AMERICANS LOSING THEIR RELIGION

Given how much we hear about the rise of the religious right in America, the truth is that, like Europe, America is losing its religion. In a poll of 51,000 adults in the USA, 14 percent claimed to have no religious affiliation a significant increase, the researchers say, from 8 percent in a similar study they conducted in 1990.

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that those most disaffected with religion were under 35 years of age. In that age group, 23 percent of the men and 18 percent of the women said they did not follow any organised religion.

The researchers were surprised to find that 43 percent of the unaffiliated were former Roman Catholics, given that Catholics make up slightly less than one-quarter of the general population in the United States.

Ariela Keysar, a demographer at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut said: “Why aren’t ex-Catholics becoming Baptists or something else? Instead, they are deciding to distance themselves from organised religion. So there is something major going on in Catholic religious identity. It’s in transition.”

For the ARIS study, telephone pollsters questioned randomly chosen households across the country in 2001. They began with a question they had first posed in 1990 during a survey of 110,000 households: “What is your religion?”

The more recent ARIS survey found that 19 percent of baptised Catholics leave the church, compared with an average of 16 percent for Americans of all faiths. But an exceptionally large number of Catholics who drop out 28 percent do not join another faith. The next largest group to quit not only their church but religion entirely are Methodists, at 17 percent.

The ARIS study did not collect anecdotal information that might explain why Americans are leaving organised religion, or why such a large proportion of Catholics are among them. Keysar said the authors hoped to study secularisation and denomination-switching patterns in detail in a national survey planned for 2010.