Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The biggest losers

Un cattolico americano ogni tre ha abbandonato la chiesa.
Sarà probabilmente per via dell'ultimo pregiudizio socialmente
accettabile in un Paese dalla politica così servile verso lo Stato
ebraico.
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=BpqY55RWmGXRCxs36hbv4vpqNdNkmHfM
A survey on American belief overturns some scholars' theories
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By ALAN WOLFE
Released to the public late last month, the findings of the Pew Forum
on Religion & Public Life's survey on the American religious landscape
became instant front-page news. Based on more than 35,000 interviews
with Americans over 18, it is one of the most extensive surveys to
date. A bare majority of Americans (51.5 percent) identify themselves
as Protestant. Close to a majority (44 percent) have switched faiths
at least once in their lives. One in three native-born Roman Catholics
has left the church, which is increasingly dependent on immigrants to
maintain its 23.9 percent of the American population. The percentage
of those with no distinct religious preference is now 16.1. Nearly
four in 10 Americans (37 percent) are intermarried.
The remarkable fluidity of American belief is not especially
surprising to scholars; social scientists and demographers have long
noted the degree to which Americans, rather than having their religion
determined for them by their births, choose their faiths in an open
and competitive market. In some ways, the major achievement of the Pew
study is to bring to the attention of the public what is conventional
wisdom among academics.
Yet other findings in the study shed new light on issues around which
there has been no scholarly consensus. Three in particular are worthy
of attention: the size and composition of minority faiths, the winners
and losers in the religious marketplace, and the potential prospects
of the religious right. Some scholarly thinking -- and rethinking -- is
clearly in order.
Most surveys of American religious attitudes interview some 1,000
people, a sample size that allows for a more-or-less representative
portrayal of the population as a whole. Yet that sample size also
makes it difficult to obtain reliable findings on religions whose
adherents are few. If a faith constitutes only 1 percent of the total
share, a survey may uncover 10 of its adherents, or, depending on the
luck of the draw, it may not, which means that any overall conclusions
about the size of the group are unlikely to be reliable. One
consequence has been that estimates of such nonmajority religions as
Islam have been all over the map, ranging from 1 percent to 10 percent
of the American population.
The size of Islam relative to other American faiths happens to be an
issue of major significance to scholars of religion. For instance,
Georgetown University's John Esposito has long argued that we need to
speak to a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition because the histories of
all three faiths have been so intertwined. If studies were to show
more Muslims than Jews in the United States, the case for not using
the term "Judeo-Christian" to describe its religious character would
be even stronger. Along similar lines, if Muslims were to be shown to
have become the largest group in the United States that is neither
Christian nor Jewish, that might be taken as evidence that we are
about to experience what the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington
has called a "clash of civilizations" within America's borders.
But the Pew survey's findings unsettle both arguments: The lowest
estimate usually cited of the Muslim population, it turns out, is too
high. Only 0.6 percent of Americans adhere to the Muslim faith,
equally divided between Sunni and Shia. If Pew is correct, there are
more Unitarians (0.7 percent), Jehovah's Witnesses (0.7 percent), and
atheists (1.6 percent) than Muslims in the United States. Nor are
Muslims, as some scholars have suggested, anywhere near surpassing
Jews as America's leading non-Christian faith; there are nearly three
times as many Jews (1.7 percent of the population) as Muslims. Two
other minority faiths are as important, in terms of sheer size: Greek,
Russian, Armenian, and other Orthodox adherents (0.6 percent) and
Buddhists (0.7 percent).
Such findings suggest that the problems scholars have had in
characterizing the overall religious nature of the United States will
increase. In ways that haven't necessarily been understood until now,
it is becoming increasingly obvious that the term "Judeo-Christian" no
longer makes sense, given how many Americans are neither. But the
favorite terms to replace it -- "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" or
"Abrahamic" -- seem equally inappropriate. It is not just that
Buddhists, who do not trace their roots to Abraham, may outnumber
Muslims, who do. It is that the combined percentage of those who
identify themselves as either Hindu (0.4 percent) or from "other world
religions" (0.3 percent) does so as well. We are not one nation
divided into three monotheistic faiths. We are a nation characterized
by many faiths, as well as by none.
Questions about the dynamics of American pluralism follow from these
findings. No one is more important than that of the relationship
between religion and morality. A common morality, founders like George
Washington and John Jay believed, was dependent on a common religion.
The fact that we now have so many religions in this country suggests
either that no common morality is possible, or that, if it is,
religion cannot be its most important source. The ways in which
religious diversity either increases or detracts from speaking about
the common good ought to be a subject stimulated by Pew's conclusions.
A second finding of the Pew survey important to scholars of religion
concerns which religions gain and which ones lose in the marketplace.
For many years now, it has been received wisdom that mainline,
politically liberal Protestant churches have been the losers and
conservative evangelical churches have been winning. That assumption,
too, will have to be rethought.
The biggest losers among American religions turns out to be Catholics:
As many as one in 10 Americans is a former Catholic. The findings do
not allow us to establish cause and effect, so some observers may
claim that people are leaving the Roman Catholic Church because it has
become too liberal, while others blame the sexual-abuse crisis among
priests and an out-of-touch hierarchy. Chances are, however, that the
decline in Catholicism has more to do with intermarriage -- 22 percent
of Catholics marry outside their faith, compared with 10 percent of
Hindus and 17 percent of Mormons -- than with attitudes toward abortion
or birth control.
Nor is it quite the case that conservative Protestant churches are the
winners. According to the Pew survey, mainline Protestant
denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and
Episcopalians, were all losers, but that does not mean that
evangelically oriented denominations were winners. The most
interesting finding in that regard involves the Baptists, who lost
most among all Protestant denominations. The term "Baptist" includes
African-American, mainline, and evangelical churches, so we cannot
specify precisely from the Pew data which of those groups is losing
the most. But since the single largest component of the Baptist
religion in America is the Southern Baptist Convention, which is
evangelical, losses in the Baptist category make it highly unlikely
that the Southern Baptists are growing to any significant extent.
Evangelicals appear to be just as subject to the ups and downs of the
religious marketplace as everyone else.
One theory that has gained widespread adherence among sociologists of
religion is that the strict teachings of conservative churches, by
demanding more of their members, appeal to those seeking something
more meaningful than the bland and easy-to-swallow theology of
mainline religion. But Pew has found that the strictest of all
churches, at least in the sheer amount of proselytizing time and
energy it requires, has the lowest overall retention rate: Jehovah's
Witnesses. Pentecostal churches, also generally viewed as demanding,
are growing, but barely. Orthodox Judaism attracts only 10 percent of
all Jews. Most likely there was a movement in the direction of
conservative religions a generation ago. It may have been the result
of the attraction of stricter churches, although not all sociologists
of religion agree about that. But whatever the case in the past, there
is no strong evidence of strict churches attracting a disproportionate
share of members now.
Political scientists interested in American religion, such as John C.
Green, Clyde Wilcox, and Kenneth D. Wald, believe that the influence
of the religious right may have peaked. The Pew survey provides strong
evidence that they are right. If the religious world of adults in the
United States is diverse and in constant flux, the religious
affiliations of young Americans, who will be tomorrow's voters and
citizens, are even more so. Three times as many Americans under 30 as
those over 70 are not religiously affiliated. Mainline Protestants
tend to be elderly, but so do evangelical Protestants; the differences
in age distribution are minimal, suggesting that both groups are
having problems attracting the young. If you want to find religious
groups that have disproportionately large numbers of young people, you
have to look at Hindus (76 percent of whom are under 50), Muslims (63
percent), and Buddhists (63 percent). As far as the young are
concerned, the prospects for a Protestant majority, let alone a Moral
Majority, seem bleak.
Those trends are likely to be compounded by the effects of
immigration. Catholicism in the United States is well on its way to
becoming an immigrant church, much as it was in the late 19th century
when the bulk of its members were born in Poland, Ireland, or Italy.
Although college campuses have increasingly attracted Asian students
with strong evangelical ties, the percentage of white people among
evangelicals as a whole was a whopping 81 percent. The number of
minority worshipers among evangelicals was still higher than among
mainline Protestants, though lower than among Catholics. But while
conservative Protestant churches may be able to revitalize themselves
by recruiting immigrants with pronounced conservative moral and
religious views, so far there are no indications that is happening in
any great numbers. Indeed, I would argue that continued immigration
will likely contribute more to America's commitments to diversity and
tolerance than to support for conservative causes.
The Pew study does contain methodological flaws, including a low
response rate of 24 percent. Some of its findings, like the relatively
low number of Muslims, may be due to problems associated with
interviewing immigrants and will need further confirmation from other
studies to become more widely accepted. Yet as surveys go, this is one
of the most careful and comprehensive ever conducted on the American
religious landscape. Students of American religion will be pondering
its implications for years to come.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American
Public Life and a professor of political science at Boston College.

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