Survey finds Christianity on the decline -- even in the South
Christian faith still flourishes in the Bible Belt -- but there, like elsewhere, it's in decline. That's one of the findings of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey released this week. The study is especially valuable because it tracks trends over time -- previous reports were done in 1990 and 2001 -- and draws on a rich volume of data (in 2008, questionnaires of 54,400 people). The big finding of the report is that Protestant Christians are in decline:
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. The number of Catholics is declining as well, but not nearly as much largely because losses in the Northeast have been balanced out by a growth of Catholics -- fueled by new immigrants -- in the South and Southwest. (Perhaps Christians have Latinos and other new immigrants to thank from keeping church values alive.) Believe what you will but don't let a few little disagreeable facts annoy you. It appears that Thomas Jefferson's assertion to John Adams, third president to the second, just might finally come to fruition: "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding" ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, from Monticello, April 11, 1823; Lester J. Cappon, ed., <A href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807842303/">The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence~
| 
Welcome:
Guest