By Religion News Service with BJC Staff Reports
Americans as a whole are growing less religious, but those who still consider themselves to belong to a religion are, on average, just as committed to their faiths as they were in the past — in certain respects even more so, according to the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, released Nov. 3 by the Pew Research Center.
“People who say they have a religion — which is still the vast majority of the population — show no discernible dip in levels of observance,” said Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at Pew.
“They report attending religious services as often as they did a few years ago. They pray as often as they did before, and they are just as likely to say that religion plays a very important role in their lives,” he continued. “On some measures there are even small increases in their levels of religious practice.”
More religiously affiliated adults, for example, read Scripture regularly and participate in small religious groups than did so seven years ago, according to the survey. And 88 percent of religiously affiliated adults said they prayed daily, weekly or monthly — the same percentage that reported such regular prayer in the 2007 study.
While nearly nine in 10 adults say they believe in God, belief in God overall has ticked down by about 3 percentage points in recent years.
And now 77 percent of adults surveyed describe themselves as religiously affiliated, a decline from the 83 percent who did so in Pew’s 2007 landscape study.
Pew researchers attribute these drops to the dying off of older believers, and a growing number of Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — who claim no religious affiliation.
The researchers also found that as religiosity in America wanes, a more general spirituality is on the rise, with six in 10 adults saying they regularly feel a “deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being,” up 7 percentage points since 2007. Also increasing: the number of people who experienced a “deep sense of wonder” about the universe, which also jumped 7 percentage points.
Other findings from the study include that 40 percent of Jews and 90 percent of Muslims say they do not eat pork, the consumption of which is forbidden by Jewish and Islamic law. It also found that six in 10 adults, and three-quarters of Christians, believe the Bible or other holy scripture is the Word of God. About 31 percent — and 39 percent of Christians — believe it should be interpreted literally.
The 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study interviewed 35,071 Americans and has a margin of error of plus or minus less than 1 percentage point. This portion of the survey, which focuses on beliefs and practices, is the second of two parts. The first, released in May, found that the nation is significantly less Christian that it was seven years ago.
From the November/December 2015 Report from the Capital. Click here to read the next story.
