Recently in Survey Category
The Pew forum's new study, currently getting a lot of press attention, touts the "remarkable dynamism" of the US religious landscape. It's a well-designed study that--unlike those commissioned by mainstream media outlets and by religious polling firms like Barna Research Group--fully accounts for the diversity of belief and practice within protestant Christian traditions:
...the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions - evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).
"Remarkable dynamism" is a tidy way of saying everything's kind of up in the air:
The survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of 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.
There are no simple narratives to pull out here, but a wealth of interesting data, all available at Pew's website. Still, there is a trend towards the unaffilliated:
The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.
Unaffilliated doesn't necessarily mean non-believer, however:
Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular." This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the "secular unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the "religious unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).
I was also curious about motion between mainline protestant population and evangelicals. Anecdotally, I hear about evangelicals wanting to leave behind conservative theology/politics behind without abandoning christian faith completely, and thus choosing mainline churches. But I also hear about former mainliners joining more evangelical churches that are better at providing niche-marketed lifestyle-focused programming and a comfortingly stable doctrinal worldview, which is appealing in a volatile economic and geopolitical climate. So which direction are people actually moving? Both ways! About 30% of evangelicals used to be mainliners. About 30% of mainliners used to be evangelicals.
So religiosity, even Evangelicalism, is not something fixed and imposed on people from above--at least, not any more. It is constantly in flux; so while religiosity isn't going away any time soon, if instead of writing them off, we stay in dialogue with religious people whose political goals and claims about ultimate reality are at odds with our own, we have a chance to influence the choices they make in the religious marketplace.
