Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA 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.

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These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American
Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds
that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million
adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have
lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of
who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in
myself,' " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

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.

Religion as a hobby

Since the first ARIS study was released, other major national surveys
have offered snapshots of the USA's faith.

The Baylor University Religion Surveys in 2006 and 2008, each based on
35,000 interviews, were distinguished by a look at how people described
and understood God. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released its
Religious Landscape Survey last year, also based on 35,000 interviews,
mapping Americans' beliefs state by state. It found that 41% of people
had switched their religion at some point in life.

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The initial ARIS report in 1990 set the table for those surveys.

It was based on 113,000 interviews, updated with 50,000 more in 2001 and
now 54,000 in 2008. Because the U.S. Census does not ask about religion,
the ARIS survey was the first comprehensive study of how people identify
their spiritual expression.

Kosmin concluded from the 1990 data that many saw God as a "personal
hobby," and that the USA is "a greenhouse for spiritual sprouts."

Today, he says, "religion has become more like a fashion statement, not
a deep personal commitment for many."

Kosmin is now director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in
Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.; ARIS
co-researcher Ariela Keysar is associate director.

The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the
"Nones" — people who said "None" when asked the survey's basic question:
"What is your religious identity?"

The survey itself may have contributed to a higher rate of reporting as
sociologists began analyzing the newly identified Nones. "The Nones may
have felt more free to step forward, less looked upon as outcasts" after
the ARIS results were published, Keysar says.

Oregon once led the nation in Nones (18% in 1990), but in 2008 the
leader, with 34%, was Vermont, where Nones significantly outnumber every
other group.

Meabh Fitzpatrick, 49, of Rutland, Vt., says she is upfront about
becoming an atheist 10 years ago because "it's important for us to be
counted. I'm a taxpayer and a law-abiding citizen and an ethical person,
and I don't think people assume this about atheists."

Not all Nones have made such a philosophical choice; most just unhook
from religious ties.

Diane Mueller, 43, of Austin, who grew up Methodist, says she's simply
"totally disengaged from the church and the Bible, too." Sunday mornings
for her family mean playing in a park, not praying in a pew.

Ex-Catholic Dylan Rossi, 21, a philosophy student in Boston and a
Massachusetts native, is part of the sharp fall in the state's
percentage of Catholics — from 54% to 39% in his lifetime.

Rossi says he's typical among his friends: "If religion comes up,
everyone at the table will start mocking it. I don't know anyone
religious and hardly anyone 'spiritual.' "

Social mobility a factor

Anger and dismay over the clergy sexual abuse scandal, which erupted in
Boston in 2002, may be reflected in declining rates of Catholics across
New England. But the total percentage of Catholics in the USA declined
only slightly from 1990 to 2008, from 26.2% to 25.1%. Analysts say
immigration and other demographic shifts account for most of the changes.

"It's not that everyone in New England lost their Catholic faith since
1990. It's not the same people in New England," says sociologist Mary
Gautier, senior researcher at the Center for Applied Research in the
Apostolate, the research arm of the Catholic Church in America.

Membership in New England's Catholic churches is shrinking as older
Catholics have died or moved to sunnier climates. Young adults are
choosing non-Catholic partners, having civil weddings and skipping
baptism for their babies. And those moving in to areas served by the
churches are young adults who often find their communities of work and
friendship online, not in parish halls.

"I sometimes wish I had a sky hook to take people from dying parishes up
North and plunk them down in the parishes around Austin or Atlanta — and
bring their beautiful buildings with them," Gautier says.

Bishop Gregory Aymond would be happy to have those resources in Austin.
He's spiritually delighted and financially challenged as his Texas
diocese has doubled in numbers with retirees, Mexican immigrants,
students at five major universities and Californians moving in for
high-tech jobs.

"And demographers expect it to double again in the next 10 to 12 years,"
he says.

In Mount Pleasant, S.C., a suburb of Charleston, "everyone from Ohio is
here," says Msgr. James Carter, pastor of Christ Our King Catholic
Church. The church has grown so big so fast that it has spun off another
parish and a mission church, and it plans outdoor split-shift services
for Easter to accommodate about 2,500 families.

South Carolina also exemplifies the Protestant faiths' shrinking share
of the national religion "pie." The state has more Catholics (10%, up
from 6% in 1990) and the percentage of Nones has more than tripled, from
3% to 10%. The share of Protestants is 73%, down from 88% in 1990.

Like Gautier, the Rev. Kendall Harmon, theologian for the Episcopal
Diocese of South Carolina, blames social mobility.

"Mobility means your ideas are more challenged and your family and
childhood traditions have less influence, particularly if you are not
strongly rooted in them. I see kids today who have no vocabulary of
faith, and neither do many of their parents."

Harmon recalls, "A couple came into my office once with a yellow pad of
their teenage son's questions. One of them was: 'What is that guy doing
hanging up there on the plus sign?' "

Kosmin and Keysar also found a "piety gap" in how Americans understand
God: While 69% say they believe in a personal God, the Judeo-Christian
understanding of the Almighty, an additional 30% made no such connection.

The piety gap defines the primary sides in the culture wars, Kosmin says.

"It's about gay marriage and abortion and stem cells and the family. If
a personal God says, 'Thou shalt not' or 'Thou shalt' see these a
certain way, you'd take it very seriously. Meanwhile, three in 10 people
aren't listening to that God," he says.

"There's more clarity at the two extremes and the mishmash is in the
middle," Keysar adds.

Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in
Public Life at Trinity College, sees in the numbers "an emergence of a
soft evangelicalism — E-lite — that owes a lot to evangelical styles of
worship and basic approach to church.

"But E-lite is more a matter of aesthetic and style and a considerable
softening of the edges in doctrine, politics and social values," Silk says.

Additional narrowly focused surveys, with closer looks at Catholics,
evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and African-American Christians,
will be released later this year by Trinity's Program on Public Values,
which sponsored ARIS, Silk says.

Some believers might be alarmed by the ARIS findings, but Tom Haynes
isn't. Haynes, 46, a Houston entrepreneur, is the brother of Diane
Mueller, the Austin mom who claims no religion. Same Methodist
upbringing. Totally different spiritual choices.

Haynes, like 69% of Americans, said in the ARIS survey that he believes
there is "definitely a personal God." He calls himself a deeply
committed "follower of Christ," rather than aligning with a specific
denomination. He attends a non-denominational community church where he
likes the rock music, but Bible study is the focus of his faith.

"We just look to Jesus," he says. "That's why I don't pay attention to
surveys. Christianity is moving totally under the radar. It's the work
of God. It can't be measured. It happens inside of people's souls."