Protestants on verge of becoming minority in US: study

[Woodmonkey]

Protestants on verge of becoming minority in US: study


Protestants are on the verge of becoming a minority in the United States, a country they helped to found, as people change affiliation and immigration reshapes the religious "marketplace", a ground-breaking study showed Monday.

"The number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51 percent," compared to nearly two-thirds of the population in the 1960s, the first US Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said.

"Religion in the United States is often described as a vibrant marketplace where individuals pick and choose religions that meet their needs, and religious groups are compelled to compete for members," said the report, which surveyed 35,000 adult Americans.

"The proportion of the population that is Protestant has declined markedly in recent decades while the proportion of the population that is not affiliated with any particular religion has increased significantly," the survey said.

But Protestantism is not the only religion that is losing ground in the United States, where "constant movement characterizes the religious marketplace."

"The Landscape Survey confirms that there is a remarkable amount of movement by Americans from one religious group to another... More than one-quarter of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion -- or no religion at all," the report says.

The biggest winner in the constant ebb and flow of religious affiliation is the "unaffiliated" group, which includes atheists, agnostics, secularists and people who say they are not aligned with any particular creed but that religion is still important to them.

"Individuals who are not affiliated with any particular religion make up about one-sixth (16.1 percent) of the adult population. They thus comprise the fourth largest 'religious' tradition in the United States," the report says.

Roman Catholicism has had the highest attrition rate, with around one-third of the survey respondents who said they were raised Catholic no longer describing themselves as Catholic.

But Catholicism has held steady in its share of the US religious market, at around one-quarter of the population, thanks largely to the high number of Catholics among immigrants to the United States, mainly from Latin America.

The constant changes on the US religious landscape help to give religious life in the United States "great dynamism", the report says.

Nearly eight in 10 Americans are Christian -- Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox and other branches.

Sixteen percent are unaffiliated, and nearly five percent follow other religions, including 1.7 percent who are Jewish, 0.7 percent Buddhist and 0.6 percent Muslim.

The Source

[Woodmonkey]

America's Unfaithful Faithful

By DAVID VAN BIEMA2 hours, 36 minutes ago

A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths. America's religious culture, which is best known for its high participation rates, may now be equally famous (or infamous) for what the new report dubs "churn."

The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."

According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."

For some groups, their relatively steady number of adherents over the years hides a remarkable amount of coming and going. Simply counting Catholics since 1972, for example, you would get the impression that its population had remained fairly static - at about 25% of adult Americans (the current number is 23.9%). But the Pew report shows that of all those raised Catholic, a third have left the church. (That means that roughly one out of every 10 people in America is a former Catholic, and that ex-Catholics are almost as numerous as the America's second biggest religious group, Southern Baptists.) But Catholicism has made up for the losses by adding converts (2.6% of the population) and, more significantly, enjoying an influx of new immigrants, mostly Hispanic.

An even more extreme example of what might be called "masked churn" is the relatively tiny Jehovah's Witnesses, with a turnover rate of about two-thirds. That means that two-thirds of the people who told Pew they were raised Jehovah's Witnesses no longer are - yet the group attracts roughly the same number of converts. Notes Lugo, "No wonder they have to keep on knocking on doors."

The single biggest "winner," in terms of number gained versus number lost, was not a religious group at all, but the "unaffiliated" category. About 16% of those polled defined their religious affiliation that way (including people who regarded themselves as religious, along with atheists and agnostics); only 7% had been brought up that way. That's an impressive gain, but Lugo points out that churn is everywhere: even the unaffiliated group lost 50% of its original membership to one church or another.

The report does not speculate on the implications of its data. But Lugo suggests, "What it says is that this marketplace is highly competitive and that no one can sit on their laurels, because another group out there will make [its tenets] available" for potential converts to try out. While this dynamic "may be partly responsible for the religious vitality of the American people," he says, "it also suggests that there is an institutional loosening of ties," with less individual commitment to a given faith or denomination.

Lugo would not speculate on whether such a buyer's market might cause some groups to dilute their particular beliefs in order to compete. There are signs of that in such surveys as one done by the Willow Creek megachurch outside Chicago, which has been extremely successful in attracting tens of thousands of religious "seekers." An internal survey recently indicated much of its membership was "stalled" in their spiritual growth, Lugo allowed that "it does raise the question of, once you attract these folks, how do you root them within your own particular tradition when people are changing so quickly."

The Pew report has other interesting findings; the highest rates for marrying within one's own faith, for example, are among Hindus (90%) and Mormons (83%). The full report is accessible at the Pew Forum site.

The Source