New comprehensive study finds that America is becoming a nation of religious freelancers. Excerpt from the USA Today report (which is full of details, charts, etc.):
The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers -- or falling off the faith map completely.These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,' " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
More:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity ... does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
It's mobile, rootless modernity that's severed people from their religious traditions:
Like Gautier, the Rev. Kendall Harmon, theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, blames social mobility."Mobility means your ideas are more challenged and your family and childhood traditions have less influence, particularly if you are not strongly rooted in them. I see kids today who have no vocabulary of faith, and neither do many of their parents."
Harmon recalls, "A couple came into my office once with a yellow pad of their teenage son's questions. One of them was: 'What is that guy doing hanging up there on the plus sign?' "
Well, look, as someone born Methodist, converted to Catholicism, and now to Orthodoxy, I'm hardly in a position to criticize others for jumping traditions. Conscious of the weakness of my own position, I will say, though, that the major thrust of my own pilgrimages has been looking for a stable tradition in a society in which everything is in rapid flux.
Note that this rapid change happened in only 18 years. What will the next 18 years bring, given that so many Americans will have been raised with little if any vestige of traditional religion, or to think in traditional religious categories? Here comes the further mainstreaming of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
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The problem with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is that it seeks to eliminate most eternal consequences or ramifications of any kind based on what people think, say, or do in this lifetime. All that is left is enjoying this life the best one can and 'being good' (whatever that means). People can fill in the blanks for themselves so long as they can reconcile in their own moral system that they're behaving properly. If adjustments are necessary to sustain a pleasure-filled lifestyle, then so be it they're still going to experience eternal bliss in the next life.
It's funny that people are going back to the first article of all the "revealed" religions: Deism. Deism is simply the belief in God based on the application of our God-given reason on the designs in Nature which to Deists presuppose a Designer. This will make for a much more peaceful and truly progressive world as there is much less to fight over. Christians have slaughtered each other over dogma, Jews and Muslims are slaughtering each other over dogma that teaches supremacy of the one over the other. With Deism there is no man made holy books loaded with man made dogma to cause such nonsensical violence.
Deism, along with our God-given reason is rising, thank God!
Progress! Bob Johnson
www.deism.com
I've noticed a phenomenon here where someone takes over the comboxes for a period of time, dominates every conversation over several posts, assumes every comment said by someone else on a particular subject is personal attack, and then flames out and disappears either out of disgust or from Rod banning them.
QED.
very good...
Very useful article, thanks.
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