You Either Got Faith or You Got Unbelief and There Ain't No Neutral Ground
USA Today describes the results of the latest American Religious Identification Survey:
The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers -- or falling off the faith map completely….
[D]espite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,'" says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
While the number of Christians and Jews is down, the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion now stands at 15 percent, up from 8 percent in 1990. Also rising: the number of Wiccans and the number of Muslims. No word of the number of Jedi.
Elsewhere in Reason: My dispatch from the spiritual jacuzzi.
Elsewhere not in Reason: Post title explained here.
