Could it be that while the number of people in the United States who are religious is decreasing, the ones who remain religious have become more spiritual?
The November 2015 report coming out of the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study by Pew Research Center would indicate that is indeed happening.
The study confirms that religiously affiliated American adults appear to have grown more religiously observant in recent years and are as involved as ever.
There has been a small drop in overall rates of belief and practice — mostly because of the growing population of “nones” who say they do not belong to any organized faith, the study notes. But the roughly three-fourths of Americans who do claim a religion have not shown any discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment.
Mind set on the Spirit
For Christians these results are reflected throughout Scripture in places like Romans 8:5: “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.”
The study’s results also could stand as a confirmation that the Lord’s strategy is to preserve a faithful remnant amid the sinful world.
According to Pew, the modest falloff in traditional religious beliefs and practices coincides with changes in the religious composition of the U.S. population.
A growing share of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, including some who self-identify as atheists or agnostics as well as many who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”
Altogether the religiously unaffiliated now account for 23 percent of the adult population, up from 16 percent in 2007, when the Religious Landscape Study was first conducted.
As older adults die (many of whom are self-identified Christians), they are being replaced by a new cohort of young adults who display far lower levels of attachment to organized religion than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations did when they were the same age.
Despite the decline, however, 77 percent of adults continue to identify with some religious faith, according to the 2014 study.
Four out of 10 (41 percent) of the religiously affiliated now say they rely mainly on their religious beliefs for guidance on questions about right and wrong, up 7 percentage points from 2007.
Six out of 10 now say they regularly feel a deep sense of “spiritual peace and well being,” again up 7 percentage points from 2007.
And 46 percent now say they experience a deep sense of “wonder about the universe” at least once a week, also up 7 percentage points from seven years ago.
The amount of importance people attach to religion varies considerably depending on the religious tradition to which they belong, but about 8 in 10 of evangelical Protestants say religion is “very important” in their lives.
Some indicators, according to the study, have ticked upward slightly among the religiously affiliated.
Twenty-six percent of them now say they share their faith with nonbelievers or people from other religious backgrounds at least once a week, up from 23 percent in 2007.
More than 4 in 10 religiously affiliated adults (43 percent) now say they read Scripture outside of religious services at least once a week, up 3 percentage points.
Praying daily
Consistent with the 2007 study, 88 percent of religiously affiliated adults said they prayed daily, weekly or monthly.
The 2014 survey was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 35,071 adults interviewed by telephone from June 4–Sept. 30, 2014.
Findings based on the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points.
(RNS, BP, TAB)
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