The U.S. Catholic Church Is Sinking Fast — Part III
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” that analyzes data culled from interviews with over 35,000 adult Americans pertaining to religious affiliation. The news isn’t good.
Over a quarter of adult Americans have left the religion in which they were raised, the Survey found, and if one counts “shifts among Protestant denominations,” writes Neela Banerjee in The New York Times (Feb. 25), “then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations” — that is, about half of our countrymen. Evidently, the permanent things in life can no longer be said to be permanent: Americans are divorcing themselves from their religions almost as often as they divorce themselves from their spouses. What a fickle lot!
Americans aren’t just “switching” religious affiliations — they are abandoning religion en masse. Protestantism, the American “majority” religion, which in the 1970s held sway over two-thirds of the population, now accounts for barely 50 percent of the population.
The fastest-growing “religious affiliation,” according to the Survey, is the “unaffiliated” — those who profess no particular faith, but who don’t consider themselves atheists. The “unaffiliated” currently account for a bulging 16 percent of the U.S. population.
You May Also Enjoy
Our past is neither as virtuous as our optimists think nor as vicious as our pessimists think. It consists, rather, of a mixture of comic and tragic elements.
The conceit of the Enlightenment was that we could have the good of Christendom without the Church. “Judeo-Christian Westernism” assumes this.
Neuhaus’s plea for the restoration of religious values in the public sphere and for the believing community to act there on the basis of its beliefs is proper and necessary.