The Changing Landscape of American Religion: The Growth of the Unaffiliated

American religious affiliation is in flux according to a new report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. One finding that we're familiar with here, is that the “unaffiliated” category is growing. The report compares the change in religious affiliations of respondents between their childhood and adulthood, finding that the unaffiliated group has grown from 7% as children to 16% as adults. This unaffiliated category now makes up 16% of American adults, compared with 18% Mainline Protestant, 26% Evangelical, and about 24% Catholic.

The biggest gains due to changes in religious affiliation among those who say they are not affiliated with any particular religions group or tradition. Overall, 7.3% of the adult population says they were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child. Today, however, 16.1% of adults say they are unaffiliated, a net increase of 8.8 percentage points. Sizable numbers of those raised in all religions —from Catholicism to Protestantism to Judaism — are currently unaffiliated with any particular religion.¹

According to a recent discussion of the report on the PBS News Hour, the number of Protestants in American has dropped from two-thirds in the 1970s to about half of the population today. Similarly, those raised Catholic made up nearly one-fourth of the population thirty years ago, but have shrunk to just over one-fifth today. However, the number of Catholics would be significantly lower were it not for the influx of mostly Catholic immigrants during the same period—according to the same conversation.²

The Pew Report shows that 44% of Americans changed religious affiliations from childhood to adulthood. The result gives a numerical handle on the now commonly known phenomenon of “shopping around.” While Baptists suffered the largest net loss among categorized Protestants (3.7%), Nondenominational actually grew 3% and Other Evangelical/Fundamentalist also gained 1.5%. This does not necessarily indicate a movement from Baptist to Nondenominational, since Protestants together lost 2.6%. My own opinion is the Nondenominational is just the last step on the path to Spiritual-but-nonreligious.

The Unaffiliated crowd is not necessarily Atheistic, nor are they done with religion. While Atheists did gain 1.1% of the unaffiliated group, the largest growing subsection by far is the Nothing-in-particular. This last group grew by 5.5 percentage points over the past 30 years. Still, this group is more complicated.

Remember that the comparison included asking over 35,000 people questions about their religious affiliations, and the changes they made between those they knew as a child, and those they have currently chosen as an adult. The responses indicate that Americans are not only moving around the denominational world in very large numbers, but a growing number of them are choosing disassociation that is short of declaring an anti or agnostic response. What does this mean? Well, I have yet to study the whole 143 page report, but from other results I've read in recent years, I will continue to interpreted this as, not only a disillusionment with organized religion, but also a healthy search for Good News.

Notes

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