Pat Dollard

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According to the study, 78.4% of Americans are Christians, about 5% belong to other faith traditions and 16.1% are unaffiliated with any particular religion.

Evangelicals make up the nation’s single-largest tradition, followed by Catholics. The survey also notes many Americans have changed religious affiliations or dropped ties to a specific faith.

LAT:

February 26, 2008

America remains an overwhelmingly Christian country, but the nation’s religious life also shows great fluidity, with many adults switching religious affiliations or abandoning ties to organized denominations altogether, according to a new survey released today.

The study also suggests that, in the near future, Protestants may no longer make up a majority of Americans.

Barely 51% of Americans are Protestants, and among people between the ages of 18 and 29, just 43% identify with this branch of Christianity, according to the study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

More than four in 10 adults, or 44%, have switched religious affiliations, moved from being unaffiliated with any faith tradition to affiliated, or abandoned any ties to a specific religion altogether, according to the study. But the study also found that Americans who identify themselves as Christians has remained constant — nearly 8 in 10.

Today’s 148-page study, made public at a teleconference from Washington, D.C., is the first report of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, a project in the works for more than a year. The interviews were conducted from May 8 to Aug. 13 in 2007. The study was based on interviews in English and Spanish with a representative sample of more than 35,000 adults.

The study is available at www.pewforum.org.

“The presumption of a Protestant framework for understanding the American character is now a thing of the past,” said Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

“We are an increasingly pluralistic society, and we Protestants now have to think much about how we can contribute to the common good as simply just one more voice in the American choir,” he said in an e-mail.

But Jerry Campbell, president of the Claremont School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary in Claremont, questioned whether the United States ever was a Protestant nation.

“Early on, Europeans came to America at least in part so that they could enjoy religious freedom,” he said in an e-mail. “Thus they adopted the principle of the separation of church and state. So, technically, one would not say that this was ever a Protestant nation, rather it was a nation made up primarily of individuals who professed to be Protestants.”

According to the study, 78.4% of Americans are Christians, about 5% belong to other faith traditions and 16.1% are unaffiliated with any particular religion.

Secular unaffiliated Americans account for 6.3% of the population; religious unaffiliated, 5.8%; atheists, 1.4% and agnostics, 2.4%.

At 1.7% of the population, Jews make up the largest group of any other religion. Buddhists are 0.7% of the population; Muslims 0.6%; and Hindus and New Age followers, both 0.4%

The study categorized Protestants as members of mainline denominations, such as Methodist and Presbyterian, and Evangelical, which includes Southern Baptists, Pentecostals and historic black churches.

The study noted that Protestantism is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three “fairly distinct” religious traditions — evangelical Protestant churches (26.3%), mainline Protestants (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).

Evangelicals make up the nation’s single-largest religious tradition, followed by Catholics, who make up about a quarter of Americans.

But Catholics also lost more adherents than any other single religious group in the United States, with one in three adults who were raised as Catholics no longer in that church, the study said. Roughly 10% of Americans are former Catholics.

“These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration,” the study said.

Immigrants to the United States are twice as likely as native-born Americans to identify with the Catholic church. One in three adult Catholics is Latino.

Researchers in the study found the fluidity of religious affiliation most striking.

“Americans are ready, willing and able to change their religious affiliation,” said Gregory Smith, a research fellow who worked on the study. “That the United States is a dynamic marketplace when it comes to religion isn’t that surprising. But to see the hard numbers, to see just how common an occurrence religious change was, was quite striking to me and to other researchers.”