Survey Says: Catholics are on the Move, Non-religious are on the rise

The third installment in a three-decade project studying religion and secularism reveals some interesting statistics regarding the condition of faith around the United States.

WASHINGTON (Catholic Online) - A new study has found that the concentration of Catholics in the United States has shifted from New England to the Southwest. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) was conducted by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut.

According to Barry Kosmin, a principal investigator for ARIS 2008, "The decline of Catholicism in the Northeast is nothing short of stunning. Thanks to immigration and natural increase among Latinos, California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than New England."

The study also concluded that secularism has continued to grow in strength in all areas of the country. According to the Program on Public Values, given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million "Nones" in our country.

Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country, with Vermont, at 34 percent "Nones," leading all other states by a full 9 points.

ARIS 2008 was conducted from February through November of last year, through a series of large, nationally representative surveys of 54,461 adults in the "lower" 48 states who spoke either English or Spanish,.

Led by Professors Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, who serve respectively, director and associate director of Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, this is the third such appraisal, with the first two held in 1990 and 2001.

The 2008 results, according to researchers, confirmed the shifts that were seen in the 2001 survey.

"Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly," Keysar stated. "We now know it wasn't. The 'Nones' are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union."

The survey revealed the following traits in terms of Christianity:

• The percentage of Christians in America, which declined in the 1990s from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent.

• Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans, and the United Church of Christ.

• These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, and just 12.9 percent in 2008.

• Most of the growth in the Christian population occurred among those who would identify only as "Christian," "Evangelical/Born Again," or "non-denominational Christian."

• Most of the increase is associated with the growth of megachurches, which increased from less than 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to over 8 million today. These groups grew from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 8.5 percent in 2001 to 11.8 percent in 2008.

• Significantly, 38.6 percent of mainline Protestants now also identify themselves as evangelical or born again.

"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism--mainline versus evangelical--is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States."

Regarding the Catholic Church, the survey reported, "Catholics increased their share in California and Texas to about one-third of the adult population and in Florida to over one-fourth. In terms of numbers they gained about 8 million adherents in these three states in the past two decades."

The report went on to say, "New England had a net loss of one million Catholics. Big losses in both the number of Catholic adherents and their proportion occurred also in Massachusetts, and in Rhode Island, the nation's most heavily Catholic state where the proportion of Catholics dropped from 62 percent to 46 percent. New York State lost 800,000 Catholics and they dropped from 44% to 37% of the adult population."

The ARIS 2008 survey estimates that those who identified themselves as Catholics in 2008 numbered about 57.2 million, 25.1 percent of the population. This contrasts to about 50.9 million who made up 24.5 percent of the population in 2001 and 46 million who made up 26.2 percent of the population in 1990.

Other key findings that have been listed in the report include:

• Baptists, who constitute the largest non-Catholic Christian tradition, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population.

• Mormons have increased in numbers enough to hold their own proportionally, at 1.4 percent of the population.

• The Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .5 percent in 2001 to .6 percent in 2008.

• The number of adherents of Eastern Religions, which more than doubled in the 1990s, has declined slightly, from just over two million to just under. Asian Americans are substantially more likely to indicate no religious identity than other racial or ethnic groups.

• Those who identify religiously as Jews continue to decline numerically, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2008--1.2 percent of the population. Defined to include those who identify as Jews by ethnicity alone, the American Jewish population has remained stable over the past two decades.

• Only1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.

• Adherents of New Religious movements, Including Wiccans and self-described pagans, have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s.

The full report of ARIS 2008 can be found at: http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf

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