American religiousness

[DRSB]

There, the article says it: a quarter of the electorate consists of fundamentalists.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

There, the article says it: a quarter of the electorate consists of fundamentalists.

Three kinds of liars.

Liars.

Damn liars.

Statisticians.

[DRSB]

Things are bad in US, I blame the fundamentalists.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Things are bad in US, I blame the fundamentalists.

I blame Darwin.

[DRSB]

Things are bad in US, I blame the fundamentalists.

I blame Darwin.

Why, what did the pious chap do?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Things are bad in US, I blame the fundamentalists.

I blame Darwin.

Why, what did the pious chap do?

Without him we'd still be on the path of righteousness in this country.

And anyway, the THEORY of evolution doesn't explain the Big Bang.

[DRSB]

Things are bad in US, I blame the fundamentalists.

I blame Darwin.

Why, what did the pious chap do?

Without him we'd still be on the path of righteousness in this country.

And anyway, the THEORY of evolution doesn't explain the Big Bang.

Nor does it contradict it.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Things are bad in US, I blame the fundamentalists.

I blame Darwin.

Why, what did the pious chap do?

Without him we'd still be on the path of righteousness in this country.

And anyway, the THEORY of evolution doesn't explain the Big Bang.

Nor does it contradict it.

It was a joke, btw.

[Ian]

A little bit from Pew Research on religion in the states (extensive 2007 poll):

Key Findings and Statistics on Religion in America
More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions - evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).

While those Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular religion have seen the greatest growth in numbers as a result of changes in affiliation, Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration. The Landscape Survey finds that among the foreign-born adult population, Catholics outnumber Protestants by nearly a two-to-one margin (46% Catholic vs. 24% Protestant); among native-born Americans, on the other hand, the statistics show that Protestants outnumber Catholics by an even larger margin (55% Protestant vs. 21% Catholic). Immigrants are also disproportionately represented among several world religions in the U.S., including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Although there are about half as many Catholics in the U.S. as Protestants, the number of Catholics nearly rivals the number of members of evangelical Protestant churches and far exceeds the number of members of both mainline Protestant churches and historically black Protestant churches. The U.S. also includes a significant number of members of the third major branch of global Christianity - Orthodoxy - whose adherents now account for 0.6% of the U.S. adult population. American Christianity also includes sizeable numbers of Mormons (1.7% of the adult population), Jehovah's Witnesses (0.7%) and other Christian groups (0.3%).

Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular." This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the "secular unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the "religious unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

[Ronja]

Thanks, Ian! That was informative.

[DRSB]

The End of Religion? Been to America Lately?

By Stanton Peele


Nigel Barber has declared the end of religion based on the trend for better-educated people and richer nations to eschew religious doctrine in favor of atheism.

Has Barber been to America lately?

In case you hadn't noticed, America is now being led around by the Tea Party, who insist that no increase in revenues be used to address America's ballooning debt. N-O = NO!

Did you catch the Republican debate in Iowa? Remember the part where all eight candidates raised their hands to agree they would reject a resolution of the debt situation that called for ANY increase in revenues, even if the ratio of income-raising to spending-reduction was 1:10?

That's the Tea Party's position, one that has made it impossible for America realistically to address its swooning economy and plummeting economic status in the world. But why worry about economics? The Tea Party has God on their side.

A new study reveals that God (the Christian one) is the most important element in the Tea Party make-up. Based on a panel study whose members were recruited prior to the advent of the Party, researchers David Campbell and Robert Putnam determined that -- aside from Republican affiliation -- the strongest predictor of who became a Tea Party member was a person's desire to mix religion in politcs.

Enter, center stage, Rick Perry. Perry has been elected three times as governor of Texas, the second largest (and the fastest growing) state in the union. He is now a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Perry believes in God. Does he ever. Just before entering the presidential race, Perry led a large faith rally in Houston where people cried out to Jesus. Perry's invitation read: "As an elected leader, I'm all too aware of government's limitations when it comes to fixing things that are spiritual in nature. That's where prayer comes in and we need it more than ever."

Perry regularly calls on God to solve earthly problems. His most notable previous effort was invoking God's name to end the long drought which is suffocating Texas. In April Perry announced "Days of Prayer for Rain." At the time of the prayer days, "forecasters called for a 20 to 30 percent chance of rain." Unfortunately it didn't rain, and "in the four months since Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Nearly all of Texas is now in 'extreme or exceptional' drought."

Damn -- the Devil is winning! But Perry -- as indicated by his recent prayer rally -- is not in the least discouraged. What, is he supposed to rely on science? Perry regards global warming as "a scientific theory that has not been proved." Campaigning in New Hamphsire, located in the most liberal section of the country, Perry fairly spit out his contempt for climate researchers: "I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects."

Today in New Hampshire, Perry described evolution as "a theory that’s out there and it’s got some gaps in it. In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools.” Thank God!

The next President in the 21st Century may be the first, so far as I can tell, to embrace creationism since the beginning of the last century!

Come to think, weren't the last two Presidents both born-again Christians (even if they weren't as stupid as Perry)?

And, oh -- did I mention that one of the two other leading Republican contenders is Michele Bachmann, a Christian fundamentalist who shares all of Perry's views while specializing herself in gay-bashing on biblical grounds? (Of course, the third is a devout Christian also -- although he doesn't talk too much about it, because, well -- read this.)

So, Dr. Barber, what do you make of these United States, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world still, in light of your theory?




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Source URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/72236

[DRSB]

How Religious Are Americans, Really?!

By Nigel Barber, Ph.D.

For a developed country, the U.S. is very religious (1). Some 65 percent of Americans say that religion is important in their daily lives compared to just 17 percent of Swedes, 19 percent of Danes, and 24 percent of Japanese according to Gallup data (2).

In general, there is plenty of evidence that religion is losing its power and influence in the U.S. as it is in other developed countries. According to Steve Bruce (3):

First, there is ample evidence of Christianity in the USA losing power, prestige and popularity. Secondly, there is ample evidence that Christianity in the USA has changed in ways expected by the secularization paradigm: greater emphasis on individual choice, a shift from other-worldly to this-worldly salvation, and an increasing therapeutic orientation to religion. Thirdly, … there has been no significant reversal of the major trend of religion becoming marginal to the operation of the social system.

Even so, if 65 percent of Americans say that religion is important to them, surely the majority would also be going to church on Sunday. We have all seen the pictures of crowded mosques at Friday prayer in conservative Muslim countries. If the U.S. population is as religious as survey responders say, then it would be hard to find a seat in most churches on Sunday.

Critics of the secularization thesis point to Gallup data on self-reported church attendance that have hovered above 40 percent during the past half century. This is substantial, if still a minority. During the 1990s, scholars became aware that the numbers claiming to attend church each week were starkly inconsistent with the number of empty pews. As Steve Bruce states:

In surveys conducted by Gallup and other competent organizations, about 35 percent of self-defined Episcopalians said they had been to church in the previous seven days. But the Church’s own figures suggest that only 16 percent actually did so.

Sociologist C. Kirk Hadaway and coworkers (4) found that actual church attendances were far lower than attendance rates claimed in surveys. He measured actual attendance rates by counting the congregations of all the churches in Ashtabula County, Ohio. Ashtabuleans claimed attendance rates that were 83 percent higher than their actual attendance.

These results were also verified in research by sociologist Penny Long Marler on a large Baptist congregation in Alabama. About 40 percent of this congregation actually showed up at Sunday services. When surveyed during the following week, approximately 70 percent said that they had attended. So the self-reported attendance rates for this conservative church with unusually high attendance rates by national standards were inflated by about 75 percent.

Using self-reported church attendance in the U.S. to claim that religion has not declined is using a rubber ruler. When 40 percent of Americans said that they attended church in the 1950s, most of them really did go to church. When the same number claimed to attend forty years later, however, almost half of them were lying. In reality, a huge majority of Americans, about four in five, do not go to church on a regular basis, although they clearly believe that they ought to go to church. Otherwise, they would not go to the trouble of lying about it. Still, using data on people’s willingness to lie about going to church to discredit a secularization trend for the U.S. is absurd.

Contemporary Americans are not big on going to church. Contributing to religious charities is one aspect of religious commitment that really has not changed. It remained at the same level in the late 1980s as it had been 50 years earlier despite the fact that incomes rose (3). Corrected for income level, there has been a steep drop in monetary commitment to churches. Americans gave just 1.6 percent of their incomes to the church in 1983 compared to 2.2 percent in 1963, a relative drop of 37%.

By most objective measures, religion declined steeply in the U.S. over the past half-century. Subjective measures are more stable. The majority of Americans still believe in God (about 76 percent, with 12 percent atheists and 12 percent agnostic, 5) and say that religion is important in their lives. Religion remains stronger here than in Europe whether one looks at objective evidence or self reports. But that is not saying much.



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Source URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/98120

[MrJonno]

I can think of a couple of things that cause it

A weak welfare state and health cover, if you fall on hard times you had better hope god will save you (or at least a church) as no one else will but more fundamentally than that is it is politically useful.

Take away religion and what do people vote on , its not immigration, its not abortion, its not really crime, its not who we are bombing abroad, its not gay marriage its basically two things

1) economics which translates as how much do you earn and how do you earn it. I'm on an average wage and an atheist generally I am far more likely to vote the same way as a christian or muslim on the same wage than an atheist investment banker. Now in Europe thats generally called 'sensible', in the US its called class warfare

2) Public services in particular health

To put it bluntly religion makes people who are poor vote against their own economic interests and is incredibly useful