Thread: Report: US Protestants lose majority status

Updated: 10:29 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, 2012 | Posted: 10:29 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, 2012

Report: US Protestants lose majority status


By RACHEL ZOLL
The Associated Press

NEW YORK —
For the first time in its history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority, according to a new study. One reason: The number of Americans with no religious affiliation is on the rise.

The percentage of Protestant adults in the U.S. has reached a low of 48 percent, the first time that Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has reported with certainty that the number has fallen below 50 percent.

The drop has long been anticipated and comes at a time when no Protestants are on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republicans have their first presidential ticket with no Protestant nominees.

Among the reasons for the change are the growth in nondenominational Christians who can no longer be categorized as Protestant, and a spike in the number of American adults who say they have no religion. The Pew study, released Tuesday, found that about 20 percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an increase from 15 percent in the last five years.

Scholars have long debated whether people who say they no longer belong to a religious group should be considered secular. While the category as defined by Pew researchers includes atheists, it also encompasses majorities of people who say they believe in God, and a notable minority who pray daily or consider themselves "spiritual" but not "religious." Still, Pew found overall that most of the unaffiliated aren't actively seeking another religious home, indicating that their ties with organized religion are permanently broken.

Growth among those with no religion has been a major preoccupation of American faith leaders who worry that the United States, a highly religious country, would go the way of Western Europe, where church attendance has plummeted. Pope Benedict XVI has partly dedicated his pontificate to combating secularism in the West. This week in Rome, he is convening a three-week synod, or assembly, of bishops from around the world aimed at bringing back Roman Catholics who have left the church.

The trend also has political implications. American voters who describe themselves as having no religion vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Pew found Americans with no religion support abortion rights and gay marriage at a much higher-rate than the U.S. public at large. These "nones" are an increasing segment of voters who are registered as Democrats or lean toward the party, growing from 17 percent to 24 percent over the last five years. The religiously unaffiliated are becoming as important a constituency to Democrats as evangelicals are to Republicans, Pew said.

The Pew analysis, conducted with PBS' "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly," is based on several surveys, including a poll of nearly 3,000 adults conducted June 28-July 9, 2012. The finding on the Protestant majority is based on responses from a larger group of more than 17,000 people and has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.9 percentage points, Pew researchers said. Pew said it had also previously calculated a drop slightly below 50 percent among U.S. Protestants, but those findings had fallen within the margin of error; the General Social Survey, which is conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, reported for 2010 that the percentage of U.S. Protestants was around 46.7 percent.

Researchers have been struggling for decades to find a definitive reason for the steady rise in those with no religion.' The spread of secularism in Western Europe was often viewed as a byproduct of growing wealth in the region. Yet among industrialized nations, the United States stood out for its deep religiosity in the face of increasing wealth.

Now, religion scholars say the decreased religiosity in the United States could reflect a change in how Americans describe their religious lives. In 2007, 60 percent of people who said they seldom or never attend religious services still identified themselves as part of a particular religious tradition. In 2012, that statistic fell to 50 percent, according to the Pew report.

"Part of what's going on here is that the stigma associated with not being part of any religious community has declined," said John Green, a specialist in religion and politics at the University of Akron, who advised Pew on the survey. "In some parts of the country, there is still a stigma. But overall, it's not the way it used to be."

The Pew study has found the growth in unaffiliated Americans spans a broad range of groups: men and women, college graduates and those without a college degree, people earning less than $30,000 annually and those earning $75,000 or more. However, along ethnic lines, the largest jump in "nones" has been among whites. One-fifth of whites describe themselves as having no religion.

More growth in "nones" is expected. One-third of adults under age 30 have no religious affiliation, compared to 9 percent of people 65 and older. Pew researchers wrote that "young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives," and aren't expected to become more religiously active as they age.
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Online: ‘No Religion’ on the Rise: 19.6% Have No Religious Affiliation - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
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Follow Rachel Zoll at Rachel Zoll (rzollAP) on Twitter

Report: US Protestants lose majority status | www.kfoxtv.com

An can you just imagine that the Pew Research Center which is dishing out a new report on immigration each week just happened to forget the factor that millions of Hispanic Catholics from Central and South America have recently been illegally imported into the United States as a factor in the new Protestant Minority status.

No, they would not want to print a truth like that even though their omission lie is quite easy to see for anyone with more than two brain cells.

They left that out so they can keep the head of the Southern Baptist Convention pushing for amnesty for illegal aliens to make this demographic, religious, and political takeover of the United States using an unprecedented illegal immigration invasion fait accompli.

W

One in five Americans have no religious affiliation, survey finds

The number of unaffiliated is now at its highest point ever and has increased 5% in the past five years,the Pew/PBS poll

By Victoria Cavaliere / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, October 9, 2012, 11:06 AM

Although 19.6% of Americans say they have no affiliation with any organized religion, a vast majority of that segment, 68%, say they still believe in God, the Pew poll found.

More Americans than ever say they don’t identify with an organized religion — a trend that is growing among all segments of the population, a poll released Tuesday found.

One in five American adults, or 19.6% of the population, are now religiously unaffiliated, a Pew Center/PBS survey finds. Atheists and agnostics now make up about 6% of the U.S. population.

The number of unaffiliated is now at its highest point ever and has increased 5% in the past five years,the poll found.

Further, the 46 million Americans who no longer identify with a religion aren’t looking to join a different one.

“Overwhelmingly, they [the non-affiliated] think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics,” the survey said.

But a vast majority of those who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, 68%, still believe in God, the Pew poll found.

The survey focuses on Christian religions: Catholics, Protestants and evangelical Protestants.

Though people under 30 are the most likely to identify as unaffiliated, with 33% saying they are not associated with a religion, the trend has expanded across all segments of the population. That includes men and women, college graduates and non-college graduates and those making $75,000 and less than $30,000 per year. It has also grown in “all major regions of the country,” the poll found.

The religiously unaffiliated have also become an increasingly important segment of the electorate, the poll found.

Some 60% of registered voters who are religiously unaffiliated are Democrats, the poll found.

They are also far more likely to be socially liberal, with 73% saying they support same-sex marriage and 72% who support a woman’s right to abortion.

vcavaliere@nydailynews.com

One in five Americans have no religious affiliation, survey finds - NY Daily News