The percentage of Americans claiming “no religion” has almost doubled since 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. Fox News has the details:
A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.
Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.
In 2008, Christians comprised 76 percent of U.S. adults, compared to about 77 percent in 2001 and about 86 percent in 1990. Researchers said the dwindling ranks of mainline Protestants, including Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, largely explains the shift. Over the last seven years, mainline Protestants dropped from just over 17 percent to 12.9 percent of the population.
Respondents who called themselves “non-denominational Christian” grew from 0.1 percent in 1990 to 3.5 percent last year….Researchers also found a small increase in those who prefer being called evangelical or born-again, rather than claim membership in a denomination.
Evangelical or born-again Americans make up 34 percent of all American adults and 45 percent of all Christians and Catholics, the study found.
Every day, the population of our nation is bombarded with secularist and anti-religious messages (n0t to mention hedonist ones, which play into the same mindest), so it’s not surprising that they are having a long-term impact. It’s also a function of the unwillingness of so many churches, particularly mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, to take seriously (in some instances, to even believe in) the call to evangelization. We’ve grown exceedingly comfortable in our religious ghettoes, and the temptation to hold fast to what previous generations bequeathed us and turn our backs on the growing numbers of spiritually hungry people is strong. But as the non-Christian and non-religious fields grow larger, the call becomes more insistent, and I suspect that those churches that have decided they would rather tend their own gardens will have some accounting to do when the time of judgment comes upon us.
