The Population of Non-Christians Keeps Rising in America

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 2:09 PM on February 25, 2008.

In a national demographic shift of equal importance to the increasing number of Latinos, Asians and "Others" within race / ethnicity self-identification in America, the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian continues to decline as a precipitous rate:

But the survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said.(...)

The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country's fourth largest "religious group."(...)

While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for about two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 51 percent.(...)

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The complete survey can be found here. Overall, it indicates that 21.4% of the country does not self-identify as Christian, with unaffiliated making up the majority of that diverse group. It is also worth noting that unaffiliated is itself a diverse and largely unknown group:

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion "as nothing in particular." Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

This is a massive demographic shift that we must understand. Such a large change in a major ideological institution in America, religion, necessarily results in a major shift in American ideology in general. In particular, I have often noted how self-identified whites who do not self-identify as Christian tend to vote for Democrats at almost exactly the same 2-1 or 3-1 ratios as self-identified non-whites. When someone does not self-identify as Christian, it appears to have an equivalent impact on their voting behavior as not self-identifying as white. Given that both non-Christian self-identifiers and non-white self-identifies are growing at rapid rates in America, they appear to be the future of both the Democratic Party in particular and American politics in general. More than 60% of Americans under the age of 43 fall into one or both of these demographic groups. This massive generational demographic shift, combined with the conservative movement's attack on these groups, are the main reasons for why Democrats are no performing exceptionally well with young voters in America.

The diversity within these groups makes continuing to appeal to them at such fantastic rates a difficult task. Latinos, Asians, those with unaffiliated religions, and the religious but non-Christian are all highly diverse groups within themselves, making any monolithic messaging difficult. Faced with such a diverse array of emerging cultural identities within America, the only generalized solution for Democrats and progressives is to make certain that pluralism is a core value in both rhetoric and legislation. The conservative movement has done a good job presenting a cultural supremacist contrast, leaving progressives with a wide open opportunity to continue to score huge margins among the fastest growing demographic groups in America.

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Tagged as: christianity, religion

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.