TruthBook Religious News Blog

September 24,
by Vanessa Barnes

According to a study entitled "American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population," released Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 15% of Americans do not associate with a religious denomination.

The study was conducted by lead researcher Barry Kosmin and professor Ariela Keysar of Trinity College of Hartford and assisted by Professor Ryan Cragun of the University of Tampa and Juhem Navarro-Rivera of the University of Connecticut.

Researchers studied the results of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) which questioned 54,461 adults in English or Spanish.

The category of "NONES", those who answered "None" when asked their religious identity, grew greatly in the 1990's according to the study. The NONES were the only group to have increased in every state and region of the country during the past 18 years.

About 59% is agnostic or deist, while a small minority is atheist. About 27% profess belief in a personal God. Some in the survey participate occasionally in religious rituals, whiles others say they never would.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article, including an informative video.

Labels: ARIS, Nones, religion, Vanessa Barnes, video

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Thursday, September 03, 2009

Seeing the Future: Can Religion Evolve and Survive in a Changing World?

By Peter Savastano
September 2, 2009

Since the fall of Secularization Theory, which claimed that belief in God would slowly recede in the face of science and technology, we still must ask: Is there a future for formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it in rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world? Here’s what religion will have to do for humans to survive and flourish.

One of the last books the Catholic mystic, social activist, poet, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton read just before his tragic death in Bangkok, Thailand on December 10, 1968, was Final Integration in the Adult Personality (1965, E.J. Brill). Written by the Iranian-born psychologist A. Reza Arasteh, the central premise of the book is that in order for a person to reach final integration of the adult personality, she or he must grow beyond their native culture and religious tradition.

In a subsequent book published twelve years after Merton’s death, Growth to Selfhood (1980, Routledge), Arasteh further develops this central idea making the paradoxical argument: that the means by which one outgrows or moves beyond the limiting worldview of one’s native religious tradition is through the practice of the religious tradition itself.

Two questions I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the last number of years is what form, structure, and expression the phenomenon we call "religion" will take in the future (that is, if "religion" is then still labeled as such); or, conversely, is there a future for religion (specifically formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it) in a rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world?

Back in the 1960s, sociologists predicted that the advancement of science and technology would usher in a secular worldview and that religion would eventually fade into the past. Or if it did manage to survive, they imagined, religion would become the purview of a small segment of the population that, kicking and screaming, has refused to enter into the contemporary world.

Of course, we now know that the sociologists were wrong. Religion, it seems, is here to stay. Rather than fade into oblivion or become a private matter, religion is front and center in the new millennium, especially since the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

Still, while it isn’t going away any time soon, it is also true that if we humans are going to collectively survive and flourish living in the information age of a globalized world, our understanding and practice of religion will have to change. While we can’t know for certain what shape or form religion will take in the future, I am willing to speculate. Fortunately, there are some trends and patterns that support my speculations so they are not simply spun out of thin air.

If the recent surveys, Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S." (2009), and the "2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)," are any indication, the process Arasteh described in his two books may be an experience common to a growing number of Americans. As the surveys suggest, this process of growing beyond one’s inherited religious tradition has become far more prevalent, sometimes spanning generations. Referred to as the Nones," these are people who identify themselves as unaffiliated with any kind of organized religion and are happy to be so. However, this does not mean that Nones have no interest in spirituality, prayer, meditation, or ritual; all areas traditionally associated with "religion."

This is just a small portion of a two-page article exploring the subject of the future of "religion." Please click on "external source" to access the entire article.

Labels: A. Reza Arasteh, ARIS, faith, God, Peter Savastano, religion, sociology

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Friday, August 21, 2009

Poll: Religious funerals not for everyone

Published: Aug. 20, 2009

HARTFORD, Conn., Aug. 20 (UPI) -- More than one-quarter of all Americans do not expect to have religious services as part of their own funerals, poll results indicate.

Researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., said their national survey of 6,000 U.S. residents found 27 percent expressed doubts their funerals would include some form of religious service, USA Today reported Thursday.

The 2008 American Religious Identification survey, conducted by researchers at the college's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, resulted in 15 percent of respondents identifying their religion as "none."

Labels: ARIS, funerals, religion

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Thursday, July 09, 2009

Churches Face the Boomer Challenge

MIKE HARTON TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Published: July 5, 2009

Two recent conversations haunt me. An old college friend, a leading-edge baby boomer (age 63) whom I knew to be a person of faith in college, told me he and his wife "had given up on the institutional church." The other con versation was with an educated professional friend, also a baby boomer, who describes herself as spiritual but not religious.

These friends' attitudes are consistent with American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS, 2008) findings that more and more of us are claiming no religious affiliation. A similar study by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 16 percent of the population has no religious identity.

Why did my college friends give up on church? Why is my spiritual friend not religious? In light of what we know about both boomers and many churches, it is not hard to speculate.

Baby boomers are as diverse a cohort as we have known. Their religious experiences run the gamut from no affiliation or faith identity to former "Jesus freaks" (from the 1960s) to very involved, regular church attenders. Some who formerly never darkened the doors of a house of worship are now actively engaged. Others who grew up in church have dropped out, many with no intention of returning.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: ARIS, Baby Boomers, church, faith, Mike Harton, religion, spirituality

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Friday, May 08, 2009

Catholics lead the exodus

MARK E. RONDEAU, Staff Writer
Posted: 05/04/2009 03:00:24 AM EDT

Monday, May 4
The departure of U.S.-born Roman Catholics from their church is a major factor in the rise of those not affiliated with any religion, as documented by the American Religious Identification Survey, which was released in March.

This crisis exploded into the news in early 2002, after the second of the ARIS surveys in 2001. In Vermont, those identifying as Catholic were 37 percent of adults in the 1990 survey, 38 percent in the 2001 survey and then down to 26 percent in 2008, Silk noted, providing the number for 2001, which wasn't included in the published survey.

A follow-up Pew survey published on April 27 focusing on religious switching asked former Catholics why they had left the faith. This survey offered respondents both a list of reasons to choose from and asked them to explain why they left in their own words. The most chosen response by the religiously unaffiliated from the list was just gradually drifted away from the religion, 71 percent; stopped believing the religion's teachings, 65 percent; "spiritual needs not being met, 43 percent. Other common choices by religiously unaffiliated former Catholics included unhappiness with church teachings on abortion and homosexuality, 56 percent; unhappiness with the treatment of women, 39 percent; and the clergy sexual abuse scandal, 27 percent.

However, there was a difference when religiously unaffiliated Catholics explained their reasons for leaving in their own words. The top reason, at 54 percent of those responding, was disagreement with religious and moral beliefs. While 42 respondents gave reasons for leaving that fell into the broad category of religious institutions, practices and people, only 2 percent of religiously unaffiliated former Catholics listed the clergy sexual abuse crisis as a reason for leaving.

Similarly, 3 percent of former Catholics who had become Protestants listed the clergy sexual abuse crisis as their reason for leaving the Catholic Church. Drifting away from the faith was given by only 4 percent of unaffiliated former Catholics when giving reasons for leaving in their own words.

Labels: ARIS, Catholicism, church, Mark E. Rondeau, priest sex scandal

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The End of Christian America

The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 4, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

NB: This is only a small excerpt of a four-page article which can be accessed by clicking on "external source" at the bottom of this snippet.

Labels: ARIS, Christianity, culture, Jon Meacham, Newsweek magazine, politics, post-Christian, religion

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Broken connection

Broken connection
Growing number of Christians claim no church affiliation
BY PAM THARP
APRIL 12, 2009

This is the first of a three-page article which is well worth reading. Please click on "external source" to access the complete piece.

Natasha Allen does not have a church she calls home, but she prays every night.

Allen is among a growing number of Americans this Easter with no religious affiliation, a group that's almost doubled in size during the past 18 years, from 8 to 15 percent, according to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) released last month. Fewer Americans also say they are Christians now than did in the 1990 survey.

And even though three-quarters of those polled still identify themselves as Christians, area pastors say the survey is an indicator of a church culture that's not fulfilling its God-given mission.

"Jesus gave us the blueprint and the church is not following it and the church is dying," said Pastor Ocie Poole of Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Richmond. "The imperative is to go and teach and the whole thing is driven by love, but too many believers won't do it and they're not concerned about the lost."

The church isn't reproducing itself because some Christian parents have failed to disciple their children in the faith, said Pastor Laura Altman of St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Richmond.

"Parents are letting children make their own decisions. Faith has to be taught," Altman said. "You don't get it by osmosis."

ARIS showed few gains in atheism, those who don't believe in God, said Liberty Church of Christ senior minister David Soper. It's the "nones," who have no connection to a church, that are most concerning, he said.

"The 'nones' are a growing trend," Soper said. "People know what the church is against and not what it's for. The church doesn't have good answers to people's problems and it's not addressing the problems they face.

"We've spent too much time in politics rather than living out our lives in Christ and in love. We need to focus on what the church was called to do: serve, love, teach and disciple. That's where the true influence lies."

Labels: ARIS, Christianity, church, Pam Tharp, religion

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Friday, March 27, 2009

Johnson: Religion survey shouldn't be alarming

3/21/2009
Jessica Johnson

Results of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, released last week, have caused many to ponder the future of Christianity in our nation. The survey found that mainline churches have experienced a sharp decline in membership, while the number of people identifying themselves as nondenominational Christians has been on the rise since 2001.

The highlight that may have been most interesting to many was that the survey concluded the challenge to Christianity in America is not coming from other religions but "from a rejection of all forms of organized religion."

Many Christians like myself have wrestled with "organized religion" in our faith in the same manner the Apostle Paul struggled with the thorn in his flesh. As a child growing up in Ebenezer Baptist Church West in Athens, I always wondered why there were different denominations that claimed to believe in the same God.

Although many Americans today are, according to the ARIS findings, rejecting organized religion, I don't interpret this trend as completely negative for Christianity. I think many people who still profess to be Christians are discarding man-made ordinances - not necessarily the order of the church - to find a more intimate and meaningful relationship with God.

The Bible clearly explains the order of the church in terms of the ministry gifts of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers that are to edify the body of Christ, but it also speaks of truly knowing God through a personal walk of faith.

Many of the Christian respondents questioned in the ARIS survey who are non-denominational are most likely looking to fill a spiritual void. Historic mainline churches are known for messages to keep believers on the straight and narrow, which we definitely need, but many people are also yearning for teachings that illustrate how they can get to know God for themselves.

We speak of having faith constantly in the church, but in order to grow in faith one must trust in God. The word "trust" occurs 152 times in the Old Testament, as documented in the Scofield Study Bible, and "trust" is the Old Testament term for faith.

When thinking of how David wrote songs emphasizing trust, such as Psalm 13:5, which reads, "but I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation," it's clear God desires much more from us than just adherence to his statutes.

The ARIS data concerning the state of Christianity in the United States have alarmed many, but I think the numbers reveal something much deeper.

Now, more than ever, many Americans are looking to their faith to sustain them through the trying times they are facing. They are seeking to strengthen the temple within themselves amid uncertainty and apprehension about the future.

It is my prayer that those on this spiritual path, who have discarded the manmade precepts of religion, will find the fulfillment in God for which they have been diligently searching.

Labels: ARIS, Christianity, church, faith, Jessica Johnson, trust

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America's faltering faith

March 20, 2009

By Ken Connor

Americans appear to be losing faith in God and in our cultural institutions. Is the loss of confidence in one related to a loss of confidence in the other? The answer is unequivocally yes.

How we view God inevitably determines how we view our fellow man. And how we view our fellow man, in turn, determines how we treat him. Created in God's image or creature of chance? The answer makes a difference because what we believe determines how we behave.

America's Founders recognized the important role that a shared belief in God contributed to the stability of our society. Our second President, John Adams, said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Adams' son, John Quincy Adams (our sixth President), declared, "This form of government... is productive of everything which is great and excellent among men. But its principles are as easily destroyed, as human nature is corrupted.... A government is only to be supported by pure religion or austere morals. Private and public virtue is the only foundation of republics." Both presidents — father and son — understood that a shared belief in God is necessary to produce the shared values required for a stable society. Belief in God was the foundation of the republic. The very freedoms and republican form of government we embrace today require society's acknowledgment of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" acknowledged by the Founders in our Declaration of Independence.

Unfortunately, shared belief in a transcendent God — the cornerstone of our stable society — seems to be eroding in America today. The recently-released American Religious Identification Survey is an overview of religious demographics in America. Preliminary results show an America rapidly losing its religious faith. Since the survey began in 1990, the number of self-identified Christians has dropped from 86.2% to 76%, and the number of people claiming no religion has risen from 8.2% to 15%. People are losing faith in God at a rapid rate.

As our shared belief in a transcendent God disappears, our shared moral values inevitably give way to a pervasive relativism. We no longer believe in common moral values, so social norms begin to disappear. Every man is a law unto himself. Radical individualism reigns. We should, therefore, not be surprised when our cultural abandonment of shared values manifests itself in the caveat-emptor business practices which have produced our current financial crisis or the forked-tongued politicking of politicians who will spin any lie or reverse any position in order to pass the buck and keep their jobs. Without shared moral values, every person makes their own morality.

Likewise, we should not be surprised to find that Americans' faith in our cultural institutions is also faltering. Without shared belief in God, social values disappear, social norms are abandoned, and we no longer know what to expect from institutions like the family, church, or state. According to the General Social Survey of 2008, Americans have lost trust in nearly every single major American institution. The recent poll asked Americans whether or not they have confidence in several cultural and political institutions. The preliminary results have just been released, and the picture is not pretty. Since 1976, Americans have lost confidence in every major cultural institution except for the military. This list includes the scientific community, financial institutions, organized religion, the federal government, the media, medicine, education, and major companies. The percentage of Americans expressing a "great deal" of confidence in organized religion has dropped from 32% in 1976 to 20% in 2008. Over that same period, confidence in the media fell from 29% to 9%. Confidence in Congress fell from a dismal 14% to an even more dismal 11%. Clearly we Americans are losing faith in our cultural institutions.

A shared belief in a transcendent God produces shared moral values which provide people with social norms that give them confidence in their culture. Without this core belief, the structure of society is undermined by man-centered relativism. An increasingly unbelieving people also suffer from a loss of confidence in one another. Having replaced faith in a transcendent God with faith in flawed human beings, they inevitably set themselves for disappointment and abandon the only moral basis for a stable society.

Only by regaining our shared faith in a transcendent Law Giver will Americans be able to recover our faith in our society.

Labels: ARIS, belief, faith, God, Ken Connor, morality, relativism

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Here's the steeple. Open the door. Where are all the people?

Elizabeth Scarinci
3/19/09

This page one of three. Please click on "external source" for complete article.

The steeple of the Congregational Church of Middlebury is the most defining characteristic of the town's skyline. But despite the steeples that dominate many Vermont towns, religion is a declining landmark of the state. The most recent American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), released March 9, showed that a record 34 percent of Vermonters claim no religious affiliation, making Vermont the most secular state in the country, followed by New Hampshire and Maine.

The Program on Public Values at Trinity College recently conducted the last of three surveys from 1990 to 2008. On a national level, Americans who claim no religion almost doubled from 1990 to 2008. In 1990, 8.2 percent claimed no religion, which spiked to 14.2 percent in 2001 and is now at 15 percent. The number of people answering "None" grew in every state.

Vermont's status as the leader of "Nones" is an issue that Vermonters themselves can unfurl. Professor Larry Yarbrough, chair of the Religion department at the College, speculates that part of the reason is that Vermonters are independent and freethinking.

"For the most part, they are not susceptible to be led one way or another, and that definitely comes in [to play]," Yarbrough said.

Anne Brown, communication director of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, said that religious institutions could be better communicating their missions and relating them better to Vermonters' lives.

"I think this is a response to the failure of the institutional religious bodies to respond in a creative and helpful way to the search for meaning," Brown said. "We have often been more focused on maintaining tradition than on meeting people where they are with something that works for them."

Yarbrough said he would be interested in a survey that asked the people who claim no religion if they were spiritual but just did not associate with an organized religion. He speculates that many Vermonters who find themselves spiritual would say that they can encounter God in nature.

Labels: ARIS, Elizabeth Scarinci, nature, religion, Vermont