Two interesting reports this week: Trinity College (Hartford, CT) released a survey this week http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/reports/highlights.html It's major finding is that the US population is slowly becomong less Christian. Quote: The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008. Yesterday the Christian Science Monitor published an essay on "the coming evangelical collapse." The author predicts the collapse of evangelical Christianity in ten years. (Although the above study shows an increase in evangelical Christians.) http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090310/cm_csm/yspencer It will be interesting to watch over the next few decades to see if politics divorces its self from religion.
That was an interesting topic. Each day at school we show Channel 1 News to the students, and this was one of the stories they reported on. I pretty much had an idea that Catholics and Baptists dominated, but was shocked to see that "non-religious" had almost doubled to 15%. As an observer, it amazes me how many of my students claim to be Christian, but couldn't tell me the first thing about Christianity when we were going over it in class. -Matt
This new ARIS survey is fascinating. Its website is here: http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/ In table 1, on page 3, they say that total Christians have gone from 151,225,000 in 1990 to 173,402,000 in 2008. That's a hefty rise in numbers, but a drop in percentage of the total population from 86.2% to 76.0%. Other non-Christian religions rose from 5,853,000 to 8,796,000, a modest rise from 3.3% to 3.9%. They attribute most of this gain to immigration. And the group that ARIS calls "Nones", those who don't identify with any religious grouping, went from 14,331,000 to 34,169,000, a significant rise from 8.2% to 15.0%. Interestingly, Protestants appear poised to drop below 50% of the US population for the first time in the country's history. The group that ARIS calls "other Christian" (including Protestants and Eastern Orthodox) fell from 60.0% in 1990 to 50.9% in 2008. Catholics held their own better, falling from 26.2% to 25.1%. The survey attributes much of this to immigration of Hispanics. It's associated with a movement of the Catholic center of gravity from the Northeast to the Southwest. One *very important* fact about this survey is that it's about people's self-identification with a religious group. That isn't necessarily the same thing as religious belief. To investigate that aspect, ARIS added some new questions in 2008. (Table 4, page 8.) "Regarding the existence of God, do you think..." "There is no such thing" got 2.3% "There is no way to know" got 4.3% "I'm not sure" got 5.7% Those would seem to correspond to atheists and to strong and weak agnostics. Together, they total 12.3%. "There is a higher power but no personal God" got a surprising 12.1% Interestingly, those four combine to total 24.4% of the population, significantly more than the people who say that they have no religion. It's more than the "nones" and "other-religons" combined. (And the "other-religions" include Jews and Muslims, both theistic.) Apparently millions of the self-identified members of the various theistic religions don't actually believe in the doctrines of their religion. Presumably they claim membership for ethnic, family or social reasons. It looks like there are about the same number of non-theists in America as Catholics. Their numbers are each about half the number of Protestants, but closer to the number of self-professed Protestant "born agains". Looking at more detailed numbers (table 3, p. 5)... Mormons have risen from 2,487,000 in 1990 to 3,158,000 in 2008, but they remained constant at 1.4%,, just pacing the country's population growth. They have large families but little immigration. Episcopalians have fallen dramatically from 3,043,000 to 2,405,000, 1.7% to 1.1%. Jews have fallen too, from 3,137,000 to 2,680,000,, 1.8 to 1.2%. But the survey notes that this refers to Jews who identify their religion as Judaism. If we define Jews as an ethnic group rather than as a religion, then the numbers will probably double. (There are lots of Jewish "nones" out there.) Eastern religions have risen dramatically, from 687,000 in 1990 to 1,961,000 in 2008. (0.4% to 0.9%) Buddhists are the largest component, rising from 404,000 to 1,189,000 (0.2% to 0.5%). ARIS attribues most of these increases to immigration from Asia. Muslims are another small but growing group, rising from 527,000 to 1,349,000 (0.3% to 0.6%). Again, most of this growth is due to immigration. Another interesting thing to look at is the percentage of each group that are college graduates. (Table 11, p.16) Eastern religions 59% Jewish 57% "Mainline christian" 35% Muslim 35% "Nones" 31% Mormons 31% [US National Population 27%] "Christian generic" 26% Catholic 25% Baptists 16% Pentecostal/charismatic 13%
