“…the decline among White Christians has slowed. Indeed, the percentage of White Christians actually rose slightly due to growth in an unlikely category -- an increase among white mainline Protestants, "an uptick" of 3.5%”
Conversation
‘Since 2007, white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants have declined from 19% of the population to a low of 13% in 2016, but the last three years have seen small but steady increases, up to 16% in 2020."’
The trad turn is real
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Link to the survey the article is about. These are self-classifications, so only identity, not behaviors like going to church. But if you specify beyond “religious” at all, I’d say you’re at least a little sincere. So 77% of America is still religious.
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White catholic is broken out and I’m surprised it’s so much bigger than Hispanic. I’d vaguely assumed most Catholicism in the US is Hispanic, but I guess it’s mostly Italian and Irish heritage?
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Forgot link 2 tweets up. prri.org/research/2020-
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Only 2% is don’t know/refused.
Interesting that they didn’t ask to distinguish unaffiliated into atheist/agnostic/non-institutional spiritual
The biggest category is almost certainly “socially religious,” as in “institutionally affiliated but never reflected on actual beliefs”
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Hmm. Interesting, I’ve understood trad turn mainly as millennial and Gen Z, but perhaps that’s a distinct phenomenon within what this survey measured, and is swamped in aggregate. More of a weird internet-derived larp thing. All my anecdata is from Twitter. twitter.com/alexqgb/status
This Tweet is unavailable.
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I have to occasionally remind myself that this is a very religious country and I know almost nothing about its religious side. I went to dinner one time with a conservative Christian family in my first semester in US grad school, and that’s it. They were nice. 6-7 kids.
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Whites appear to be losing their religion faster than blacks and Hispanics. So religious conservatism will turn into an under-privileged minority thing if this continues.
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One thing I’m not able to infer from this data is how East-Asian Americans tend to self-classify. Especially Chinese.
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