![]() ![]() Currently, 22.8% of American adults identify as unaffiliated, which is nearly 14 percentage points higher than the share who say they were raised as religious “nones.” But fully 18% of American adults were raised in a religious tradition and now describe themselves as unaffiliated. Fewer than one-in-ten adults (9.2%) say they were raised as religious “nones.” And nearly half of those who were raised unaffiliated (4.3% of all U.S. The group that has experienced the greatest net gains due to religious switching is the religiously unaffiliated. Examining the total number of people entering and leaving each religion provides the most complete picture of the dynamism of the American religious landscape. Rather, each religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing members. No religious group is only losing members or gaining members. Net Gains and Losses by Religious Tradition: Unaffiliated Make Big Gains, Catholics Suffer Major Losses In fact, people who have gotten married since 2000 are about twice as likely to be in religious intermarriages as are people who got married before 1960. The chapter also details the survey’s findings about interfaith marriage, which suggest that religious intermarriage is becoming more common. In addition, it analyzes the patterns of membership gain, loss and retention among religious groups. This chapter examines the religious groups that experience net gains and losses from changes in religious affiliation and documents the high degree of turnover among American religious groups. And there are approximately 1.7 people who have left mainline Protestantism for every person who has joined a mainline denomination. adults, there are now more than six former Catholics (i.e., people who say they were raised Catholic but no longer identify as such) for every convert to Catholicism. In other words, for every person who has left the unaffiliated and now identifies with a religious group more than four people have joined the ranks of the religious “nones.”īy contrast, both Catholicism and mainline Protestantism, the two groups whose shares of the overall population have declined most sharply in recent years, have lost more members to religious switching than they have gained. Nearly one-in-five American adults (18%) were raised in a religion and are now unaffiliated, compared with just 4% who have moved in the other direction. Looked at this way, the data clearly show that part of the reason the religious “nones” have grown rapidly in recent decades is that they continue to be the single biggest destination of movement across religious boundaries. ![]() After all, every religious tradition ultimately loses some of the people who were raised within its fold, and every tradition (including the unaffiliated) gains some members who join its ranks after having been raised in a different group. religious landscape is to consider the ratio of the number of people who have joined each religious group to the number of people who have left. And perhaps the best way to assess the impact of switching on the composition of the U.S. (like immigration and differential fertility or mortality rates), understanding patterns of religious switching is central to making sense of the trends observed in American religion. If the survey had measured this category, the estimates of the number of people who have switched religions would be higher still.Īlong with other sources of change in the religious composition of the U.S. 16 And these figures do not include an estimate of the number of “reverts” (people who leave their childhood religion before returning to it later in life). If the three major Protestant traditions (evangelical Protestantism, mainline Protestantism and historically black Protestantism) are analyzed as separate categories, then the share of Americans who have switched religions rises to 42%. If Protestantism is treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, which is up six percentage points since 2007. ![]() Like the 2007 Religious Landscape Study, the new survey shows a remarkable degree of churn in the U.S.
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