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Rich Visualization of Our Religious Affiliation Changes [trends]
Michael Bell: Looking at the Pew Forum’s “Changes in Religious Affiliation” Data | internetmonk.com
A few days ago, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of a survey entitled Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S. This was followup to their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey that they released last year.
I have been busy in the last week doing a bit of reverse engineering on the numbers to represent the shifts in belief as best and as clearly as I can. Here is the resulting chart. You can click on it to see the full sized version.
What you are looking at is changes in American adults, from their childhoods to present day. As such it eliminates such factors as birthrate and death rate, and strictly looks at who is changing to what. We should note that immigration is a factor in this chart as present day Americans may have been born elsewhere, and so their childhood would have been in a different country. More on this later in the post.
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Comments
At a first pass, it looks
At a first pass,
it looks like "none" and "other" are the "winners" and traditional American Christianity is the "loser."
While this is not exactly good news, maybe it is reasonable to expect.
No one is actually "born" a Christian. The most you can say is that they were born into a Christian environment. If you use a sort of "zero based budgeting" you might consider that every person who STAYS a Christian is a convert of sorts, and those who migrate from "none" are inarguably converts.
I also assume that "other" involves some Christians as well, Eastern Orthodox, for example.
All that said, this analysis is not the final word since it is a static snapshot. I suspect that, adjusted for birth year, we would find a very discouraging meta trend away from affiliation with Christianity far more profound than the modest losses depicted in this aggregate.
Which brings to mind the Lord's rhetorical question: "However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" Luke 18:8
great post
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