Last year was the first year Pew conducted a survey on the country’s religious landscape since 2007.
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Evolution was another hot-button issue Pew researchers surveyed. If you’re looking at the public as a whole, then the answer is yes – we find small but statistically significant declines, overall, in belief in God and several other conventional measures of religious commitment. “Asking about how frequently someone attends church or prays might not be sufficient to capture this movement”.
According to new numbers released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center, less than half say religion is very important to them. Researchers attribute the change to so-called “nones”, young adults without religious affiliation.
“We should remember that the United States remains a nation of believers”, said Gregory A. Smith, Pew’s associate director of research, “with almost 9 in 10 adults saying they believe in God”.
Baby Boomers and those in the Silent generation also have become more likely to say their religion is the “one true faith leading to eternal life”.
It polled more than 35,000 Americans of every religious affiliation as well as independent individuals about their beliefs in God, government, heaven, hell, morals and institutions.
The views on immigration were mixed among religious groups.
The chart presents more specific differences as well, with 80 percent of evangelicals seeing God as a person and just 14 percent selecting “impersonal force”; that disparity is greatest among Mormons, as 89 percent chose “person” and just eight percent chose “impersonal force”.
“This is where a few (survey) terms are insufficient”, she noted. It has been discovered that the number of people who are “absolutely certain” of God’s existence has decreased by 8%, from 71% in 2007 to 63% in 2014.
“The world is changing so rapidly that religion is kind of being relegated to a back seat; I don’t believe it has to be that way”, said Rabbi Steven Stark Lowenstein.
Three percent go so far as to bluntly declare an atheist religion, an opinion which may bewilder a few atheists who consider their atheist beliefs to be the opposite of religion.
“Most people think these traditions are fossilized”, but they’re changed and shaped by the culture they’re practiced in, she said. “That’s the exciting part about them”.
“On the contrary, the people in the survey who express the most spirituality are the people who are the most religious in conventional ways”, he said, “and the respondents who are the least attached to traditional religion, including the ‘nones, ‘ report much lower levels of spiritual experiences”.
“One of the real challenges is determining in what sense meditation and yoga are spiritual or religious activities”, Cox said. The Pew study found that barely a quarter of “millennials” (born between 1981 and 1996) attend church services on a weekly basis, compared with more than half of US adults born before 1946. But the survey didn’t ask people to characterize their meditation practice.
Among the religiously affiliated adults, 97% believe in God and among religiously unaffiliated, only 61% believe in God.
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According to Pew’s new survey, many Americans have a rich spiritual life.
