cicerone imposter wrote:Talk about a timely article, this one fits the bill.* In January 2002, a USA TODAY/Gallup poll showed that almost half of American adults do not consider themselves religious. In 1999, 54% said they considered themselves religious; that number had shrunk to 50% in 2002. A full third (33%) described themselves as "spiritual but not religious," an increase of 3% over three years. Ten percent said they regarded themselves as neither spiritual nor religious.
* According to an American Religious Identification Survey conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001, the most dramatic demographic shift in religious identification is the number of Americans saying they do not follow any organized religion, increasing from 8% (about 14.3 million people) in 1990 to 14.1% (29.4 million) in 2001. During the same period, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Christians shrank from 86.2% to 76.5%, a reduction of nearly 10 percent. If the trend holds, Christians will be outnumbered by non-Christians in America by 2042.
* The Barna Group, a Christian polling and research organization, commented in an April 2005 report that "Despite the media frenzy surrounding the influence of evangelical Christians during the 2004 presidential election, the new study indicates that evangelicals remain just 7% of the adult population. That number has not changed since the Barna Group began measuring the size of the evangelical public in 1994."
The fact that evangelical Christians are heavily outnumbered by Americans declaring no religious affiliation may come as a shock, considering the prominence of evangelical activists in the press and their recent influence on society. After the last presidential election, some analysts attributed the winning edge of President Bush's victory to the mobilization of evangelical voters in the so-called "red states." (Bush's final popular vote margin over John Kerry was 2.5%.) Their social perspectives and political agenda also get substantial and continuing coverage in the media, particularly in regard to such hot-button issues as abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, and the teaching of creationism vs. evolution in the public schools. Yet as the data above suggest, the actual number of evangelicals is small and has been constant for over a decade, even as the overall number of Christians steadily declines and a substantial and growing proportion of the population prefers to be identified as "spiritual but not religious."
There are at least three major factors contributing to this dramatic disparity between popular perceptions of America's spiritual evolution and what is really going on. First is the media's failure to pay attention to the actual shifts of belief that are occurring quietly behind the more easily reported controversies that involve religion. The second factor is simply that evangelicals have a mission to spread their creed. Over the last decade or so they have done an increasingly effective job of enhancing their media profile and their political clout, even if the effect on the number of people espousing their cause is negligible.
Third, the "mission" of people who are turning away from organized religion toward a more individual style of spiritual practice could well be described as the polar opposite of evangelism. Instead of trying to convert others to their beliefs, the new spiritualists are questioning their own beliefs, and privately experimenting with new perspectives.
Don't get too comfortable, Imposter.
Interesting also from
http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=14107
"Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don't know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word."
How do these numbers coincide with the Barna findings?
Well one possible reason might be the use of the term "religious". There are large numbers of Christians to whom the term carries a negative connotation, implying staleness in their spiritual walk.
Many believers that I have met and known over the years would bristle at the description of themselves as "religious", but they are in church three times a week.
The preferred term these people use of themselves is "spiritual".
Your article mentioned the Gallup findings but perhaps misinterpreted their meaning, as the additional Gallup findings regarding belief in the Bible and belief in evolution may illustrate.
