February 25, 2008
Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds
By NEELA BANERJEE
WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United States Census does not track religious affiliation.

The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.”

Detailing the nature of religious affiliation — who has the numbers, the education, the money — signals who could hold sway over the country’s political and cultural life, said John Green, an author of the report who is a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew.

Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University, echoed that view. “Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors,” said Mr. Lindsay, who had read the Pew report. “It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life. If you want to understand America, you have to understand religion in America.”

In the 1980s, the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that from 5 percent to 8 percent of the population described itself as unaffiliated with a particular religion.

In the Pew survey 7.3 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16.1 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for about two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 51 percent. Evangelical Christians account for a slim majority of Protestants, and those who leave one evangelical denomination usually move to another, rather than to mainline churches.

To Prof. Stephen Prothero, large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity point to the same desires.

“The trend is toward more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” said Mr. Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, who explained that evangelical churches tailor many of their activities for youth. “Those losing out are offering impersonal religion and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”

Immigration continues to influence American religion greatly, the survey found. The majority of immigrants are Christian, and almost half are Catholic. Muslims rival Mormons for having the largest families. And Hindus are the best-educated and among the richest religious groups, the survey found.

“I think politicians will be looking at this survey to see what groups they ought to target,” Professor Prothero said. “If the Hindu population is negligible, they won’t have to worry about it. But if it is wealthy, then they may have to pay attention.”

Experts said the wide-ranging variety of religious affiliation could set the stage for further conflicts over morality or politics, or new alliances on certain issues, as religious people have done on climate change or Jews and Hindus have done over relations between the United States, Israel and India.

“It sets up the potential for big arguments,” Mr. Green said, “but also for the possibility of all sorts of creative synthesis. Diversity cuts both ways.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/us/25cnd...nyt&emc=rss

Interesting article Lt...This morning when I was browsing news, they had a poll on CNN as to who has and who hasn't changed their religion...It came up 31% have, 69% haven't....It didn't have any mention of what the percentage of each domination was....As for myself, I was born and raised a Catholic but that all changed when the church would not baptize my grandson because his mom wasn't married...I thought it out carefully and decided to go with the Methodist....So I am still practicing, not just the faith I was bought up with..

Many of the Pagans I know come from a Catholic back ground. My question is if you change from one Christian church to another Christian church have you really changed you religion? If you go from being a Christian to being Hindu then I would say you have differently changed your religion.

I think that really depends Darkwind.

Christian isn't a unified anything and the theologies are wildly different in some cases.

A Catholic that stops being a Catholic and decides to become a Quaker has pretty much rejected almost everything the catholic church taught him to believe and practice.

Now, the presbyterian that starts going to a methodist church... he probably hasn't changed his religion, he's still more or less practicing and believing in theologies so similar that it's mostly a lateral step.

Going from Catholic to Methodist... that's a pretty big leap, the two are quite different from each other. Is it a change of religion? It might be.

i thought you might find this interesting and something to add to the topic...

"Not only is Islam the fastest growing religion in the world, but also in the United States, Canada and Europe [Bruce a. Mcdowell and Anees Zaka, Muslims and Christians at The Table (Phillipsburg, P& R Publishing, 1999)] The annual growth rate of Islam in the US is approximately 4%, but there are also strong reasons to believe that it may have risen to as high as 8% over the past few years. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans convert to Islam. Prior to 2001 most reports seem to have the number roughly around 25,000 American converts per year. This may not sound like that much, but this yearly figure according to some Muslim American clerics has quadrupled since 9-11. Since 9-11 the numbers of American converts to Islam has skyrocketed. As early as one month after the World Trade Center attacks, the reports were flowing in from Mosques all over America. Ala Bayumi, the Director of Arab affairs at the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on November 11, 2001, in the London daily newspaper, Al-Hayat said this:

Non-Muslim Americans are now interested in getting to know Islam. There are a number of signs... Libraries have run out of books on Islam... English translations of the Koran head the American best-seller list... The Americans are showing increasing willingness to convert to Islam since September 11... Thousands of non-Muslim Americans have responded to invitations to visit mosques, resembling the waves of the sea crashing on the shore one after another...[ Al-Hayat Newspaper (London), November 12, 2001, as quoted in Middle East Media & Research Institute, November 16, 2001, Muslim American Leaders: A Wave of Conversion to Islam in the U.S. Following September 11]

After testifying to the dramatic strides that Islam had taken as a result of the 9-11 attacks, Bayumi goes on to say that:

Proselytizing in the name of Allah has not been undermined, and has not been set back 50 years, as we thought in the first days after September 11. On the contrary, the 11 days that have passed are like 11 years in the history of proselytizing in the name of Allah."

link

If they are that different ,why do they all call themselves Christians?




fullywired

they are still christian, but follow different denominations, based on variations in the bible and variations in its interpretation.

I know our community has doubled since I joined.

The fact that its difficult to quantify accurately, leaves me a little skeptic. Also the fact that most convertions seemed to be taking place on the net an unregulated media, makes me skeptic too. Not to mention the lack of formal organistion in order to verify the numbers etc. This is just my opinion.... dont take it personally.

In my early years, I grew up in a rather non-mainstream Christian group (they would not call themselves Christian though). I never really believed this though, and as I reached adolescence, I wavered between Agnosticism and Deism (what I mean is that at times I was not sure if there was a creator, and at others I was completely believing in a creator but saw that this creator was too big for any religion and beyond any quantifiable understanding). When I was 19/20'ish, I became a Christian.

Interesting article, Lt Ripley. From my experiences, I think the statistics are finally getting closer to the truth of the matter. I have felt that the statistics of Christians compared to non-Christians has always been smaller than reported (generally based on people calling themselves "Christian" despite holding no real religious affiliation), but this is the first article I have seen that even gets close to it.

Thanks for sharing

~ Regards, PA

P.S -

My community has quintupled since I joined.... at least in my area. In 2000, when I first started going to church, there were only 25-30 regular members at my church. Today we get 110 regular members....... Though I get the impression that going by American standards, this would still be considered a "tiny" church.

I think this follows the same rate as people who say they go to church but actually don't. Americans tend to poll at about 40% that go to church when actually counting it comes to about 20%.


The Barna Research Group reported that in 2005, "47% of American adults [said that they] attend church in a given weekend, not including a special event such as a wedding or a funeral." 5 In earlier years, attendance varied from 37% to 49%.

Quotation:
"Americans misreport how often they vote, how much they give to charity, and how frequently they use illegal drugs. People are not entirely accurate in their self-reports about other areas as well. Males exaggerate their number of sexual partners, university workers are not very honest about reporting how many photocopies they make. Actual attendance at museums, symphonies and operas does not match survey results. We should not expect religious behavior to be immune to such misreporting." Kirk Hadaway, a sociologists at the United Church of Christ, (1993) 1,2
"... despite the rhetoric, active religious participation remains a minority interest in American life." Tom Flynn, writer for Free Inquiry magazine, (1998). 2

Hadaway, Marler, and Mark Chaves counted the number of people attending four Protestant churches in Ashtabula County, OH, and in 18 Roman Catholic dioceses throughout the U.S. In their 1993 report they stated that actual attendance was only about half of the level reported in public opinion surveys: 20% vs. 40% for Protestants, and 28% vs. 50% for Roman Catholics. 1,11

They later returned to Ashtabula County to measure attendance by Roman Catholics. They physically counted the number of attendees at each mass over several months. They concluded that 24% of Catholics in he county actually attended mass. They then polled residents of the county by telephone. 51% of Roman Catholic respondents said that they had attended church during the previous week. Apparently, most were lying.

Later in 1993, Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts referred to the gap between poll results and reality. He said: "Gallup and other pollsters are aware of this. It’s kind of a dirty little secret." 1




For years, pollsters have been asking adult Americans whether they go to religious services regularly. Typically, the specific question asks whether they attended a service during the previous weekend. The results have been relatively constant over time. Some recent estimates are:

38% by the National Opinion Research Center
44% by the Institute for Social Research's World Values survey. This institute is located at the University of Michigan. 4

The Barna Research Group reported that in 2005, "47% of American adults [said that they] attend church in a given weekend, not including a special event such as a wedding or a funeral." 5 In earlier years, attendance varied from 37% to 49%: 1991: 49%




How many people lie about going to religious services?

Various studies in recent years have cast a grave doubt on the 40% value.

Public opinion polls generally do not report real opinions and events. They report only the information that the individuals choose to tell the pollsters. Quite often, their answers will be distorted by a phenomenon called "social desirability bias." Pollees answer questions according to what they think they should be doing, rather than what they are doing. For example, a poll by Barna Research showed that 17% of American adults say that they tithe -- i.e. they give 10 to 13% of their income to their church. Only 3% actually do.

The gap between what they do and what they say they do is closer in the case of religious attendance. It is "only" about 2 to 1.

Fluctuation in church attendance after the 9-11 terrorist attacks:

There was a surge in church attendance after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on 2001-SEP-11. Some religious leaders predicted that the phenomenon would be short lived. Others saw it as the start of a major revival in the U.S. According to the New York Times, Franklin Graham, son of the well known Christian evangelist, Rev. Billy Graham, hailed it as an enduring turn toward God. On NOV-20, Fundamentalist Christian Pat Robertson said that the attack was "bringing about one of the greatest spiritual revivals in the history of America...People are turning to God. The churches are full." 8

It appears that, with the exception of the New York City area, the increase lasted only about two months. By 2001-NOV-26, attendance had returned to normal.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_rate.htm

The thing writer of the article doesn't understand is we don't proselytize, people come to Paganism because they are looking answers in their life. Paganism give them the answers they are searching for. I wouldn't really call a change to Paganism a conversion, because we make no attempt convert others. The reason they use the internet is because we are rather secretive in our groups because of the attacks we have endured for many years. There are many people I have know for years and never knew they were Pagans until I see them at a Pagan function. We don't have formal organizations because our religions are not set up that way, but there are some out there. Time will tell what the next great religion will be. Personally I hope it is not Paganism cause I like it small and tidy. But we Pagans just coming out of the wood work and someday we will be a force to be reckoned with.