Wednesday, 02.27.08
Survey Says: Hellbound
the church of the flying spaghetti monster
Oh, Gods!
February 2002
Toby Lester examined the state of the world's religions, and the new faiths springing up everywhere.
By law, the U.S. census doesn't ask about religious belief. Fortunately, the Pew Forum has stepped into the breach.
The survey depicts a nation where Christianity still dominates, but is in decline. Only fifty-one percent of Americans identify themselves with Protestantism, long the nation's dominant creed. Roman Catholicism's share is holding steady (at around twenty percent of the population), but the Catholic numbers are kept afloat by immigration rather than institutional strength; the report notes that the Catholic Church "has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes" over the last twenty years.
Catholic and Protestant decline has coincided with the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, whose numbers have more than doubled in a decade-and-a-half. Being unaffiliated isn't necessarily the same as being an unbeliever. Many Americans who don't identify with any particular faith presumably retain spiritual beliefs of one sort or another. But what's long made America exceptional among developed nations is the strength of organized religion, and it appears that strength is weakening -- perhaps because religion is increasingly identified with politics, or perhaps for some more mysterious reason known to God alone.
Reading the resultsThe Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite says we've already entered a "post-denominational" stage in America. |
Crunching the dataRod Dreher reads the results, from his ex-Catholic, Eastern Orthodox position. |
From the sourceThe Pew Forum's original survey, released this week. |
(1)
Pew does great work, this is a good survey.
Still, there is a very important, yet missing, data point.
Humanism is a deep and abding faith that many Americans believe in. Some Humanists are secular, not believing or at least not caring about God. Others are more sacred, that God is important but not directly impacting their daily decision-making. Many attend houses of worship of major religions.
At this point, there is way too much money involved in promoting this religion, from members and governments, so that people are careful what they say. Clearly, it represents their deepest beliefs and they will not hear opposing views.
The Humanist Manifesto and its first revision have religious language. It wasn't until 1994 that they scaled back on their spiritual tones. It is succesfully competing with other religions in a way that "Atheist" is not.
Posted by Kim | February 28, 2008 12:50 PM