MY LIFE

USA Today reports on the latest American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) report, to be released today.

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

How cool is that?

Those who claim “None” (15% of the population) includes atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists, and others who simply identify with no particular religion, so I suppose it would include Deists (those who belief there is a God that created the universe and then stepped back and has had no further influence or intervention).     But even though this number isn’t exclusively all atheists, it is important to note that this number is rising (up 6.8%) since 1990, numbering about 34.2  million Americans claiming no religion.   That’s a HUGE number, and it is a growing number!    Very cool!

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.

• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.

• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.

• The percentage of those who choose a generic label, calling themselves simply Christian, Protestant, non-denominational, evangelical or “born again,” was 14.2%, about the same as in 1990.

• Jewish numbers showed a steady decline, from 1.8% in 1990 to 1.2% today. The percentage of Muslims, while still slim, has doubled, from 0.3% to 0.6%. Analysts within both groups suggest those numbers understate the groups’ populations.

Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, says that most national telephone surveys such as ARIS undercount Muslims, and that he is conducting a study of mosques’ membership sponsored by the Hartford (Conn.) Institute for Religious Research.

Meanwhile, some Jewish surveys that report larger numbers of Jews also include “cultural” Jews — those who connect to Judiasm through its traditions, but not necessarily through actively practicing the religion.

Meanwhile, nearly 2.8 million people now identify with dozens of new religious movements, calling themselves Wiccan, pagan or “Spiritualist,” which the survey does not define.

Wicca, a contemporary form of paganism that includes goddess worship and reverence for nature, has even made its way to Arlington National Cemetery, where the Pentagon now allows Wiccans’ five-pointed-star symbol to be used on veterans’ gravestones.

It’s too early in the morning (for me) to offer an analysis of serious implications, but the fact is that religious adherence is dwindling and that’s a good thing for America.   The more religion is taken out of the public square, the better society will be.  That’s an absolute statement of opinion because I believe religion is publicly divisive and personally not very helpful.   All the good that religion might do (i.e., social service activities, charities, etc.) can be, and should be, done without reference to God; these are humane/humanist activities at their root.  similarly, all cultural/social/community sense that comes from belonging to a church can be (and should be) matched by participation in other activities of like-minded people.  People have a need to belong, and that need can be satisfied in ways that aren’t built around things far more realistic than merely the shared guilt/shared fantasies of religion.   I would LOVE to see more secularists taking the lead in social service and charitable activities.