Jun 7, 2023 01:26 AM
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-com...r-religion
EXCERPTS: More Americans are abandoning religion [...] than was the case seventeen years ago. Those are the top-line conclusions of a report that the Public Religion Research Institute ... published earlier this month...
That news as such is not surprising—it comports with reports by Gallup, Pew, and other survey organizations. But it does raise a question about the tightening of restrictions on legal abortion and the expansion of protections for religion by the U.S. Supreme Court: How can it be that religion is at once declining in Americans’ individual lives and surging in our civic life?
One answer was proposed by Kelefa Sanneh [...] The sharp recent drop in religious affiliation—from seventy per cent in 1999 to forty-seven per cent in 2020, according to a Gallup poll—“helps explain the militance that is one of the defining features of Christian nationalism,” Sanneh observed. “It is a minority movement, espousing a claim that might not have seemed terribly controversial a few decades ago: that America is, and should remain, a Christian nation.” (This point aligns with the recent Supreme Court rulings that protect the free expression of religion as a right threatened by an anti-religious majority.)
Another answer is that the withdrawal [...] gives free play to the hard-liners who remain: they’re now at the center of many congregations rather than on the fringes, and pastors who used to tailor their preaching to a mixed group ... now preach to the choir, literally and figuratively.
Within the P.R.R.I. report, however, is a set of statistics about religion and U.S. Hispanics [...] Historically, Central and South America were predominantly Catholic regions [...] As the story was told, those immigrants would reinvigorate American Catholicism as they settled and made lives in the United States.
[...] The P.R.R.I. report tells a different story. As of 2020, according to the survey ... What’s striking about the report’s profile of Hispanic Catholics is that their rates of disaffection with religion track almost exactly with those of white Catholics. ... Statistically ... they are withdrawing from active participation in the Church in the same proportions as the ethnic Irish or Germans or Italians whose ancestors came to this country, as Catholics, a hundred or more years ago.
What might explain this? It could be seen as an expression of simple assimilation: as Hispanics new to this country began to worship in predominantly white churches, their habits of affiliation (and disaffiliation) came to resemble those of whites. But the P.R.R.I. survey data suggest otherwise... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: More Americans are abandoning religion [...] than was the case seventeen years ago. Those are the top-line conclusions of a report that the Public Religion Research Institute ... published earlier this month...
That news as such is not surprising—it comports with reports by Gallup, Pew, and other survey organizations. But it does raise a question about the tightening of restrictions on legal abortion and the expansion of protections for religion by the U.S. Supreme Court: How can it be that religion is at once declining in Americans’ individual lives and surging in our civic life?
One answer was proposed by Kelefa Sanneh [...] The sharp recent drop in religious affiliation—from seventy per cent in 1999 to forty-seven per cent in 2020, according to a Gallup poll—“helps explain the militance that is one of the defining features of Christian nationalism,” Sanneh observed. “It is a minority movement, espousing a claim that might not have seemed terribly controversial a few decades ago: that America is, and should remain, a Christian nation.” (This point aligns with the recent Supreme Court rulings that protect the free expression of religion as a right threatened by an anti-religious majority.)
Another answer is that the withdrawal [...] gives free play to the hard-liners who remain: they’re now at the center of many congregations rather than on the fringes, and pastors who used to tailor their preaching to a mixed group ... now preach to the choir, literally and figuratively.
Within the P.R.R.I. report, however, is a set of statistics about religion and U.S. Hispanics [...] Historically, Central and South America were predominantly Catholic regions [...] As the story was told, those immigrants would reinvigorate American Catholicism as they settled and made lives in the United States.
[...] The P.R.R.I. report tells a different story. As of 2020, according to the survey ... What’s striking about the report’s profile of Hispanic Catholics is that their rates of disaffection with religion track almost exactly with those of white Catholics. ... Statistically ... they are withdrawing from active participation in the Church in the same proportions as the ethnic Irish or Germans or Italians whose ancestors came to this country, as Catholics, a hundred or more years ago.
What might explain this? It could be seen as an expression of simple assimilation: as Hispanics new to this country began to worship in predominantly white churches, their habits of affiliation (and disaffiliation) came to resemble those of whites. But the P.R.R.I. survey data suggest otherwise... (MORE - missing details)
