Losing Our Religion

Results of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) were released yesterday, with one of the most notable findings being that a growing percentage of the population feels no affinity for organized religion at all.

The survey, based on 113,000 interviews, also contained these findings:

- Geographies with traditionally strong Catholic pockets (New England, Rust Belt) have seen shifts, due to an influx of immigrants and the exodus (so to speak) of retirees and job seekers to the South;

- Baptists and Mainline Protestants have seen their ranks decline since 1990;

- Percentages of Jewish respondents decreased, while numbers for Muslims increased;

- Americans claiming no religion at all climbed from its 1990 figure to 15%, out-ranking Mainline Protestantism. Over a third of the respondents (34%) living in Vermont qualified themselves as “None” when asked the survey’s leading question – “What is your religious identity?”

The survey also suggests that the respondents who answered “None” are not necessarily atheist; it is simply that they have remained spiritual in some way but have chosen to disaffiliate themselves with an organized religion. When asked for his thoughts, ex-Catholic Dylan Rossi, a philosophy student from Boston says that he’s typical among his friends: “If the religion comes up, everyone at the table will start mocking it.”

That’s funny; that’s just what my friends and I do when the topic of philosophy students comes up.