- Religious Identification Among American Adults - Religious Institutional Membership - Religious or Secular Outlook - Religious Switching - Marital Status Among Selected Religious Groups - Mixed Religion Households - Age and Gender Patterns Among Selected Religious Groups - Race and Ethnicity Among Selected Religious Groups - Political Party Preference Among Selected Religious Groups - State by State Distribution of Selected Religious Groups
1. Religious Identification Among American Adults
The first area of inquiry in ARIS 2001 concerns the response of American adults to the question: "What is your religion, if any?" This question generated more than a hundred different categories of response, which we classified into the sixty-five categories shown in Exhibit 1 below.
In 1990, ninety percent of the adult population identified with one or another religion group. In 2001, such identification has dropped to eighty-one percent.
Where possible, every effort was made to re-create the categories respondents offered to the nearly identical question as in the NSRI 1990 survey.
As is readily apparent from the first Exhibit below, the major changes between the results of the 1990 survey and the current survey are:
a. the proportion of the population that can be classified as Christian has declined from eighty-six in 1990 to seventy-seven percent in 2001; b. although the number of adults who classify themselves in non-Christian religious groups has increased from about 5.8 million to about 7.7 million, the proportion of non-Christians has increased only by a very small amount - from 3.3 % to about 3.7 %; c. the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight percent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001 [note 5]; d. there has also been a substantial increase in the number of adults who refused to reply to the question about their religious preference, from about four million or two percent in 1990 to more than eleven million or over five percent in 2001.
Exhibit 1 provides the most comprehensive profile of religious identification among the U.S. adult population today and compares the current pattern of identification with what the pattern was in 1990 [note 6]. <SNIP, Tons of Numbers follow>