The Churning Of Religious Affiliation

Recently, the highly respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a well-researched study on religious affiliation in America. Its findings yield an interesting mix of confirmation, surprise, and questions for further reflection. In the first place, the study confirms a prevailing opinion of researchers that a large majority of Americans identify themselves as religious, but not always in the form of institutional --- or, in Protestant Christian terms, "denominational" --- loyalty. In my words and not Pew's, we seem to be able to move on rather easily, without much anxiety or guilt, from the religious affiliation or non-affiliation of our childhood, to make our own affiliative choices in adulthood. Second, the Pew report offers further confirmation of two other well-established beliefs. One is that mainline Protestantist denominations continue to decline, while non-denominational Protestant groups continue to grow. The other is that the single fastest growing religious category of people in America is the category of "unaffiliated."

One surprise from the Pew study is that religious affiliation may be even more fluid than previously supposed. Not only do we feel a lot of freedom to move our affiliations around, whenever we choose; we actually do move them around, and in large numbers. 40% of Baptists and Lutherans have done so, as have more than 50% of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals. Another surprise is that being raised without a religious affiliation does not seem to have the negative effect across peoples' life-span that religious leaders often assert that it does. Apparently, over half of those with this so-called deficit in childhood have made their way into a religious affiliation as adults. Finally, although defections among American Catholics have been written about for years, I at least am somewhat surprised at the extent of the disaffiliation, at least as the Pew report computes it --- upwards of 7.5%.

Possibly, this latter finding is better regarded as a confirmation finding, of the "I knew it all along" sort. Certainly, there are reasons not to be surprised by Catholics' leaving their parishes in droves --- authoritarianism, sexism, pedophile priests, to mention the more florid ones. But I still have some doubts about the stats. As does the Pew report itself, which acknowledges the possibility of a significant undercounting of currently affiliated Catholics, for one thing because of its researchers' difficulties reaching Hispanic, illegal immigrants currently in the country. If most of these folks are Catholic, as may be presumed, then the percentage slide of Catholics in America that the Pew study posits may not in fact be as steep. There will be those, of course, for whom this is a non-issue. People who are here illegally, I can hear them saying no matter how hard I try to shut my ears, have neither a religion nor a personhood worth counting for anything.

The previous paragraph opens out on the fact that the Pew Forum study raises important questions to think about with regard both to its accuracy in general and to the meaning of the trends it does seem to confirm clearly. With regard to the former question, and by way of further example, people who believe that this country has always been and always should be Christian can breath a sigh of relief that the Pew statistics yield at least a superficial level of support for their perspective; roughly 80% of Americans are still identifying themselves as Christians. But to me it is curious that this research has turned up no significant increases in the number of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in the population, even though many noted writers about religion in America --- Harvard's Diana Eck comes to mind immediately --- have been touting significant increases at least in the latter three groups for some time.

And with respect to the question about further implications, I for one was struck by Pew's finding that fully a third of marriages in this country are between spouses who at least say that they belong to different religious groups. I wonder just how "different" these differences are, whether or not they are mattering very much, and if they are, how these couples are dealing with them, if they are dealing with them at all. It will take more than just a poll or a questionnaire to secure meaningful answers to these questions. But it is "the bottom line" of this report that is likely to generate the most reflection in the weeks to come, the so-called churning of religious affiliation that is emerging as a major feature of American religious life. Is the trend --- if it is indeed a trend --- something to bemoan or to celebrate? My first reading of the Pew Forum report inclines me toward the latter.