Welcome to the Tuesday edition of the Coffee Hour on Street Prophets. This is our communities’ open thread where we can talk about what’s happening in our lives, our thoughts on current events, and anything else that strikes your fancy. I thought I’d start today’s discussion by looking at a recent study about religious affiliation.
One out of five Americans—20%--currently indicate that they have no religious affiliation affording to a recent analysis of data from the General Social Survey by sociologists from the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University. This is a significant increase from 8% in 1990.
The General Social Survey contains a basic core of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions which facilitate time-trend studies. The survey is generally regarded as the single best source of data on societal trends.
With regard to demographics, the researchers found that men are more likely than women to indicate no religious affiliation: 24% among men as compared with only 16% among women.
Another recent study by the Pew Research Center found that about one third of adults under the age of 30 don’t have a religious affiliation.
With regard to politics, 40% of people who identify themselves as liberal have no religious affiliation as compared with only 9% of the conservatives. The researchers feel that the shift away from religion is tied to politics. A heightened national focus on social issues may be driving people away from religion. According to Claude Fischer, one of the researchers at UC, Berkeley:
“Increasingly, people identify and link organized religion with anti-gay attitudes, sexual conservatism, a whole range of those kinds of social cultural values. One way you can think about it is, this is blowback."
As conservative Protestant Christian politicians seek to turn the U.S. into a theocracy, it looks like they are intending to disenfranchise a significant minority of Americans.
This is an open thread. Feel free to comment on the article, or what every you're thinking about.