A new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life - based on interviews with 35,000 Americans - shows that religious affiliatoin is shifting in the US. They found that:
The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.
More than one-quarter of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another religion or no religion at all, the survey found. Factoring in moves from one stream or denomination of Protestantism to another, the number rises to 44 percent.
One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution.
"In the past, certain religions had a real holding power, where people from one generation to the next would stay," said Penn State University sociologist Roger Finke, who consulted in the survey planning. "Right now, there is a dropping confidence in organized religion, especially in the traditional religious forms."
I get fed up with lefty nuts who use the word "Christian" or "Religious" to equate everything that's bad in the world. Religion is not inherently bad. As a Sociologist, I tend to side with Durkheim's views in his famous book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in which he argues that "God is society, writ large." In this way, organized religion can serve an important role in communities as places to negotiate shared values and norms. Increasingly, they are some of the only places where communities actively and regularly gather (see Putnam's book, Bowling Alone for more on this).
Many people demonize religion -- and some religion is surely worth demonizing -- but there is nothing inherent in religion that is bad. So when I see news that religious is affiliation is on the decline, I have mixed emotions. We ought to support the growth of progressive-minded denominations like the Unitarian Universalists (UU's) and the United Church of Christ (UCC), while finding ways to combat the spreading of fundamentalist Evangelical traditions. The two are not the same. We shouldn't forget that!