Religion In American News

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A recent survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing members. Those that are growing because of the religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members. Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.

The United States, founded by dissident Protestants in search of religious freedom, is on the verge of becoming a nation in which Protestants are a minority. A growing portion of Americans identify themselves as unaffiliated with any religious tradition, and a small but increasingly significant number say they are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox Christian. In addition, a flood of overwhelmingly Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, is helping to counterbalance a high dropout rate among U.S. born Catholics.

These are among the key findings of a groundbreaking study of the American religious landscape released recently by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The study, which is the most comprehensive such assessment of the country in at least a half century, finds that the United States is in the midst of a period of unprecedented religious fluidity, in which 44 percent of American adults have left the denomination of their childhood for another denomination, another faith, or no faith at all. The study is based on a survey of 35,000 Americans age 18 and over who speak one of five different languages. This is a very large number for survey research, which allowed the researchers to get more detail about minority religious groups than is usually available from smaller studies. The study is also important because the quantification of religious association in the United States is often complicated and contested; the U.S. Census does not include questions about religion, and many studies rely on counts submitted by denominations, whose self-reporting is often undependable (Dykman 41).

The new study is filled with results about a extraordinarily diverse nation, with a population that is fashioned by affiliation with a vast and shifting collection of religious groups and sects. A number of subgroups represent every religious family - Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. The nation is still predominantly Christian - 78 percent of adults say they are Christian - but nearly 5 percent recognize themselves as members of other faiths, and 16 percent say they are unaffiliated (Dykman 41).

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