re: Religion in Politics We should be concerned WHO and WHY and WHAT groups are trying to "tag" various Christian groups as taking over one party or another. From the research I've been able to do, "smear tactics" and "guilt by association" tactics are being employed, without any proof or statistics, or really without anything, except a "sound bite" from some of the left, or progressive folks, or some irresponsible folks in the media. Maybe we can start insisting they use some known studies or links, etc for whatever they are trying to pass off as "information."
I think we agree on having "less government"...And, I think anyone will be able to stop thinking the Evangicals will take over the Republicans or the Government for that matter......(For the record, I'm not a member of the Catholic or any Church that has designigated itself Evangical...however, I do term myself a Christian.)
Here's a bit of info...Most of the studies do combine Christian and Roman Catholic as one..."Christian." We all know that there are many groups within that large entity.
religioustolerance.org
Christian faith groups:
One source estimates that there are 34,000 separate Christian groups in the world.
We have attempted to sort them into:
Three meta-groups, (Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism)
Three wings, (conservative, mainline and liberal)
Fifteen Religious families, (Adventist, Baptist, Lutheran, Reform....)
Dozens of denominations, (from the Amish to The Way), and
Many systems of belief (Arminianism, British Israelism, Calvinism...)
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Polling data from the 2001 ARIS study, described below, indicate that:
81% of American adults identify themselves with a specific religion: 76.5% (159 million) of Americans identify themselves as Christian. This is a major slide from 86.2% in 1990. Identification with Christianity has suffered a loss of 9.7 percentage points in 11 years -- about 0.9 percentage points per year. This decline is identical to that observed in Canada between 1981 and 2001. If this trend continues, then by about the year 2042, non-Christians will outnumber the Christians in the U.S. 52% of Americans identified themselves as Protestant.
24.5% are Roman Catholic.
1.3% are Jewish.
0.5% are Muslim, followers of Islam.
The fastest growing religion (in terms of percentage) is Wicca -- a Neopagan religion that is sometimes referred to as Witchcraft. Numbers of adherents went from 8,000 in 1990 to 134,000 in 2001. Their numbers of adherents are doubling about every 30 months. 4,5 Wiccans in Australia have a very similar growth pattern, from fewer than 2,000 in 1996 to 9,000 in 2001. 10 In Canada, Wiccans and other Neopagans showed the greatest percentage growth of any faith group. They totaled 21,080 members in 1991, an increase of 281% from.
14.1% do not follow any organized religion. This is an unusually rapid increase -- almost a doubling -- from only 8% in 1990. There are more Americans who say they are not affiliated with any organized religion than there are Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans taken together. 6
The unaffiliated vary from a low of 3% in North Dakota to 25% in Washington State. "The six states with the highest percentage of people saying they have no religion are all Western states, with the exception of Vermont at 22%." 6
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usatoday.com
Excellent graph study |
