Michael Hout and Claude Fischer at Berkely report a number of studies with similar results, showing that people reporting no religious preference doubled from 7% to 14% in the 90s. Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations, 67 Am. Soc. Rev. 165 (2002). Tweaking the data, they find that some of the difference is a difference between the young adult generation and the recently deceased generation, and that part of the difference is people with weak religious affiliations now reporting none. This second group is entirely confined to political liberals and moderates; these appear to be people who do not want to report themselves as religious because to them, conservative Christians have given all religion a bad name. The Baylor study may have picked up a small reversal of trend, or it may have asked a slightly different question. Quoting Newsom Michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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[1] Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed
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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[2] Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed
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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 Links: ------ [1] /horde/services/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists.ucla.edu%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Freligionlaw [2] /horde/services/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists.ucla.edu%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Freligionlaw
_______________________________________________ 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.
