With in-touch leaders like Grandpa Crazypants here, it's a shock that younger people aren't rushing to pray for the end of the world
There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that our younger generations are becoming less religious. The good news is that our younger generations are becoming
less religious.
But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.
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The falloff in traditional religious beliefs and practices coincides with changes in the religious composition of the U.S. public. A growing share of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, including some who self-identify as atheists or agnostics as well as many who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” Altogether, the religiously unaffiliated (also called the “nones”) now account for 23% of the adult population, up from 16% in 2007.
But all is not lost. There are still many people who are as religious today as they were eight years ago.
At the same time, the vast majority of Americans (77% of all adults) continue to identify with some religious faith. And this religiously affiliated population – comprising a wide variety of Protestants as well as Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and adherents of other faith traditions – is, on the whole, just as religiously committed today as when the study was first conducted in 2007. Fully two-thirds of religiously affiliated adults say they pray every day and that religion is very important to them, and roughly six-in-ten say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month; those numbers have changed little, if at all, in recent years. And nearly all religiously affiliated people in the survey (97%) continue to believe in God, though a declining share express this belief with absolute certainty (74% in 2014, down from 79% in 2007).
In other, even more positive news, the trends in religions, is moving in the towards acceptance of what was once considered sinful behavior (homosexuality). Surprisingly (read: not surprisingly), even though there is more acceptance of homosexuality, this has not changed those very same religious people from observing and praying at the same rates as they did before accepting a gay baby Jesus into their lives.
But one thing is clear. As the population of the United States grows, the percentage of religious people declines.
These changes are happening even though the absolute number of Americans who are highly religiously engaged has not changed very much. In other words, the United States is growing less religious (in percentage terms) not because there are fewer highly religious people but rather because, as the overall U.S. population has grown, there are now many more nonreligious people than was the case just a few years ago.
All of this is to say that people like Pat Robertson are becoming more and more like the dinosaurs that Paul rode out of Tarsus 2000 years ago.