If Americans find it easy to switch religious affiliations, as the Pew Forum's extensive research reports, we shouldn't take this as either a sign of "sickness" or "health" in the nation's religious landscape. Rather, it's a practical result of two inescapable factors: being an American and, more basically, being human.
Being a citizen of the United States, in a nation lacking an established church but legally guaranteeing freedom of conscience, has meant living with religious choice. And although Pew presents us with interesting new statistics, the fact that people have grasped that choice is nothing new. Take, for example, some of the people we admire most.
Abraham Lincoln, raised a Baptist, attended a Presbyterian church as president--one he never joined, by the way. These days, we would count Lincoln (never baptized), as a member of Pew's "unaffiliated, but religious" sub-set. Theodore Roosevelt traced his ancestry to Dutch Reformed stock, was baptized in a Presbyterian church and, while at Harvard, taught Sunday School in an Episcopal Church, the denomination with which he later identified. U.S. Grant was at different times in life a Methodist and a Presbyterian. Dwight Eisenhower went from sectarian Protestantism to Presbyterianism.
There are some eminently practical grounds for Pew's findings, too. We're a mobile population, and it's easy to change denominations (Christian or Jewish) when you relocate, especially if you find a congregation that strikes you as more exciting or closer to your home or more family-friendly than anything under your former brand. Too, people do fall in love and get married, and it is not unusual for a spouse to take the faith of his/her partner.
Finally, we all get older, and as we do our needs and perspectives change. That applies to religion as it does to everything else, from the politics we hold to the friends we choose. For an individual, that may mean leaving one faith for another, leaving faith altogether, or coming to faith for the first time. It's natural, folks.
Not only that, but it results in a certain type of public good, in that it provides great fodder for people who study religious trends. And so I say, amen to that, and keep those statistics coming!
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