America's Unfaithful Faithful: Americans changing religions at a high rate, survey finds

[marmar]

from Time, via Yahoo!:



America's Unfaithful Faithful
By DAVID VAN BIEMA
2 hours, 48 minutes ago



A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths. America's religious culture, which is best known for its high participation rates, may now be equally famous (or infamous) for what the new report dubs "churn."

The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."

According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."

For some groups, their relatively steady number of adherents over the years hides a remarkable amount of coming and going. Simply counting Catholics since 1972,for example, you would get the impression that its population had remained fairly static - at about 25% of adult Americans (the current number is 23.9%). But the Pew report shows that of all those raised Catholic, a third have left the church. (That means that roughly one out of every 10 people in America is a former Catholic, and that ex-Catholics are almost as numerous as the America's second biggest religious group, Southern Baptists.) But Catholicism has made up for the losses by adding converts (2.6% of the population) and, more significantly, enjoying an influx of new immigratns, mostly Hispanic.

An even more extreme example of what might be called "masked churn" is the relatively tiny Jehovah's Witnesses, with a turnover rate of about two-thirds. That means that two-thirds of the people who told Pew they were raised Jehovah's Witnesses no longer are - yet the group attracts roughly the same number of converts. Notes Lugo, "No wonder they have to keep on knocking on doors." .............(more}

The complete piece is at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080225/us_time/americasunfaithfulfaithful

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. People who write about religion should know something about it.

Like, the difference between a religion and a denomination/specific expression of that religion.

Makes this writer look fucking a moron, and for people who use the terms correctly, it makes it seem that this is country is even more fickle and consumer-driven than it is.

Very annoying.

But, given that he doesn't know how to use words, I'm not surprised by the findings of the study at all. I don't know about other religions, but within Christianity (my religion, thus first-hand experience) my experience has been that people are switching churches constantly, ever on the lookout for the "perfect" church, the "perfect" pastor, or the "perfect" consumer-driven "church that gives me what *I* want but doesn't expect me to do anything in return". The ultimate in user mentality. Others are people who have been abused by the theology of their denomination (esp. true with Catholics, fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and some Lutherans) and are looking for a more liberal, socially justice oriented church with good theology and message of hope, not damnation (I'm UCC, by the way).

At my own church, only a handful are born and raised in the denomination - the rest are a mix of former Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans of all stripes, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Reformed, and a number of other Christian expressions.

Every protestant church I've visited has about the same makeup - very few people any more can say that they've been in one denomination their whole life; few could even say that they've only been in two or three.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Same here

The Episcopalians have a term "cradle Episcopalian." This is something like being a "native Oregonian," i.e. relatively rare.

The Episcopalians are widely pictured as "declining," but that's not the whole story. Being particularly friendly to single and GLBT people, unlike the relentlessly family-oriented evangelicals, they don't have as much natural increase to make up for the people who leave.

And people do leave evangelical churches, often to join Episcopal, Lutheran, or other more liberal Protestant ones, or to become Unitarians. My church takes in new members four times a year, and it's usually between twenty and thirty people.

I was raised Lutheran, but in my twenties, I began attending Episcopal services for the first time when I ended up in an environment where the Lutherans did nothing but folk masses. For the next 15 years, I was either Lutheran or Episcopalian, depending on which church I liked better in the particular town I was living in.

In 1991, I had just started attending an Episcopal parish, after a couple of unsatisfying years in a Lutheran church, when the priest announced that the bishop was coming in two months and that anyone who wanted to be confirmed or received should sign up for instruction. I've been an official Episcopalian ever since.

One of my brothers, on the other hand, attended a Methodist church for a while, athough he's back with the Lutherans now. The other one doesn't go to church at all, but his wife attends a Presbyterian church, although she was raised Methodist.