Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: US Churning Our Religion

DAVID VAN BIEMA of TIME  mag reports on the report The Religious Landscape of the United States from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths. America's religious culture, which is best known for its high participation rates, may now be equally famous (or infamous) for what the new report dubs "churn."

The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."

According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."

The report does not speculate on the implications of its data. But Lugo suggests, "What it says is that this marketplace is highly competitive and that no one can sit on their laurels, because another group out there will make [its tenets] available" for potential converts to try out. While this dynamic "may be partly responsible for the religious vitality of the American people," he says, "it also suggests that there is an institutional loosening of ties," with less individual commitment to a given faith or denomination.

Lugo would not speculate on whether such a buyer's market might cause some groups to dilute their particular beliefs in order to compete. There are signs of that in such surveys as one done by the Willow Creek megachurch outside Chicago, which has been extremely successful in attracting tens of thousands of religious "seekers." An internal survey recently indicated much of its membership was "stalled" in their spiritual growth, Lugo allowed that "it does raise the question of, once you attract these folks, how do you root them within your own particular tradition when people are changing so quickly."

The Pew report has other interesting findings; the highest rates for marrying within one's own faith, for example, are among Hindus (90%) and Mormons (83%). The full report is accessible at the Pew Forum site.

I am not so keen on Lugo's characterization of the religious "marketplace" - I think it is accurate, but it is sickening to remember how intertwined consumerism & churchianity is in America today.

My biggest a-ha from the study is that America is not just losing it's religion - but in fact churning our religion,  like a broke buys and sells (a client's securities) frequentlu, like a butter maker moving or shaking in agitation with violence or continued motion, religion see as a liquid or any loose matter.   You can see this in the study, but also in conversations & churches & the way people hunger for hope & vision.   

This is particularly the case with young people -  among those aged 18 to 29, 25 percent said they are not affiliated with a particular religion.  You can see this in Christian Smith's work on the National Study of Youth and Religion.  According to Smith, one-third of U.S. teens are regularly involved in religion, one-third are sporadically involved in religion, and one third are never religiously involved.  "Teens feel it is okay to be somewhat religious," Smith has said. "But important not to be too religious."

 

Anecdotally, it is my sense that people - particualrly young people - have a strong sense of supernatural and moral claims, but they are recoiling from codified  prayer, ritual, and religious law.  The pundits will point out their rationales for this - whether liberal theology or conservative hegemony is to blame.  I think it is both - the whip-lash effect of American culture has rendered religion just another flash point, just another way to categorize, the ultimate crossfire.   

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