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RELIGION IN A FREE MARKET
Religious and Non-Religious Americans
WHO | WHAT | WHY | WHERE

Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar

Contents:

Acknowledgments ix

Preface by Mark Silk xi

Introduction xv

ONE American Religion, Religious Brands, and Markets 1

TWO The National Profile of Religious Identification in the United States 20

THREE Belief, Belonging, and Behavior 38

FOUR Religious Switching 56

FIVE Who Are the Religious and Non-religious? 65

SIX Household and Family Characteristics 89

SEVEN Geographic Distribution of Religions 105

EIGHT Gender and Socioeconomics 137

NINE Socioeconomic Rankings 149

TEN Patterns of Consumption of Modern Technologies 165

ELEVEN Religious Affiliation and Recruitment 170

TWELVE Membership Patterns among Specific Religious Groups 184

THIRTEEN Religion and Political Party Preference 206

FOURTEEN Race and Ethnicity in Religious Identification 235

FIFTEEN Profile of the American Muslim Population 260

SIXTEEN Current and Future Trends 269

Methodological Appendix 287

Index 296

About the Authors 300

For a complete list of 151 tables, charts, and maps in this book, go to www.paramountbooks.com

Excerpt from the Introduction to RELIGION IN A FREE MARKET

GOD may be unchanging and heaven eternal, but religion in America is in constant ferment. New sects and faiths are born; others wither. People grow in devotion or become disillusioned. Religion both contributes to and is affected by the turbulence of modern society: war, economic growth, technological change, new ethical puzzles. While religion is about God, it is practiced by people. Those who offer up their prayers to the Almighty on the weekend (or don’t) are the same people who buy cars and laundry detergent, watch sitcoms, and agonize over tax cuts, climate change and terrorism.

Reflecting that turbulence, Religion in a Free Market is not a book of eternal verities. It is the most complete statistical portrait available of religion as actually experienced in one country at one point in time: the United States in 2001, the dawn of the millennium. The statistical portrait covers religion from the perspective of politics, economics, gender, generation, and geography. The analysis is based largely on a resource of unrivaled richness and quality: the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2001, which covered a random sample of more than 50,000 adults who identified themselves with dozens of religious groups, from Roman Catholics and Methodists to Sikhs, Rastafarians, and Druids.

Why read this book? First, because religious ferment is as strong as it has ever been, so whatever you learned about religion in the U.S. a generation ago is out of date. Second, because whether you are a political consultant, a marketer, a religious leader, or a social scientist, it is impossible to understand America without understanding religion in America. According to ARIS, 75 percent of adults in 2001 said they are religious or somewhat religious, and 91 percent said they believe in God. Even those who consider themselves secular—a rapidly growing portion of the public—are acutely aware of and influenced by the religious milieu surrounding them.

As its title indicates, Religion in a Free Market is built on one key idea— that religion in America can best be understood as a product on offer in the marketplace of ideas. It is no sacrilege to observe that religious institutions craft sales messages, recruit “customers,” and focus intently on retention policies. The “customers,” in turn, pick from a smorgasbord of religious choices, including the choice of no religion at all. What clergy have observed anecdotally, and other researchers have speculated on, we document scientifically.

Here are the key findings of this book:

• America remains primarily a Christian society at the beginning of the 21st century. However, the share of the population that self-identified with a Christian faith tradition declined abruptly from 86.2 percent in 1990 to 76.5 percent in 2001. Only a small part of the decrease in self-identified Christians can be attributed to a greater unwillingness among respondents to answer survey questions.

• The share of American adults who say they have no religion rose from 8 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2001, which amounts to approximately 30 million people.

• Somewhat surprisingly the minority non-Christian faiths’ share of the national population rose only very slightly from 3.3 percent in 1990 to 3.7 percent in 2001.

• Sixteen percent of American adults had switched religious identification at some point in their lives as of 2001, with Catholicism as the biggest numerical loser and “no religion” as the biggest numerical gainer.

• The mobility of American society has done little or nothing to erode strong regional religious cultures such as those of the Catholics of the Northeast, the Lutherans of the Upper Midwest, the Baptists of the South and the “Nones” of the Pacific Northwest.

• There is a huge generation gap emerging in religion. Despite popular impressions of religiously engaged youth, in general the old and middle-aged are far more likely than the young to believe in God and identify with a religious group.

Religion in a Free Market overcomes the failings of much prior research on American religion by drawing heavily on the findings of the land- mark American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001. This survey covered a large, national, representative cross-section of the American public, and asked questions about religious identification, belief, and behavior.

Identifying people by their religion is fraught with potential controversy. Who decides who counts as a Roman Catholic, for example? Should it be the parish priest or the Pope in Rome? Who decides who’s a Jehovah’s Witness or Wicca? ARIS cuts this Gordian knot by relying on self-reporting. We opted for an open-ended question: What is your religion, if any? This approach takes away the power of classification from the religious institution––the supplier––and gives it to the individual respondent––the autonomous consumer.

By casting a wide net, self-reporting catches a vast variety of self-descriptions: more than 100 categories of religious groups, faiths, denominations, and orientations. We realize that the large number of categories is challenging for analytical purposes. It would have been far simpler to create ahead of time a short list of religious groups, perhaps five to seven, as in some other surveys. Fortunately, we have the experience and statistical skills to analyze the vast quantities of data emanating from ARIS. The availability of 50,000 cases allowed us to create the sociodemographic and economic profiles of many religious groups usually not available in ordinary market, academic, or public opinion surveys with their limited sample sizes.

. . . despite the personal nature of religion, we found that most people have no problem reporting on their belief in God, or religious preference. Indeed, the refusal rate to the particular question, What is your religion, if any? was just 5.4 percent. The fact that a great majority provided an answer ought to encourage social scientists to keep on asking such questions and to duplicate this approach of using open-ended self-reporting, even though it complicates the job of coding answers into categories.

Because the ARIS essentially replicated the methodology of our previous study, the National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) 1990, we were able to generate trend data, something which has been scarce in the sociology and demography of U.S. religion. We are able to report on the shifts that occurred between 1990 and 2001, an important decade of societal and economic change.