TruthBook Religious News Blog

July 24, 2009

In Utah, July 24 is Pioneer Day, a state holiday commemorating the day in 1847 when the first Mormon settlers, led by Brigham Young, entered the Salt Lake Valley. Today, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon groups make up 58% of Utah's population and 1.7% of the total U.S. adult population, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life in 2007. The religious tradition, founded in the United States in 1830, has come under increased public scrutiny in recent years as a result of prominent Mormons in the news, such as Mitt Romney, a 2008 Republican presidential primary candidate and former governor of Massachusetts, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader in the U.S. Senate, as well as the involvement of the LDS church in political issues, such as the recent debate over gay marriage in California.

A new analysis of the Landscape Survey data reveals that as a group Mormons are among the most devout and conservative religious people in the country. The Mormon community is also internally diverse, with differences according to levels of religious commitment and educational attainment, regions of the country where Mormons live, and between lifelong Mormons and those who have converted to the faith. This report explores Mormons' unique place in the American religious landscape and is divided into three parts: demographic characteristics, religious beliefs and practices, and social and political views.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article, along with breakdowns of the survey.

Labels: Church of Latter Day Saints, demographics. politics, Mormonism, pew Religious Landscape Survey, religion

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Friday, May 29, 2009

Everybody’s A Little Bit Jew-ish

Everybody’s A Little Bit Jew-ish

by Joshua Hammerman
Special To The Jewish Week

For ages we’ve been obsessed with the question, “Who is a Jew?” Perhaps we need to be asking instead, “Who isn’t?”

A team of geneticists has uncovered explicit evidence of mass conversions of Sephardic Jews to Catholicism in 15th- and 16th-century Spain and Portugal. The study, based on an analysis of Y-chromosomes and reported first in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates that 20 percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry. That’s about 10 million people. While anti-Semitism remains pervasive and the Jewish population microscopic, there is a deep fascination with all things Jewish. “We’ve gone from a period of pillaging the Jews and then suppressing and ignoring their patrimony to a period of rising
curiosity and fascination [about them],” said Anna Maria Lopez, the director of Toledo’s Sephardic Museum in a New York Times interview.

So while there are almost no Jews left in Spain, a residue remains, literally in their DNA. Everyone’s a little bit Jew-ish, even if almost no one is a Jew.

The suffix “ish,” indicating approximation, is increasingly popular among today’s youth, according to the language forum, “Wordreference.com.” Kids are constantly tossing it about: A movie is “creepish,” he looks “Europeanish,” the dress is “greenish” and the meeting begins at “five-ish.” In an age where fluidity is the norm, and everything, from the national debt to Arlen Specter’s party affiliation, is a moving target, we all need to learn how to go with the flow. Fortunately, we Jews are uniquely prepared to do just that: We already have “ish” in our name.

The Pew Foundation’s latest survey on the American religious landscape, called, “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.,” notes that Americans change religions almost as often as they change their underwear, with over half abandoning their childhood faith-group, usually before the age of 24.
Meanwhile, Synagogue 3000’s latest survey indicates that American Jews are foregoing secular and ethnic identification in favor of a more “spiritually oriented” — and therefore more fluid — self-definition. The survey notes that the presence of Christian, or formerly Christian, members in many Jewish households has led to a greater comfort level with spiritual ideas and language. While there are some forms of spirituality that are innately Jewish, the category lends itself to a blurring of boundaries between faiths. In the S3K report, Rabbi Rachel Cowan states that spirituality “helps me see that I’m not the whole story here, that I’m just part of something much bigger.” Bigger even than Jewish peoplehood.

Please click "external source" for this entire, very interesting article.

Labels: genetics, Jewish, Joshua Hammerman, pew Religious Landscape Survey

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Friday, May 01, 2009

Survey: Half of U.S. adults have switched religions

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

About half of all Americans have switched religions at least once, according to the most in-depth survey on the topic, released Monday.

And that may still be "a conservative estimate," says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Pew's new survey is based on re-contacting 2,800 people from its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of 35,000 people, released last year. Pew estimated at the time that about 44% of Americans have changed religions. It now says between 47% and 59% have, if you count the millions who once switched but have returned to their childhood faith.

The Flux questionaire was conducted in English and Spanish between Oct. 3 and Nov 7. The findings are focused on Catholics, Protestants and the unaffiliated. There were too few converts to or from Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and other religions to analyze their views, researchers said.

Both the original Religious Landscape Survey, and the new survey are snapshots in time, so it's not possible to tell whether America has always been a bubbling chemistry lab of religious change. But this is the first to spell out the switches in such detail, establishing a baseline to measure future changes, and potential problems.

Please click on "external link" for the entire article. This is only a small snapshot of the information contained in it.

Labels: Cathy Lynn Grossman, Flux, Luis Lugo, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, pew Religious Landscape Survey, religion