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Interfaith: Home / Blog article: Americans Fluctuate In Faith According To Study

February 26, 2008

Americans Fluctuate In Faith According To Study

by Rohan Parker

According to a new study of more than 35,000 Americans conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Americans are comprised of 78.4% Christians, 4.7% other faiths, and 16.1% unaffiliated.

The study shows that the average Buddhist in the U.S. lives in the West and is a Caucasian convert. The average Jehovah’s Witness is from the South and is Caucasian, however nearly 50% of their numbers is made up by Afro-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. The Midwest is, according to the study, the area which best exemplifies the religious diversity of the U.S. today.

The study, which has been named, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, was released yesterday and gauges the adherents amongst the 225 million adults in the U.S.

The largest percentile belongs to the evangelical Protestants, who make up 26.3% of the population. Next is the Catholics, who make up approximately 24%, then mainline Protestants with 22% of the populace. Around 1.7% of the surveyed Americans were Jewish, roughly 0.6% are Muslim and the Unitarians make up about 0.3%.

The study was not only about how many Americans where of which faith, it also investigates locations of religious populations and also religious movement of people converting or dropping religion. Pew researcher John Green labeled the Midwest as a microcosm for religion in America as the percentiles of the area are very similar to the percentiles of the country as a whole.

This notion has been seconded by Stephen Prothero who is the chairperson for the religion department at Boston University. Prothero suggested that generally Catholics reside in the Northeast, Baptist in the South, Buddhist, Hindu and non-religious people in the West, and that whilst the Midwest may be thought of as predominantly Lutheran, they do not hold as large a portion of the population as Catholics in New England and Baptists in the Southeast.

The study also found that of the 16.1% who were unaffiliated, only 4% stated they were atheist or agnostic, with the remaining portion being close to divided equally between those who say religion is not important to them, and those who say it is. According to Green, this last group have issue with organized religion, but are happy with God.

Findings were that Catholics make up the portion with the largest loss of adherents, former Catholics made up roughly 10% of Americans. On the flip-side of that, Hindus were the most steadfast in their faith as eight out of ten people born into Hinduism remained with the religion into and throughout adulthood.

28% of Americans have chosen to leave the faith they were born into, either for another or for none at all. If the study included those who changed from one form of Protestantism to another, that would be 44% who had changed or disbanded their faiths. The faiths with the lowest retention rate from childhood are Buddhist and Jehova’s Witnesses.

Protestants account for 51% of U.S. people, however the ages of those adherents favor the elderly population. 62% of people over 70 are Protestant, yet just 43% of those aged between 18 to 29 are protestant.

The decline in Protestant population has dropped since the 1990’s, according to religion sociologist Barry Kosmin from Trinity College in Connecticut, and the word Christian has been replacing Protestant in that time too. Kosmin suggests that most students are no longer familiar with the term Protestant.

The most racially diverse religion is Muslim, which is comprised of approximately 37% Caucasian, 24% Afro-American, and 20% Asian-American.

Approximately 37% of the population is married to a person of a different religion, including different Protestant groups, though the highest groups of differing faith marriages are those of Buddhist and unaffiliated, and Hindus and Mormons are the most likely to have married a person of the same religion as themselves

Though this survey does allow us to closely examine the smaller religions in the U.S., other studies, like the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, have had larger participants in the survey. The Pew survey was conducted via phone interviews between May and August 2007.

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