I’m not a big fan of religion for notable reasons. My reaction changes when challenged to follow Jesus Christ. But to the article in USA Today. The good news is that if you are reaching out to people with various “religious” backgrounds you may find the ability to win them over to a new point of view about who Jesus Chris really is. The bad news is that they may treat a real commitment to Jesus Christ no differently than their religion. If they had only token loyalty to what they believe they may have the same reaction in the long run to Jesus Christ.

A good illustration was Saul (who later became Paul) who was absolutely committed to his religion. That zeal and loyalty carried over when Jesus Christ became real on the road to Damascus. With that in mind here are some key results from the article.

[USA Today] Key findings from the survey:

•Faith is fluid: 44% say they’re no longer tied to the religious or secular upbringing of their childhood. They’ve changed religions or denominations, adopted a faith for the first time or abandoned any affiliation altogether.

•”Nothing” matters: 12.1% say their religious identity is “nothing in particular,” outranking every denomination and tradition except Catholics (23.9%) and all groups of Baptists (17.2%).

•Protestants are fading: 51.3% still call themselves Protestant but roughly one third of this group were “unable or unwilling” to describe the denomination in which they fit.

•Immigrants sustain Catholic numbers: 46% of foreign-born U.S. adults are Catholics, compared with only 21% of native-born adults. Latinos are now 45% of all U.S. Catholics ages 18-29.

Like the Catholic Church, other public institutions will have to accommodate the impact of immigration. Already, more than 34 million of the nation’s 225 million adults are foreign-born, and half of these are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census.

“The Catholic Church may be a microcosm of what’s going to happen to the country in the next 40 years,” says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum.

The Pew survey was based on random telephone interviews conducted in English and Spanish, May 8 through Aug. 13.

Another 1,050 interviews were added from an earlier 2007 Pew-sponsored survey of Muslims in the United States, which included interviews in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

The margin of error is +/- 0.6 percentage points for the full sample, but higher for each of the subgroups.

Popularity: unranked [?]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.