Religion in America

The following quote is from an email newsletter "SERIOUS TIMES"
Front pages of major American newspapers this week featured the findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which released a survey of religious affiliation based on telephone interviews with more than 35,000 Americans titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.” The results depict an extraordinarily fluid and diverse national religious life. Among its many findings, perhaps the most provocative was that more than a quarter of adult Americans have left their childhood faith in order to join another religion. If one includes shifts from one Protestant denomination to another, then 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations....According to the survey, sixteen percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith. It should be noted that among Americans ages 18-29, this number rises to one-in-four...

...This makes the disenfranchised the country’s fourth-largest “religious group.” This up from the mere 5 to 8 percent of the 1980s as determined by the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center...First, people in America have little allegiance to the faith of their childhood – translation: they are quick to abandon how they were raised (which may say something about how they were raised, but that is another conversation). Second, the fastest-growing religious segment in America is the irreligious. I’m not overly distracted by the 5.8% who are unaffiliated, but say that religion is important to their lives. All that means is that they have enough of a religious memory to feel bad about distancing themselves from their heritage. To answer the religious question with “nothing in particular,” but then follow it up with, “but religion matters to me,” is disingenuous. They may not be philosophical atheists, but they are functioning ones.
...My point is that the vast majority of our culture is clearly open and searching, yet with a sizable and growing segment having already given up on the search.
Which means that the real headline is that this may be the last, best time to reach our nation for Christ.
James Emery White