The American Religious Identification Study 2008 has been published, and the only group to grow across the entire country is the "no religion" group.
Here's how Arizona's religious identifications have changed in the last decade:
1990: 24% Catholic, 57% other Christian, 3% other religions, 13% none, 3% don't know/refused to answer.
2009: 29% Catholic, 44% other Christians, 5% other religions, 17% none, 5% don't know/refused to answer.
The states with the highest percentage of persons identifying themselves as having no religion in 2008 are:
Vermont, 34%
New Hampshire, 29%
Wyoming, 28%
Maine, 25%
Washington, 25%
Nevada, 24%
Oregon, 24%
Delaware, 23%
Idaho, 23%
Massachusetts, 22%
Colorado, 21%
Montana, 21%
(Via the Secular Outpost.)
From the study, it appears that Christianity's loss is the non-theist's gain:
ReplyDelete"in recent decades the challenge to Christianity in American society does not come from other world religions or new religious movements (NRMs) but rather from a rejection of all organized religions. To illustrate the point, Table 1 shows that the non-theist and No Religion groups collectively known as “Nones” have gained almost 20 million adults since 1990 and risen from 8.2 to 15.0 percent of the total population."
Interestingly, the vast majority of those 20 million came aboard during the 1990s. I wonder what was behind that?
Note: Email to your address is bouncing. I don't know whether this relates to your job change or not.
ReplyDeleteNope, that was due to a mistake during a system upgrade on my mail server...
ReplyDelete