WASHINGTON, DC, USA, February 26, 2008: America has always been a competitive religious marketplace, but a major survey released yesterday shows a country increasingly exploring different faith identities and ways of worship. More than 40 percent of respondents told pollsters that they had changed their religious affiliation since childhood. Experts say the growth of religious minorities, American mobility and intermarriage are key factors in the churn documented in the Religious Landscape Survey, one of the largest such polls ever done, with 35,000 adults interviewed.
Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the survey confirms on a grand scale trends that demographers have noted for years: the slipping percentage of Protestants, now down to 51, and the rise of people who call themselves unaffiliated, now at 16 percent, up from similar surveys.
More than anything else in the poll, Pew highlighted the fluidity of identity, noting that every group is constantly gaining and losing members. Twenty-eight percent of Americans have left the group they were raised in, switching, for example, from Protestantism to Judaism or from the Orthodox faith to Catholicism. America has always been very religiously vibrant, said Pew political scientist John Green, but today there are more options.