I wonder if there is a "surge" of people reporting no religion. The Baylor study -- an extraordinary piece of social science work -- that came out a year ago shows that 89.2% of Americans have a religious affiliation, and of the remaining 10.8%, the study characterizes them as "persons without a religious preference, denomination, or place of worship." One cannot fairly say that the unaffiliated necessarily have no religion, for it is possible to be an unaffiliated Christian, and even if one could say that the unaffiliated have no religion, how is 10.8% a "surge?" It would seem to me that to be a "surge" one would have to have good data that showed, for example, that 25 years ago, the "unaffiliated" constituted something under 5 or 6% of the American people.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the "unaffiliated" have been around for a long time in the United States, and in numbers not that far removed from 10.8%. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Douglas Laycock Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 11:05 AM To: religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu Subject: Recent Threads Some Christians proselytize; some don't. Same with atheists. There is clearly a hostile secular reaction to evangelical activism and political influence; it is visible in our politics and in some of the resistance to free exercise claims, and it shows up statistically in a surge of people reporting no religion in surveys about religious belief. It's not a reaction to the Christian Reconstructionists, who are numerically trivial. But many of the folks having the reaction can't tell the difference between the conservative values voters and the Christian Reconstructionists. The mission is a central religious experience in Mormonism. What Fred Gedicks described is the social understanding of the faith. The reality of any religion lies not in formal doctrine but in the social understanding, practices, and lived experience of its faithful. That smart people on this list can doubt whether the Mormon mission is religious dramatically illustrates what is wrong with the compelled/motivated distinction. I agree -- and have testified -- that the religious motivation must be substantial or primary and not just lurking in the background somewhere. That means the resulting line is one of degree and not a bright line. But to say the Mormon mission is not distinguishable from any other reason for taking a year off is like saying that because 1 isn't much different from 2, and 2 isn't much different from 3, and so on -- that 1 is indistinguishable from 100 or a hundred trillion or any other number. Douglas Laycock Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law University of Michigan Law School 625 S. State St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1215 734-647-9713 _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
