This meme has been circulating online, making inaccurate claims about the US Orthodox population.

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Lately, a meme has been circulating online, claiming that the number of Orthodox Christians in America has grown from 700,000 to six million in just four years, 2020 to 2024. This is a complete fiction – but it has quite a history.

The Earliest Estimates

In 1890, in conjunction with the decennial census, the US Census Bureau surveyed churches, resulting in a Report on Statistics of Churches in the United States. The report shows a grand total of 13 Orthodox churches in the territory of the United States – eleven in Alaska (which wasn’t yet a state), one Russian church in San Francisco, and one Greek church in New Orleans, which reported itself to be part of the Athens-based Church of Greece. Altogether, they found 14,104 Orthodox, with just 600 in what we now call the “Lower 48.” Here are the reported numbers of “communicants or members” by state/territory:

• 13,504 in Alaska Territory
• 500 in California
• 100 in Louisiana

American Orthodoxy grew dramatically in the years that followed, thanks to the flood of immigration (much of it through Ellis Island) and the conversion of Uniates to Orthodoxy. The next time the Census Bureau surveyed churches was in 1906. Four Orthodox groups were included – Greek, Russian, Serbian, and Syrian – and in total, they claimed 129,606 “communicants or members.”

The next census of religious bodies was in 1916, and by now, Albanian, Bulgarian, and Romanian parishes had been added to the mix. This time, the Census Bureau found 249,840 Orthodox in America.

Up to this point, all the numbers we’ve seen are based on surveys sent to parishes, estimating the number of people who are part of each parish. In other words, an approach similar to that of Alexei Krindatch a century later.

In 1922, we get the first of a different sort of estimate. In his enthronement address as Ecumenical Patriarch, Meletios Metaxakis famously declared his vision for “the two million Orthodox Christians of America” to be “organized into one united ecclesiastical organization, as an American Orthodox Church.” 

Did Orthodoxy in America grow from 250k to 2 million in just six years? No way. I don’t know where Meletios got his two million number. During the Ellis Island era (1891 to 1924), an estimated 420,000 Greeks immigrated to the United States (although many of them returned to their homeland after working for a few years in America) — and the Greeks have long been the largest Orthodox group in America. The only way you could possibly get to 2 million is if you count all US immigrants who came from the Russian Empire, regardless of religion. But we know that most of these “Russians” were not Orthodox — in fact, many (most?) claimed that they were fleeing religious persecution in Russia. This includes groups like Russian Jews and German-speaking Mennonites, among others. But I suppose it’s possible that Meletios saw a chart of hyphenated Americans and added up all the “Russians” along with the Greeks, Serbs, and the rest. This might explain his two million figure, but there certainly weren’t actually two million Orthodox in America in 1922.

In 1926 – so, ten years after the previous Census Bureau study, and four years after Meletios’s enthronement – the Census Bureau surveyed churches once again, finding virtually no growth among the Orthodox: our number was just 259,394, growth of just 3.8% in a decade.

The last time the Census Bureau conducted its census of religious bodies was in 1936. That year, the Orthodox churches reported 348,025 members.

US Orthodox primates with New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who signed legislation legally incorporating a pan-Orthodox federation in 1943.

Six Million?

The six million estimate actually originates from just a few years after that 1936 census. In 1942, the United States was entering World War II, and the Orthodox jurisdictions were eager to show support for the war effort – and also to be recognized as a major religion by the American government. The Orthodox bishops wanted draft exemptions for our clergy and wanted Orthodox soldiers to have “Eastern Orthodox” on their identification tags, so that they could receive Orthodox sacraments and burials. 

As part of this lobbying effort, the bishops puffed up our numbers. In March 1942, the primates of seven American Orthodox jurisdictions issued a proclamation that began, “The archbishops, metropolitan-archbishops and bishops of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the United States, representing the Greeks, Syrians, Serbs, Rumanians, Ukrainians and Carpatho-Russians, more than 6,000,000 citizens…”

The six million number has been repeated ever since. It’s the number the Encyclopedia Britannica reports on its website, and since the website’s copyright updates every year, it gives the appearance that it’s a current-year (2024) number. Britannica’s entry for the OCA includes this line: “The Orthodox Church in America does not include all Orthodox groups in the United States and Canada. Among others are the Greek archdiocese, subject to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Total Orthodox Church membership in America has been estimated at nearly 6,000,000.”

Britannica is just repeating the old 1940s lobbying number. It’s certainly not a 2024 estimate. The furthest back I can look at that page in the Wayback Machine is 2015, and the language is identical to what it is today. I don’t have any old print editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica handy, but I suspect the line hasn’t been changed in decades.

In any event, just as Orthodoxy in America didn’t grow from 250k to 2 million from 1916-22, it hadn’t grown from 350k to 6 million from 1936-42.

Self-Reported Jurisdictional Numbers

For most of the twentieth century, and into the early twenty-first, the US Orthodox jurisdictions reported their membership data to the National Council of Churches. Adding these up for 1947, we get 702,273 Orthodox in America. The bulk of this came from two jurisdictions: the Greek Archdiocese (with a reported 275k) and the Russian Metropolia (the future OCA, with 300k). Soon after this, both jurisdictions would report big increases: the GOA claimed a million members in 1950, and the Metropolia reported 750k in 1952.

The Greek number climbed steadily upwards as the years went by, plateauing at 1.95 million beginning in 1971. The Metropolia jumped to one million in 1969, on the eve of its autocephaly and transformation into the OCA, and it would continue to claim a million into the twenty-first century.

Other jurisdictions reported big increases, too. Add it up, and by the early 1950s, the combined membership that the Orthodox churches in America reported to the NCC had grown from 700k to more than 2 million.

This late 1950s meeting of Orthodox bishops led to the creation of SCOBA in 1960. At the center, L-R, are Metropolitan Antony Bashir, Archbishop Michael Konstantinides, and Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich.

In 1955, the Greek Orthodox of Istanbul were attacked by a government-backed Turkish mob, which raped, looted, and burned the Greek quarter of the city. In the wake of this atrocity, the American Orthodox bishops met and issued a letter of protest to the US Secretary of State. Just as they had done when addressing the government in 1942, the bishops inflated their numbers again in 1955, now claiming 6.5 million Orthodox in America. Yet, the same jurisdictions continued to report more modest numbers to the National Council of Churches, claiming roughly 2.2 million that year.

In the years that followed, a movement began to have the Orthodox Church recognized as the “fourth major faith” in America (in addition to Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism). Groups of Orthodox lobbied legislatures in virtually every US state, and naturally, they claimed large numbers of Orthodox in America. The reported numbers varied: 5 million in 1958, 6 million in 1963. In 1965, the Greek Archdiocese claimed to the Idaho legislature that there were 7 million Orthodox Christians in America – but the same year, the aggregate number reported by the jurisdictions to the National Council of Churches was around 3 million.

Reverse-engineering

Before we move on to more recent estimates, I want to say something about these big, round jurisdictional numbers from the mid-to-late twentieth century. 

One way of estimating the Orthodox population involves surveying individual parishes and asking about their membership. This is what the Census Bureau did in the early twentieth century, and it’s what Alexei Krindatch has been doing in the early twenty-first (about which, more in a moment).

Another way is to ask each jurisdiction to estimate its population, and add them up to get a total. That’s what the National Council of Churches did for so many decades, and the Orthodox numbers generally came in at around 2-3 million. These numbers don’t reflect the reality of church life, but they are somewhat explainable.

For example, based on the earliest data available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey – from 2010 – an estimated 1.3 million Americans had Greek ancestry. Four years earlier, in 2006, the Greek Archdiocese reported 1.5 million members. You can see a logical connection there.

In 2007, the Antiochian Archdiocese claimed 430,000 members. Can we explain that one, too? Well, the 2010 American Community Survey found that just shy of 750,000 Americans claimed Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian ancestry. The Arab-American Institute has estimated that between 63 and 77 percent of Arab-Americans are Christians, and that includes Iraqis, Saudis, and others – the Christian share is likely higher if we focus only on Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians. This suggests around 570k Christians from these groups. Many of these will be heterodox – lots of Maronites, Melkites, and Latin Catholics. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Orthodox share is 50 percent; that gives us about 285k “ethnic” Antiochians. But the Antiochian Archdiocese has a lot of converts, too. If we assume that there are 285k “ethnic” Antiochians and that one-third of all Antiochians are converts, we end up with 430k total Antiochians, which matches the number reported by the Archdiocese in 2007. To be clear: I’m not suggesting that this is in any sense a “real” number – I’m just showing how you can reverse-engineer it.

I don’t actually think that the leadership of the jurisdictions sat down every year and estimated things like this. But I do think that the big jurisdictional numbers have their origin in something along these lines.

Sociologist Alexei Krindatch

Alexei Krindatch

From the 1950s through the 1990s, pretty much the only population numbers you could find on American Orthodoxy were big, inflated estimates – either the 5-6 million figures claimed in newspapers, or the only slightly less outlandish numbers reported to the National Council of Churches. In the early 2000s, the aggregate estimate reported to the NCC was roughly 3.5 million.

And then came Krindatch.

In 2000, sociologist Alexei Krindatch made his first attempt at estimating the number of “adherents” in the US Orthodox jurisdictions. He missed a couple (ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate), but all told, he came up with an aggregate estimate of 773,740 Eastern Orthodox Christians in America. His more detailed 2010 and 2020 censuses estimated the numbers at 816,653 and 675,675, respectively. A far cry from five to six million, or even three or four.

It’s likely that Krindatch’s estimates aren’t too far off from the reality of parish life, although the methodology is decidedly imperfect.

Let’s focus on the more recent number – 675,675 in 2020, which some have rounded off to 700,000. Krindatch’s 2020 Census of Orthodox Christian Churches was part of the broader U.S. Religion Census, which isn’t connected to the actual US Census Bureau but is carried out by independent researchers. Krindatch is responsible for the Orthodox churches. His census is really just a simple survey of parish priests, asking them two questions – one about “adherents” and the other about church attendance. Here’s the “adherents” question:

• How many individual persons are involved in the life of your parish? Include in this number adults and children, regular and occasional attendees, paid stewards and persons who do not contribute financially.

How many people are “involved in the life of” a parish is very much open to interpretation. A priest could guess off the top of his head, or count names in a parish directory, or use an estimate of Pascha attendance. There’s no objective standard for “involvement in the life of the parish.”

Adding up the estimates from the Eastern Orthodox priests’ responses, Krindatch came up with 675,765 – that is, the total number of people “involved in the life of” the parishes he surveyed was a bit below seven hundred thousand. 

So, How Many Orthodox Are Actually in America?

There’s a third way to estimate the US Orthodox population, in addition to parish surveys and jurisdictional reports: we can ask large numbers of individual Americans about their religious affiliation.

Every year – and especially in election years – big organizations conduct surveys of the U.S. population. Many of these surveys are small, with only a couple thousand people; others are massive, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of respondents. The Cooperative Election Study surveys 60,000 Americans every election year. The Voter Study Group survey had three phases in 2019-20, and combined, they covered over 465,000 people.

I collected 63 surveys conducted between 2018 and 2022, covering a combined 940,000 Americans. All of this data is publicly available, and in every survey, the respondent was asked about their religious affiliation. We can use this to estimate what percentage of Americans are Orthodox.

I’ll cut to the chase: based on these 63 surveys, I estimate that roughly 0.49% of Americans are Eastern (Chalcedonian) Orthodox Christians. Multiply 0.49% by the total U.S. population (currently around 335 million), and we get 1.64 million Orthodox Americans.

What About Krindatch’s 675k Estimate?

Why does our estimate – 1.64 million – differ so much from Krindatch’s 675k number? It’s because the general population surveys we used for our estimate are measuring something different than Krindatch’s survey. He’s estimating how many people are “involved in the life of” parishes, according to the estimates of parish priests. These big surveys are asking individuals about their own religious affiliation. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the numbers don’t match up. 

Also, just to tease some future analysis we’ll be doing at OSI… In the 2018-22 Cooperative Election Study data, 43.3% of Orthodox people reported going to church at least once a month. Multiply 43.3% by 1.64 million and you get 710,000 people – almost identical to Krindatch’s estimate of the number of people who are “involved in the life of” their parish.

Conclusion

This points to a fundamental ambiguity when we talk about the Orthodox population – what do we mean by “Orthodox”? Do we mean anyone who has ever been received into the Church, regardless of their status today? Do we mean people who self-identify as Orthodox? Or people who are, in some manner,  “involved in the life of” a parish? Or people who are “in good standing,” in that they go to confession and take communion with some regularity? The number of Orthodox in America depends on which definition you prefer.

Having said all that, there never has been any basis for the claim that six million Americans are or were Orthodox. We know the number originated with the Orthodox bishops lobbying the US government, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they puffed up their numbers. The jurisdictions’ self-reported numbers, which topped out at about 3.5 million in the early 2000s, probably reflect, in some manner, the outer boundary of Americans with ties to Orthodoxy based on culture. Our 1.64 million estimate is a much more “firm” number based on self-identification, and the Krindatch-based 700k figure seems to reflect the reality of parish life as experienced by local priests. 

I see no evidence for recent net growth. Our 0.49% estimate is based on surveys conducted between 2018 and 2022. If we focus instead on only those surveys from the latter part of that period, 2021-22, the Orthodox percentage is 0.45%. In other words, we are basically running in place, at least through 2022. Elsewhere, we’ve documented the recent surge in converts, but the inflows of converts and births are offset by losses due to deaths and people abandoning the faith. 

2024 was an election year, meaning we should, in the years to come, start getting new batches of data from big, population-wide surveys – at which point we should be able to say whether American Orthodoxy has started to experience net growth.

Finally — don’t forget to check out my American Orthodox History course, which will happen on Thursdays in January. Click here to learn more.

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A Word on Data Cleaning

If you just want a number, you can probably ignore the rest of this article. But I thought that some of my readers might want to know a bit more about how we came up with this estimate.

It wasn’t as simple as just adding up the number of self-professed Orthodox and dividing by the total. Most of these surveys give one of the following options:

• “Eastern or Greek Orthodox”
• “Orthodox (such as Greek, Russian, or some other Orthodox church)”

Some surveys – most significantly, the large Cooperative Election Study – then ask a follow-up question to those who said they were Orthodox: “To which Orthodox church do you belong?”

The options don’t perfectly match up with the Orthodox jurisdictions in America. The options in the Cooperative Election Study were

• Greek Orthodox
• Russian Orthodox
• Orthodox Church in America
• Armenian Orthodox
• Eastern Orthodox
• Serbian Orthodox
• Other Orthodox

This is a bit of a mess. Armenian Orthodox are not “Eastern or Greek Orthodox” – they are non-Chalcedonians, commonly referred to as “Oriental Orthodox” (although, confusingly, “oriental” is actually just another word for “eastern”…). And “Eastern Orthodox” isn’t a subcategory of “Eastern or Greek Orthodox.”

Anyway, 7.7% of the Orthodox respondents to the Cooperative Election Study in 2018-22 said that they were Armenian. Which means, they shouldn’t be counted if we’re trying to estimate the number of Eastern (Chalcedonian) Orthodox in America.

In addition, 47 of the 1,020 “Eastern or Greek Orthodox” respondents listed their race as black, and said that they were either immigrants to America, or the children of immigrants. It is highly likely that these are Ethiopian or Eritrean Orthodox people. If we combine the Armenians with these (presumably) Ethiopian and Eritrean respondents, these Oriental Orthodox add up to about 12% of all “Eastern or Greek Orthodox” respondents in the Cooperative Election Study. Although I will say, many Ethiopians and Eritreans actually attend Eastern Orthodox parishes in America. 

But what about the other Oriental Orthodox groups? Have Coptic, Malankara (Indian), Syriac, and other Oriental Orthodox inadvertently been lumped in with the Eastern Orthodox numbers, too? One way to look into this is to consider two earlier studies – the 2007 and 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Surveys. These two surveys gave even longer lists of options to their “To which Orthodox church do you belong?” question, including most of the Oriental Orthodox groups. In those two Pew surveys, the Oriental Orthodox respondents make up 11% of the “Eastern or Greek Orthodox” respondents.

In the Cooperative Election Study, I didn’t find much evidence that other big Oriental Orthodox groups, like the Copts and the Malankara, are mixed in with the Orthodox data. Only 15 people said that they were Middle Eastern. This was a surprise to me – my own ancestors come from what is now Lebanon, and, I personally would choose “Middle Eastern,” if given the option. We might have expected other cradle Antiochians to have done the same, but this appears not to be the case – presumably, Orthodox people of Middle Eastern origin instead chose “white.” This also hints that there aren’t too many Copts included in the data. And just 19 were Asian, which rules out a large contingent of Malankara. (Another 21 people chose “other.”)

Put it all together, and my best estimate is that around 12% of survey respondents who say that they are Eastern Orthodox are, in fact, Oriental Orthodox. Maybe it’s 10%, maybe 15%, but it’s probably not too far off from that.

So then, I applied this 12% adjustment to all 63 surveys in our collection. Un-adjusted, Eastern Orthodox were 0.56% of the U.S. adult population; after the adjustment, it drops to 0.49%.

You can access all of our data at this link.