Free Republic

Among faith groups in the United States, white Evangelical Christians are one of the best at retaining members even as the share of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated continues to grow, according to a new survey. The nonprofit research organization Public Religion Research Institute released the report on Wednesday titled "Religious Change in America," which charted several trends among faith groups in the U.S. Data for the report came from a survey PRRI conducted online of 5,627 adults in the U.S. from Nov. 16 to Dec. 7, 2023, with a margin of error of +/- 1.79 percentage points at the...

When members of the small Pennsylvania chapter of Secular Democrats of America log on for their monthly meetings, they’re not there for a virtual happy hour. “We don’t sit around at our meetings patting ourselves on the back for not believing in God together,” said David Brown, a founder from the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore. The group, mostly consisting of atheists and agnostics, mobilizes to knock on doors and make phone calls on behalf of Democratic candidates “who are pro-science, pro-democracy, whether or not they are actually self-identified secular people,” he said. “We are trying to keep church and state...

The data show the “Nones” walking away from organized religion. Is pop culture taking its place? With every passing year, traditional religious belief continues its trend of steady decline in the United States. According to the latest Gallup Values and Beliefs poll, a record low of 81 percent of American adults believe in God. That’s a slip of 6 percentage points since 2017, the last time Gallup conducted the poll, which found 87 percent of respondents affirming belief in God. As traditional beliefs wane and a new generation increasingly makes its way in the world without them, a new American...

Several religious denominations have seen memberships fall in recent years, including among young adults and teens. A new survey suggests that many young people perceive a disconnect between themselves and the houses of worship that need believers to sustain their congregations. Half of young people ages 13 to 25 surveyed said they don’t think that religious institutions care as much as they do about issues that matter deeply to them, according to a report released Monday by the Springtide Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit. Those issues include racial justice, gender equity, immigration rights, income inequality and gun control. Springtide tracks...

The latest survey of the American Worldview Inventory from Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center found 43 percent of millennials born between 1984 and 2002 said they “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.” Only 57 percent said they were Christian. Researchers found that belief declined between generations. Eighty-three percent of those in the Silent Generation (born 1927-1945), 79 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-1964), and 70 percent of Generation Xers (born 1965-1983) identified as Christian. Thirty-one percent, 28 percent, and 27 percent respectively said they “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.” Those who believed “you treat...

Third, the biographies of at least some of today’s race-minded trailblazers suggest a connection between fatherlessness and identity politics. The author of the bestseller White Fragility was a child of divorce at age two. The author of the bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race reports that her father left the family and broke off contact, also when she was two. The author of another bestseller, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was raised by a single mother. The author of another hot race book, The Anti-Racist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and...

Today the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case that could determine whether parents and taxpayers have any choices about the kind of religion American children are taught with taxpayer funds. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue concerns whether private donations may support schools that make their religious beliefs explicit. It could also undo a century of U.S. court and legislative decisions that used animus between Protestants and Catholics to attack the faith of both kinds of Christians’ children over the last century.Five years ago, Montana’s legislature enacted a tiny school choice program that allows residents to deduct up to...

The Democratic National Committee passed a resolution praising "religiously unaffiliated" Americans while also taking aim at religious liberty. The resolution passed Saturday at the DNC's summer meeting in San Francisco affirmed the religiously unaffiliated as sharing their values and being "the largest religious group within the Democratic Party." The unanimously passed resolution also criticized "religious views" and "religious liberty" that threatened minority groups.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) passed a resolution Saturday praising the values of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans as the “largest religious group within the Democratic Party.” The resolution, which was unanimously passed at the DNC’s summer meeting on Aug. 24 in San Francisco, Calif., was championed by the Secular Coalition of America, an organization that lobbies on behalf of atheists, agnostics, and humanists on public policy. The group celebrated the DNC’s move as the first time a major party “embraced American nonbelievers.” “Religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’s values,” said the resolution, which adds they should advocate for “rational...

It’s no secret that the Democratic Party is on the wrong side of almost every issue as it relates to a Biblical worldview, but did you know that the DNC just passed an official resolution making it the first party to affiliate with the irreligious? Democrats haven’t been this boldly anti-religion since they literally booed God at the 2012 Convention. According to the Friendly Atheist, the DNC passed the resolution over the weekend which heralds the “value, ethical soundness and importance” of non-religious Americans.

Those with no particular religious affiliation, often called "nones," continue to grow in number in the United States, new data show. Eastern Illinois University political science professor Ryan Burge explains in an essay for Religion in Public that while much of the media often frames the statistics that nones now constitute the largest religious group in the U.S., the reality is much more complicated. Nevertheless, the trend is clear. Self-identified nones made up 22.2% of Americans in 2008, Burge noted; today they comprise 29.5%. The aggregated data was taken from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study which has been conducted since...

Religiously unaffiliated Americans are, unsurprisingly, less likely than their Christian countrymen to attend church regularly or say religion is important in their lives. However, on several common measures, “nones” in the United States exhibit nearly equal levels of spirituality as self-identifying Christians in Western Europe. A new study by the Pew Research Center, surveying more than 24,000 individuals across 15 countries in Western Europe on their religious beliefs and practices, reveal striking disconnects between Western Christians across the Atlantic. Equally striking is how similarly religious nones in the United States and Christians in Western Europe match up: * Only 27...

Our Secularist Democratic Party By Louis Bolce & Gerald De Maio Anyone who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same time, the media's obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts public attention from the changing role of religion in political life today. In particular,...

On Tuesday, Pew Research released a new study finding a radical increase in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans. That increase correlated strongly with the decrease in the number of Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelical Protestants over the past seven years.

American churches are losing their young people. This trend was evidenced most recently in a 2012 Pew Forum study titled “‘Nones’ on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.” The summary of the 80-page report posits, “The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public—and a third of adults under 30—are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.” Researchers use the label of “nones,” or “religiously unaffiliated,” to clarify that these young people are not falling into hardened agnosticism or...

May 9, 2013 – Much ink has been spilled in recent months over what social analysts are calling the “rise of the Nones.” The trend describes the seeming surge in people who claim no faith or say they are unaffiliated with any belief system. The term rose to prominence when a Pew Research poll found that the number of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated rose to almost 20%—a nearly 5% leap in just the last five years. In the subsequent months, a Gallup poll showed similar numbers, and most recently, in March 2013, a poll from UC-Berkeley and Duke University...

Frank Newport, author of the recently published book, “God is Alive and Well,” made a timely appearance this past week at a forum hosted by Concordia University in Southern California. It followed the much-hyped release of a new survey by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University that stated, “Americans and religion increasingly parting ways.” Deliberately misinterpreting data culled from the General Social Survey, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, the researchers claimed that the percentage of Americans “preferring no religion” had risen to 20 percent in 2012, down 12 percentage points from 1990. “We...

God bless Frank Newport. The Gallup Poll’s editor-in-chief is author of the recently published book, “God is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America.” It punctures the myth that the ranks of the nation’s non-religious are growing by leaps and bounds. The myth has gained currency in the mainstream media, thanks to a dishonest poll published this past fall by the left-leaning Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. By playing fast and loose with polling data, and by employing semantic gymnastics, Pew was able to make the dubious claim that 20 percent of Americans “do...

(RNS) Last month, Lauren Anderson Youngblood, communications manager for the Secular Coalition for America, approached Broderick Johnson, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, as they both left a conference on religion and the election. The SCA is an umbrella group representing 11 nontheistic organizations. So who, Youngblood asked Johnson, could she reach out to with their concerns about civil rights, access to health care and education? “He said, ‘We don’t view you as a constituency,’” Youngblood said. “He said, ‘We don’t do outreach to that community.’” After Tuesday's election, that may soon change. According to a Pew Forum on...

<p>Democrats playing catch-up to Republicans in courting religious voters have found a secret weapon: nuns.</p> <p>In Ohio and Michigan, Democrats have recruited nearly two dozen nuns in each state to work phone banks. In Ohio, the nuns have made calls for the campaign for governor of Representative Ted Strickland and the Senate campaign of Representative Sherrod Brown.</p>