-14.
As of last year, one-third of Latinos said their current religions are different from the ones they were raised in.
Martinez said he’s not atheist. He still prays and believes some of the theology he learned.
But he said he began to drift from Catholicism after he attended a youth retreat when he was an eighth grader. Catholic instructors and leaders there shared the anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion teachings…
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