Americans are seekers and shoppers. When it pertains to religion, they are no different. You may hear someone say, “I was baptized Catholic, married a Lutheran and became one, divorced, and now am unaffiliated.” This describes a growing number of Americans. The Pew Forum survey tells the story of religious identity in America. We are a mobile society not only in where we live, work, and travel our travel; we are also religiously mobile.
No doubt there are numerous reasons for such mobility, including exogamous marriage, longer lives and geographic, social, and economic factors. America’s freedom of ideas, speech, and religion underscores how different it is from many nations where a single religion dominates or where changing affiliation is simply not done, frowned upon, or even forbidden
For me, the most dramatic statistic reported in the survey is the category of “unaffiliated,” which has the highest self-identification (31%) among 18 to 29 year olds. This result mirrors studies of young Catholics (described as millennials born in 1979 or later) who demonstrate a low rate of identifying with institutional Catholicism. Recent statistics also indicate that one third of Americans who identify themselves as Catholics, approximately 23 million people, do not belong to parishes and thus likely do not have regular contact with the church.
Thus, they (and others like them) complicate matters further by identifying with their denominational category but not participating in the life of a religious institution. They exemplify what sociologist Grace Davie calls “believing without belonging.” When one includes this factor in calculating religious identity in America, it complicates the picture because not everyone who reports religious identity practices his or her religion, or does so only to mark key chronological markers such as birth, marriage, and death.
I think that such mobility cannot be characterized as either healthy or sickly. Rather, it indicates that American religious identity is fluid. Such fluidity has implications for those who administer churches and denominations, of course, who can no longer count on lifelong loyalty of their members. They must be aware that many Americans (probably more than they thought) change their religious afflation/identity. They must be open and welcoming to those who are inclined to switch. They should also be prepared to part with a significant portion of their adherents on a regular basis. They should also take comfort in the fact that Americans are more religiously identified than their European counterparts and that they have more religious flexibility than most of the world. Nevertheless, America remains one of the most religious of the developed nations.
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