Faith No More

I saw this interesting new study on the popularity of religions in the USA.  That is, they polled people on what they said their religion is. I'll give you the quick version:

• All Christian denominations have declined in popularity (as determined by the percent of the population that considers themselves a member.) Though Christianity still makes up a big majority.
• The proportion of white people has declined in almost all Christian denominations.
• Non-Christian religions have nearly all gained, though their numbers are still small.
• The member of people saying they belong to no religion has increased fast. And young people are more likely to have no religion, and are leaving religions faster.

A couple of interesting things stand out to me. One is how universal the dripping Christian numbers are. The impression I had was that moderate denominations were leaking members on both sides, with people either leaving churches all together, or getting drawn to more conservative sects. This would lead to a "hollowed out" religion made up of the fundamentalist and the lapsed with few in between. But that's not what's happening. It does appear that liberal denominations are losing members to the conservative denominations, but that's small compared to the numbers they're both losing to "none of the above."

The other interesting point involves those people who say they aren't a member of any church. The survey has options for "atheist," "agnostic," and "none." While all three have been gaining, there are far more people in the last category (at 3.1%, 4.0%, and 15.8%, respectively.)

That could mean a number of things:

• They're Christian, but don't feel right saying they belong to a particular church given that they haven't been there since childhood.
• It could be that these people still have some religious beliefs, but they don't fit into Christianity.
• They are no longer sure what they believe in, as with people who give that cryptic description "spiritual, but not religious."
• They don't know what "atheist" or "agnostic" mean.
• They're straight-up atheist, but even they are turned-off by the the attitude of the new atheist movement.

Fortunately, they say future research will look into that, it seems like a big distinction. Among young millennials, self-described Christians make up only 56% of the population, so this is a pretty big slice of the population for us to not understand.