Religions > Atheism > Hoo -fucking- ray - religion is on the decline, even in the US.
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Religions > Atheism |
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06 Jun 2006 09:24:49 AM |
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Hoo -fucking- ray - religion is on the decline, even in the US. |
Ex-Catholics move toward a secular life
By David O'Reilly
Inquirer Staff Writer
As institutional Christianity falters throughout Europe, the United
States looks positively devout by comparison.
However, a landmark survey to be released Friday has found inklings of
some of the same secularizing trends among Americans.
In a poll of 51,000 adults, 14 percent claimed no religious affiliation
- a significant increase, the researchers say, from 8 percent in a
similar study they conducted in 1990.
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"The most striking trend of recent decades has been the major increase
in the number and the proportion of adults who profess no religion,"
wrote the authors of the American Religious Identification Survey
(ARIS).
The disaffected tended to be young: Of respondents under 35 years of
age, 23 percent of the men and 18 percent of the women said they did
not follow any organized faith.
"Look at Europe, where a secular trend is prevalent," said Ariela
Keysar, a demographer at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and the
study's co-author. "We're not there, but we're going in that
direction."
Another finding that the researchers said surprised them: 43 percent of
the unaffiliated were former Roman Catholics.
They were a disproportionately large presence in those ranks, given
that Catholics make up slightly less than one-quarter of the general
population in the United States.
"Why aren't Catholics becoming Baptists or something else?" Keysar
said. "Instead, they are deciding to distance themselves from organized
religion. So there is something major going on" in Catholic religious
identity, she said. "It's in transition."
For the ARIS study, telephone pollsters queried randomly chosen
households across the country in 2001. They began with a question they
had first posed in 1990 during a survey of 110,000 households: "What is
your religion?" (The Census Bureau, which is forbidden by law to ask
religious identity, references the earlier survey on its Web site.)
The more recent ARIS survey found that 19 percent of baptized Catholics
leave the church, compared with an average of 16 percent for Americans
of all faiths.
But an exceptionally large number of Catholics who drop out - 28
percent - do not join another faith. The next largest group to quit not
only their church but religion entirely are Methodists, at 17 percent.
The ARIS study did not collect anecdotal information that might explain
why Americans are leaving organized religion, or why such a large
proportion of Catholics are among them. Keysar said the authors hoped
to study secularization and denomination-switching patterns in detail
in a national survey planned for 2010.
Neither topic has been the subject of significant surveys, experts say.
One study conducted in the 1960s suggested that when people leave one
denomination, Keysar said, "they're usually looking for something
similar."
Catholicism's unique sacramental theology, its devotion to Mary and the
saints, and its papal leadership "may make it hard for some people to
feel at home" in other churches, she said.
Keysar and study co-author Barry A. Kosmin, of City University of New
York, have included the poll results in a soon-to-be-published book,
Religion in a Free Market.
Contact staff writer David O'Reilly at 215-854-5723 or
doreilly@phillynews.com.
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