Pew Forum

The Pew Forum released its "Religious Landscape Survey," which offers a detailed look at the way we worship -- or don't -- at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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.