"The survey is conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation. Conducted in 1990, 2001 and last year, it is one of the nation's largest major surveys of religion."
Google News has hundreds of articles about this, and many focus on different specific areas of the country, so I'm just linking to the list of articles:
http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&ncl=dicoD6c6wa0kvWM6QyQuSg-372OtM&topic=h
The ONLY religious tradition that grew in all 50 states within the last 7 years, was people claiming no religion at all.
The term they use is "people claiming no religion" so it includes atheists as well as agnostics. They did this survey in 1990, 2001, and 2008. The analysis of the 54,461 interviews from 2008 has now been completed and released. Most of the comparisons are between 1990 and 2008 numbers.
In those 18 years, these changes occured:
The non-religious increased from 8.2% to 15%.
Christians (all types) decreased from 86% to 76%.
Jews decreased from 1.8% to 1.2%.
Within the umbrella of Christianity:
Those who attend megachurches increased from 5% to 11.8%.
Baptists decreased from 19.3% to 15.8%.
Methodists decreased from 8% to 5%.
Mainline Protestants (including Methodists and Lutherans) decreased from 19% to 13%.
One of the articles mentioned that Islam, Mormonism, Wicca, and paganism are all on the rise in America as well, but I couldn't find the numbers in any of the articles I looked through.
One theory I read said that this isn't because more people are losing faith, but because more agnostics are making up their mind and picking a side.
Rubang's thoughts:
There are now more nonreligious people in America than Jews and gays put together. When do we get our own TV shows? Something like Godless Eye for the Religious Guy? I just watched a news clip about this survey, and the reporter pointed out at least 3 times that atheists are "still a very small minority, but becoming more vocal." Why don't they point that out multiple times every time they interview anybody who's Jewish or Queer? Or black or Hispanic for that matter? (It seems that nonreligious are just about tied with Hispanics, and barely ahead of blacks now.)
Can you imagine how insulting it is when any time you're interviewed the reporter has to introduce you by saying "Hispanics are a small minority, but they are growing in number every year. Well, let's see what they have to say for themselves about their crazy different lifestyle before they go straight to Hell, unlike the rest of us!"
Anyway, I thought all these numbers were interesting. The survey also says a lot about how the Catholic demographic is changing from Irish Catholics to Hispanic Catholics due to immigration and whatnot.
Thoughts, comments, etc?
