But while no new Religious Landscape Study is available or in the immediate offing, the Center has collected five additional years of data since the Landscape Study from RDD political polls see detailed tables. The samples from these political polls are not as large as the Landscape Studies even when all of the political polls conducted in a year are combined , but together, 88 surveys from to included interviews with , Americans.
These surveys do not include nearly as many questions about religion as the Landscape Studies do. More than once a week, once a week, once or twice a month, a few times a year, seldom, or never?
The data shows that just like rates of religious affiliation, rates of religious attendance are declining. The changes underway in the American religious landscape are broad-based. And although the religiously unaffiliated are on the rise among younger people and most groups of older adults, their growth is most pronounced among young adults.
Furthermore, the data shows a wide gap between older Americans Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation and attendance. Only about one-in-three Millennials say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month. While the trends are clear — the U. Today, there are roughly 23 million more adults in the U. This means that there are now roughly million Christian adults in the U.
In the last two censuses, Jedi has been the most popular alternative religion with more than , people 0. By , numbers had dropped sharply, but there were still , people who told the government they were Jedi Knights. Of course — there are huge consequences to religious belief and practice. Firstly, countless wars and conflicts have had an overt or covert religious dimension throughout history right up to the present day.
Donald Trump won the presidential election with the overwhelming support of white evangelical Christians. Legislators in Argentina recently voted against legalising abortion under pressure from Catholic bishops and the pope.
There are millions of people of faith across the world engaging in social action projects to help the poor and marginalised.
More prejudice and persecution. Followers of most major religions report increasing hostility and, in many cases, violence. Christians have been largely driven out of the Middle East, with some calling it a new genocide. Meanwhile antisemitism and Islamophobia are rising in Europe. One of the biggest upheavals on the religious landscape in the next few years is likely to be the death or, possibly, retirement of Pope Francis, who is 81 and has a number of health issues.
His efforts to reform the Vatican and the church have led to a significant backlash by conservative forces, who are organising against his papacy and preparing for the moment when the post becomes vacant. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Composite: The Guardian Design Team. For such articles, and for your source list otherwise, note that CSGC and Pew co-sponsor the continually updated World Religion Database , available by online subscription.
The CSGC is at or info globalchristianity. Terry Mattingly. Douglas LeBlanc. Richard Ostling. Bobby Ross Jr. Julia Duin. Ryan Burge. I've written about church opposition to the Iraq war, the Buddhist approach to parenting, miraculous Madonnas, what the church can learn from McDonald's making first-timers welcome , and whether you can have a gluten-free communion wafer no. I've written about losing my luggage in Rome, and having a beard trim on the banks of the Euphrates.
I've written about alternative Christmas presents, the African pilgrims to World Youth Day who thought Adelaide was a suburb of Sydney, an hour's bus ride away, the Christian way to cook ethical ingredients , diplomas for imams, bullied clergy, and an inadequate circumcision that cast doubt on whether a boy was Jewish. I've written on religion and politics and why the two are not mutually exclusive, the problem of suffering, who really runs Islam, the myth of religious violence, standing firm against cults, the persecuted church, the international interfaith initiative called A Common Word , why Muslims make good citizens, and on the sexual abuse crisis.
I say all this not to boast, but to show how much is missing from news media today, from ordinary human stories of faith to great themes. I saw my job as offering a picture of the breadth and role of religion in society, the issues the religions are grappling with, its contributions and failures, some of the human stories, some of the conflicts and politics and trends.
Outside the main Christian faiths, and sometimes within them, religious and ethnic issues can overlap. I also wrote about philosophy and ethics, and indulged myself in far more opinion pieces than most news reporters. Ironically, in my last year or two I increasingly felt we were back to the first three sets of stories - especially clerical sexual abuse. Religion reporting has several issues in which it was important to have a specialist, someone who could bring some perspective beyond the scandal of the moment and understand the context.
These included the travails of Muslims in Australia, sex abuse and the rise of militant atheism through such figures as the four horsemen of the anti-apocalypse: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I interviewed the first three, all of whom came to Australia. I wrote many articles that annoyed them, about radicals, Shari'a law, calls to allow polygamy and the like, but I also worked hard to write stories that showed them as ordinary Australians contributing to society.
I did this because I feel much of the media demonised them, set out to portray them negatively and sensationalise them.
For example, the media went constantly to Sheikh Hilali, the head of Lakemba mosque in Sydney. They did this from laziness, ignorance of alternative voices and, by far the most important, the likelihood that he would say something embarrassing. Melbourne Muslims constantly told me he represented only Lakemba - that is, not even all Sydney Muslims, let alone Melbourne's.
It's no wonder the community felt under siege. I think of a story in Melbourne's Herald Sun about a Muslim father who withdrew his daughter from music lessons on religious grounds. Parents withdraw children from classes all the time for many reasons - this was simply a chance to bash Muslims, which News Ltd has indulged rather more often than it should. Generally, things are far better today, both with a more educated media and a far more savvy Muslim community.
The generation for whom English is the first language is at the helm. My period as religion editor coincided with the rise of interfaith efforts. When I began, Muslims and Jews getting together for a meal was an important story; today it is too commonplace to be worth a mention.
That is unambiguously a good thing. I also covered the two global atheist conventions in Melbourne in and , which were fascinating. There were striking similarities between their congregations and several Christian ones: grey hair dominated, but the people were full of zeal and eager to win converts to their lack of faith. And there was no shortage of unreflected faith in their own myths - notably that atheists are unbiased, guided by reason and evidence, whereas believers are mental or emotional cripples who need only to be taught to think clearly.
But of course the atheists I interacted with tended to be the militants - the least attractive. It is no accident that six million Australians did not identify with a religion at the Census, yet only 65, called themselves atheists. One area in which I feel I did make a contribution, was the gradual revelation of the clergy sex abuse crisis and in advocating an independent judicial inquiry. I wrote story after story, oped after oped, over a decade.
A question I was often asked was, need one be religious to write about religion? Obviously not, judging by the many non-believers who have written really well on the subject.
But it is surely an advantage if one is familiar with religious culture, debates and challenges. It gives one a broad background against which to work, and when a journalist doesn't have that it often shows. A Washington Post reporter was covering a protest at the White House by Pentecostal Christians, and reported that a speaker said "Let's pray that God will slay everyone on the Capitol.
I was surprised when, after we had both left the paper, Michael Gawenda, the editor who appointed me in , told me he had been concerned that it might be a mistake to have someone religious cover religion. Why should it be riskier than an atheist? Reporters who write about politics vote and no doubt support political parties in private. The danger, of course, is that an enthusiast might see the role as advocating for religion. And that was a second common question? Wasn't it my responsibility, as a Christian, to protect and advance the cause of religion, or at least of Christianity, or at least the Protestant evangelical Christianity that forms my own background?
But that would be to betray my responsibility to the newspaper, to the readers and therefore, I thought, to God. Clearly the best way to serve was by being as accurate and fair a reporter as possible. Anything else would be an abuse of privilege. The Age is a secular paper, and a reporter's role is to present news rather than advocate.
Of course that is not simple: what facts or quotations one includes or withholds in the limited space is important, and often, especially with religion, you have to take up valuable space providing a context or explaining the background.
But if The Age 's editors had regarded me as a proselytiser they would - rightly - have removed me in a heartbeat. Against that, of course I wanted to rebut hostile myths and attacks, which is where the opinion pieces often came in. I also got to advocate a Christian worldview much more directly, in the blog I ran for a few years, "The Religious Write.
That was one of the reasons I was delighted to join the Centre for Public Christianity after leaving the paper. The blog, which I moderated myself, ran for about five years and was long one of the paper's most popular, sometimes attracting more than posts.
It sounds impressive, but in fact these tended to be dominated by atheists delighted to find a public forum to attack religion. Even so they taught me much. The various ideologues would rush in, but gradually more intelligent conversations would emerge and sometimes run for days. The main irritation was that every topic would find new posters who thought that their arguments about "flying spaghetti monsters" or their believing in just one fewer god than I did were novel, clever and irresistible.
And I have to admit a certain low taste for sarcasm myself that was sometimes misplaced. Once I had an email from my daughter saying, "Dad, get off the angry pills. The Age took ethical responsibilities seriously, and there were often potential conflicts.
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