Friday, May 15, 2015

Pew Research Religious Landscape Survey

Pew Research has published it's findings in a new majority religious landscape survey. Their last survey was in 2007.

Key findings based upon interviewing 35,000 adults.

- The number of people identifying as Christian decreased from 78.4% to 70.6%
--- Protestants 2007: 51.3%  2014: 46.5%
------ Evangelical 2007: 26.3%  2014: 25.4%
------ Mainline 2007: 18.1% 2014: 14.7%
------ Historical Black 2007: 6.9% 2014: 6.5%
--- Catholics 2007: 23.9% 2014: 20.8%
--- Orthodox 2007: 0.6% 2014: 0.5%
--- Mormon 2007: 1.7% 2014: 1.6%
--- Jehovah's Witness 2007: 0.7% 2014: 0,8%
--- Other Christian 2007: 0.3% 2014: 0.4%

- Non-Christian faiths increased from 4.7% to 5.9%
--- Jewish 2007: 1.7% 2014: 1.9%
--- Muslim 2007: 0.4% 2014: 0.9%
--- Hindu 2007: 0.4% 2014: 0.7%
--- Buddhist 2007: 0.7% 2014: 0.7%
--- Other 2007: 1.5% 2014: 1.8%

- the unaffiliated (the Nones) went from 16.1% to 22.8%
--- Atheists 2007: 1.6% 2014: 3.1%
--- Agnostics 2007: 2.4% 2014: 4.0%
--- Nothing in Particular 2007: 12.1% 2014: 15.8%

This makes the Nones now the second largest group only an eyelash behind evangelicals.

- Evangelicals - 25.4%
- Nones - 22.8%
- Catholics - 20.8%

Atheists and Agnostics now at 7.1% of the population outnumber all non-Christian faiths at 5.9% combined. There are more than three times as many Atheists and Agnostics as Jews, four times as many as Mormons and almost eight times as many as Muslims.

Much of the change is related to age. The youngest Americans are by far the least religious with a solid 36% of Young Millennials (born 1990 to 1996) identifying as unaffiliated as compared to only 11% of the Silent Generation (born 1928 to 1945) and 17% of Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964).

Based upon these numbers perhaps there's some hope for the human race yet.

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