Survey: Americans Freely Change, or Drop, Their Religions
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, documents new peaks, deepening valleys and fast-running rivers of change in American religiosity.
Based on interviews with 35,556 adults in the continental United States, it shows so much diversity and dynamism that a co-author sums it up simply. “Churn. Churn. Churn. The biggest news here is change,” says Pew Forum research fellow Gregory Smith.
“It’s not that religion won’t matter in the future, but that it will matter in new and less predictable ways,” says co-author John Green, a political scientist and Pew Forum senior fellow.
Key findings from the survey:
•Faith is fluid: 44% say they’re no longer tied to the religious or secular upbringing of their childhood. They’ve changed religions or denominations, adopted a faith for the first time or abandoned any affiliation altogether.
•”Nothing” matters: 12.1% say their religious identity is “nothing in particular,” outranking every denomination and tradition except Catholics (23.9%) and all groups of Baptists (17.2%).
•Protestants are fading: 51.3% call themselves Protestant, but roughly one-third of this group were “unable or unwilling” to describe their denomination.
•Immigrants sustain Catholic numbers: 46% of foreign-born U.S. adults are Catholics, compared with only 21% of native-born adults. Latinos are now 45% of all U.S. Catholics ages 18-29.
Like the Catholic Church, other public institutions will have to accommodate the impact of immigration. Already, more than 34 million of the nation’s 225 million adults are foreign-born, and half of these are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census.
“The Catholic Church may be a microcosm of what’s going to happen to the country in the next 40 years,” says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum.
The Pew survey was based on random telephone interviews conducted in English and Spanish, May 8 through Aug. 13.
Another 1,050 interviews were added from an earlier 2007 Pew-sponsored survey of Muslims in the USA, which included interviews in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.
The margin of error is plus or minus 0.6 percentage points for the full sample, higher for subgroups.
The findings are being presented in two segments. One looks at religious affiliation (here used to mean identity) and demographic characteristics. The other, to be released in late spring, delves into beliefs, behavior and political views.
Today’s report (online at Pewforum.org) sorts people into major groupings: Christian (78.4%); other religions (4.7%) including Jewish (1.7%) and Muslim (0.7%); and “unaffiliated” (16.1%), which includes atheist (1.6%), agnostic (2.4%) and “nothing in particular.”
Protestants also are subdivided into three groups: evangelical (26.3%) with shared strict ideas on salvation and common historic origins; mainline (18.1%), which share “a less exclusionary view of salvation and a strong emphasis on social reform”; and historically black churches (6.9%) with traditions “shaped by experiences of slavery and segregation.”
These overall findings are parsed to a fine degree by being broken down into nearly 250 faiths and traditions and examined by demographic characteristics. A sampling:”
•There are as many self-proclaimed pagans (0.3%) as there are Disciples of Christ, Orthodox Jews or Greek Orthodox.
•Nearly three in four U.S. Buddhists are converts; Buddhists (0.7%) are split evenly among Zen, Theravadan and Tibetan schools.
•Nearly 20% of all men and 13% of all women are unaffiliated. So are 25% of adults under age 30.
•The major Christian denominations are losing numbers fast. Only non-denominational churches showed growth outpacing losses.
“Two in three people who say they grew up as Jehovah’s Witnesses have left the faith. Any one of 10 people you meet is a former Catholic,” Lugo says.
•The two groups that identified with “nothing in particular” now match or outstrip the two largest mainline Protestant groups.
The percentage of “secular unaffiliated” (6.3%) who say religion is unimportant to them is statistically the same as Methodists (6.2%). The “religious unaffiliated” (5.8%) who say they believe religion is at least somewhat important now outnumber Lutherans (4.6%).
The authors struggled with the categories to include. For example, the Unitarian-Universalist faith began in Protestantism, but “many of the people we interviewed don’t consider themselves Christians. … We went with where people say they are, and put it with ‘other faiths,’ ” says Green.
“Fluidity is the rule today, not the exception. There’s greater diversity and greater movement — a quantum leap in the rate of change.”
“It will become increasingly difficult to find people who share a love for distinct doctrine,” he adds.
“But there are always niches in the marketplace. There will always be a place for religions that are strict. They just may cater to smaller numbers.”
Working on Sundays
Consider Oregon, where the largest single group, evangelical Protestants (30%), is rivaled by people with no religious affiliation (27%).
Jean Burkholder of Lakeside, a born-again Christian whose brother-in-law is a pastor nearby, says, “It pains us” to keep the family dune buggy rental business open seven days a week, but demand is too great to close on Sundays.
“I hate the term ‘religious.’ I see people respect you if you live what you say you believe,” she says.
Meanwhile, in Newport, Stace Gordon, who grew up Jewish, and his wife, Liz, who grew up Catholic, agree the ideal way to spend Sabbath is a stroll on the beach, a ski trip or a stop at a local festival.
“We have no problem with religion. It’s just not a part of our lives,” Stace Gordon says.
Green says he can already foresee implications in the public square as “firm beliefs and firm organizations are increasingly a thing of the past. In political life, when candidates go out to mobilize voters, they face a much more complicated picture.
“Catholic voters in Ohio, for example, may have different values and expectations from one year to the next or, in fact, be different people in the same pews,” says Green.
Lugo predicts that as world religions such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism continue to grow in the USA through immigration and conversion, workplaces, schools and eventually the courts will face increasing challenges over religious accommodation.
He cited the 2007 brouhaha over U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., a Muslim who took his oath of office with his hand on a Quran instead of a Bible.
Guillermina Jasso, a New York University sociologist and one of the principal investigators for The New Immigrant Survey, an ongoing project of the National Institutes of Health, concurs.
“There’s no question that change is afoot and that doctrine and denominations are losing their hold” on Western Christian nations, even though these are still highly valued in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America.
But she also sees prospects for a Catholic resurgence in the USA, springing from immigrants and spreading to the native-born.
Protestant legacy likely to linger
Will the USA’s dominantly Protestant cultural landscape soon be overwhelmed by these changes? “No, not so fast!” says church historian Diana Butler Bass, a senior fellow at the Cathedral College of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
“The Protestant worldview is deep in our political and literary cultures. There’s a Protestant ethos of individual conscience that will stick around a while longer, even if people aren’t strongly identified with a particular faith,” she says.
Still, she says, “these new voices mean you can’t do business as usual. There has to be an entire rethinking of how to do religion and what it means to be Christian in this new cultural context.”
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