Monday, April 6, 2009

Newsweek article on Christianity in America

There's a good article in this week's Newsweek titled The End of Christian America. It's definitely worth reading, and I think rather well written and fair. Here's an excerpt giving some of the statistics that resulted in the article being written:

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)
On his blog, Al Mohler comments on the article and on his conversations with the the author, who is the editor of Newsweek.

1 comments:

SarahRachel said...

That's CRAZY about how many more agnostics/atheists there are. What a huge increase!
Alan and I miss you guys and hope you're doing well!! =)