Religious Affiliation Shrinking In the US

gollum123 notes new U.S. demographic data from the Pew Research Center which show that the percentage of Americans declaring affiliation with a particular religion has declined sharply since 2007. Americans identifying as Christian dropped from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Those describing themselves as atheist, agnostic, or simple having no affiliation took up most of the slack, rising from 16.1% to 22.8%. Members of non-Christian faiths collectively rose from 4.7% to 5.9%. Despite the overall decline, the demographics within the Christian group are getting much more racially and ethnically diverse. The willingness of respondents to marry outside their religious affiliation is also on the rise. The median age of unaffiliated adults is dropping, while the median ages of mainline Protestants and Catholics are rising. The study estimates that 85% of adults age 70 and over are Christian, while only 56% of adults ages 18-24 are Christian. They also say that each individual generation has shown a slight decrease in religious affiliation compared to their statistics in 2007.

Comments

This is not a good thing.

[ej0c]

Fun to see people pop up with the predictable, "science is winning" comments, but of course the science-religion boundary is only a small part of the story, and really not the most interesting to people who are inquisitive.

A much more intriguing line of query involves religion re public and individual liberty, welfare, and pursuit of happiness.

That is, thoughtful people will ask if this news helps or hurts people overall.

Thoughtful people would, of course, never use a phrase like 'religious wacko', idiot, etc, so, alas, this thread will see little deep inquiry.

If there are a few of you, here, you may be interested in this: lack of religion in the us is strongly correlated with poverty; economic mobility (escaping poverty, "climbing the economic ladder", achieving the "American dream") strongly correlates with religious affiliation.

And, historically, religious organizations have been at the forefront of most social change, education and the civil rights movement among them.

Re: News for nerds

[LWATCDR]

"This is very important, because religious wackos tend to be the ones against modern science and technology."
Really? I see a lot of Atheists that are antinuclear and anti GMO.
Sorry but this just about does it for me and Slashdot. I have already turned off Politics on the my front page but the editors of slashdot still keep pushing politics into other sections.
Now they are getting into social issues. News flash folks Slashdot provides as much good information on politics and social issues as People magazine does with science and technology.

For those that want this type of crap on Slashdot. Fine just put into a section I can ignore. If not I guess I will have to vote with my clicks. It is a shame because frankly the community here is so much better than say CNN or Endgadet.