Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

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Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

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Trends in Religiosity and Religious
Affiliation
KEVIN J. CHRISTIANO

Abstract
This essay examines studies of trends in religion and religiosity, concentrating on the
case of the United States but periodically comparing that country to other societies
as well.
The summary of research opens with an overview of the putative wisdom received
from the once-dominant belief in the process of secularization. It proceeds to a
consideration of American habits of religious affiliation and switching, followed
by a discussion of rates of participation in religious activities (most notably, the
reported reductions across denominations in attendance at church services over the
past half-century). Featured next are recognition of the rising proportions of people
who claim no religious preference at all and of those who adhere to a world faith
other than Judaism or Christianity.
Finally, the narrative ventures several informed predictions concerning the contours
of religion’s future and concludes by identifying some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that any disciplinary or interdisciplinary understanding of religion will confront in a changed and changing world.

INTRODUCTION
For much of the past two centuries, social thinkers and theorists approached
ideas about the relationship between religion and society through the prism
of the process of secularization. In the broadest use of this term, writers in
the social sciences ordinarily have meant the steady and inexorable decline of
religion as a force both in collective institutions and in the lives of individuals.
Religious trends, therefore, were expected to follow a path of linear descent
as societies progressed and modernity wrapped its reach around the globe.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
SECULARIZATION AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE
In its simplest form, the secularization thesis implies “that there has been an
enormously significant change in the ways in which society and religion have
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interacted in the past from the ways they do now” (Swatos & Christiano,
1999, p. 213; emphasis in the original). Major social transformations—the
march from feudalism as a socioeconomic system to capitalism, the shift
from agricultural to industrial production and the accompanying movement
from rural to urban residence, the introduction of dissenting theologies
and the decay of state-church monopolies, the change from folk tradition
as a basis for knowledge and technique to the application of scientific
rationality, and the substitution of bureaucratic organization for face-to-face
interaction—were all thought to have reduced the viability of religion as a
source of deep personal meaning and effective social control (Clark, 2012,
pp. 174–186; Swatos & Christiano, 1999, pp. 214–215).
Yet, as decades of debate and study have demonstrated, the empirical
evidence for this proposition in many parts of the world is ambiguous
where it is not simply absent. As the British historian Clark (2012, p. 182) has
observed, “Religious practice changed greatly in the twentieth century, as it
has changed in every century, and these changes are historically important.”
Yet, he added, “it is highly problematic to argue from that evidence to an
underlying change in religiosity.” Certainly what he has written applies
to the American case: Chaves and Anderson (2012, p. 212) bear witness
to the obvious when they write that “High levels of religious belief and
practice have characterized American society from its beginnings.” Indeed,
if secularization is the destination that awaits all modernized societies, the
United States has been uniquely tardy in getting there.
Statistical support for this proposition is abundant. For example, each and
every Gallup Poll that has asked the question since 1976 has yielded the
finding that more than 90% of American adults believe in “God or a universal spirit” (Hout & Fischer, 2002, p. 173). Further, between the 1970s and
the 1990s, the percentage of the American public that asserted a belief in an
afterlife increased steeply. This proportion rose specifically among Catholics
and Jews: the former went from 74% agreement with life after death to 83%
(roughly the same rate as Protestants), whereas for the latter, the climb was
from a small minority, 19%, to a majority, 56%. Over the quarter-century, people with no religious preference also increased their rate of belief, from 44%
to 63% (Greeley & Hout, 1999, pp. 814–815).
Moreover, the picture of most religion in the United States is remarkably
static over time; most measures remain robust and exhibit few signs of wholesale deterioration. What change as can be documented since the middle of the
twentieth century is ordinarily “slow-moving—even glacial” (Chaves, 2011,
p. 2).

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CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AND SWITCHING
At the turn of the twenty-first century, various surveys of the American
public agreed for the most part on the varied shape of the nation’s religious
landscape: slightly more than one-half of adults in the United States identified with one or another Protestant church, about one-quarter indicated to
pollsters that they were Catholics, followers of other faiths accounted for
less than one-tenth of the total, and between one-in-eight and one-in-six
respondents expressed no religious affiliation at all (Schwadel, 2010, p. 311;
Skirbekk, Kaufmann, & Goujon, 2010, pp. 295–296; Smith & Kim, 2005, pp.
214–215).
In the 30 years between 1972 and 2002, the Protestant proportion of the
American population had dipped more than 10 percentage points; Catholics
were off only two points, whereas the Jewish rate was halved, from 3% to
1.5%. At the same time, those who answered with “no religion” and “other
religion” more than doubled their presences (Chaves, 2011, pp. 23–24; Hout
& Fischer, 2002, pp. 166 and 188). The unaffiliated rose from 5.1% in 1972 to
13.8% in 2002 to 17% in 2008, at the same time that the constituencies for
“other” faiths went from 1.9% to 6.9% of total adults. Fully 27% of those
respondents who were born since 1980 said that they had no religious
preference; more than 13% had been raised without any such influence
(Chaves, 2011, p. 19; Hadaway & Marler, 1993, pp. 100–104; Schwadel, 2010,
pp. 314–319; Sherkat, 2001, p. 1472; Smith & Kim, 2005, pp. 215–216). Indeed,
Sherkat (2001, p. 1471) has written that “in recent decade of the twentieth
century more Americans reported growing up with no religious affiliation
than were raised in Judaism, or as Episcopalians.”
A minor cause of the growth or decline of religious groups is the “switcher”:
someone who, over the course of a lifetime, moves from one category of
denominational affiliation to another—or from religion to nonreligion, or the
reverse. In the United States, a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom
means that such “mobility” is “not uncommon” (Sherkat, 2001, p. 1459). True,
in the 25 years from 1973 to 1998, from 60% to 70% of Americans persisted in
the same religious affiliation; that is, the faith (or nonfaith) in which they were
raised is the one that they professed consistently. However, about one-third
of people in the United States shift from one group to another at some point
in their lives (Sherkat, 2001, p. 1467).
Switches between denominations often occur immediately before or after
marriage to a spouse of a different religious affiliation (Hadaway & Marler,
1993, pp. 99 and 108; Iannaccone, 1990, p. 302; Musick & Wilson, 1995;
Sherkat, 2001, p. 1489 [Note 4]). However, when people do switch, the
change is most often from one religious identity to another that is closely

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

related—theologically, socially, or historically (Musick & Wilson, 1995, p.
262; Sherkat, 2001, p. 1485). Travel up and down the religious spectrum,
then, is usually a short trip along a familiar trail and not a long trek into an
unknown wilderness.
Part of the reason for the tendency of the denominationally mobile not to
stray too far from their points of religious origin lies in their accumulation,
earlier in life, of what has been termed religious human capital (Iannaccone,
1990, p. 299). Having learned adequately and practiced proficiently the rudiments of one religious tradition, switchers seem reluctant to jettison all of
that experience, a “sunk cost” of time and energy, to adopt an entirely novel
identity. Rather, they gravitate toward a new affiliation that contains some (or
many) of the same (or similar) elements of belief and practice as the option
that they recently left behind (Iannaccone, 1990; compare Sherkat, 2001).
It follows from this reasoning also that “distinctive,” “quasi-ethnic” religious groups (such as Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, and Mormons) retain more
of their original members because the religious capital that they impart is
both considerable and not easily portable (Iannaccone, 1990; Sherkat, 2001).
For instance, when presented with the prospect of marriage to a member of a
different denomination, Catholics tend to gain through the switches of their
would-be spouses rather than to lose through conversions to the faiths of
their partners; indeed, when Catholics do shift at marriage, it is frequently
out of organized religion altogether (Musick & Wilson, 1995, pp. 261–268).
“Persons who were reared Catholic,” note Hadaway and Marler (1993, p.
100), “tend to remain Catholic, and Catholics are still among the most stable
of denominational families. Nevertheless,” they observe, “Catholic stability has eroded.” In recent years, Catholics have been particularly prone to
losses from switching, with many Hispanic Catholics seeking membership
in Pentecostal or fundamentalist Protestant sects and about an equal proportion of their white coreligionists seeking out mainstream Protestantism,
non-Christian traditions, or disaffiliation from religion entirely (Hadaway &
Marler, 1993, pp. 100–104; Scheitle, Kane, & Van Hook, 2011, p. 473). According to the General Social Survey, early in the twenty-first century about one
out of every six persons who belonged to the Catholic Church at age 16 was
no longer maintaining that identity (Sherkat, 2001, pp. 1469–1473; Skirbekk
et al., 2010, p. 300).
Despite the amount of switching between denominations that takes place
in American society, an even more potent force in the growth of various
religious groups is demographic. After all, the surest (if not the quickest)
means of augmenting the ranks of any group is to prod it to make its own
members and then strive to keep them within the fold. (As Sherkat [2001,
p. 1485] has commented of conservative religious groups, “Sects are not so
much attractive for switchers as they are retentive of members … ”) Research

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has established that persons who are members of theologically conservative
churches marry at younger ages, stay married longer, have more children,
and keep those offspring within the church more successfully than do members of more liberal bodies (Hout, Greeley, & Wilde, 2001; Roof & McKinney,
1987; compare Scheitle et al., 2011; Thomas & Olson, 2010).
RATES OF RELIGIOUS INVOLVEMENT AND PARTICIPATION
A prime illustration of religion’s “glacial” pace of change in the United States
is the chart of church attendance rates by year. There exists some evidence
that rates are not as high today as in the 1950s. Yet, “However one reads
the evidence about trends between World War II and 1990,” estimate Stanley Presser and Mark Chaves, “the recent past has been a time of stability,”
in that, they write, “weekly attendance at religious services has been stable
since 1990.” Thus, the two broadly concur with the judgment that “religious
service attendance in the United States has been essentially constant throughout the second half of the twentieth century” (Presser & Chaves, 2007, p. 417).
Simultaneously, north of the border in Canada, something different has been
happening: proportions of worshipers who attended church at least monthly
declined measurably between 1986 and 2008 (Eagle, 2011).
For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, from 41% to 46%
of Americans who belonged to Protestant denominations contended that
they had gone to church in the previous 7 days; the comparable rate for
American Catholics was about 50% (Chaves, 1989, p. 465; Hadaway, Marler,
& Chaves, 1993, p. 741 [Note 2]). The essential stability in these statistics to
the present day can be explained by the dual effects of an aging population
(which produces a more devoted pattern of attendance) and the replacement
of older cohorts by younger ones (which depresses attendance rates). In
aggregate, these influences work to cancel out each other (Chaves, 1989, pp.
475–476). All the same, a deterioration in church attendance by Americans
has been detected and documented, but only for a single group (Roman
Catholics) and for one period (from the late 1960s to the middle 1970s), when
weekly Mass attendance for Catholics dipped sharply (Hout & Greeley,
1987, pp. 325–326, 328, and 341). Hout and Greeley (1987, pp. 332–335
and 340–342) associate this change with a one-time event: the sweeping
erosion in confidence among Catholics about the teachings of their church’s
hierarchy dealing with sexuality in the wake of the encyclical Humanae vitae
(1968).
As elevated or diminished as present rates of church attendance in North
American societies may be, evidence suggests that current reports actually
overstate the true frequency of participation in religious services. Research

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that compared projections of total attendance from survey data with estimates (Hadaway et al., 1993) and with physical counts (Marler & Hadaway,
1999) of persons in congregations has revealed that the true rates of church
attendance “are approximately one-half the generally accepted levels” (Hadaway et al., 1993, p. 742; emphasis in the original; see also Chaves, 2011, pp.
42–45). For instance, in one rural county in Ohio, 36% of Protestant survey
respondents said that they had attended church in the previous week. However, researchers could account for only enough worshipers to produce an
attendance rate of about 20% (Hadaway et al., 1993, pp. 743–744). Counts
from 18 Catholic dioceses in the United States yielded a similar result. Instead
of the Mass attendance rate of 51% calculated by the Gallup Poll, just 28%
of Catholics appeared in the flesh to occupy a pew in those places on the
weekend (Hadaway et al., 1993, pp. 745–748).
A portion of the gap dividing reported from actual rates can be blamed
on what polling experts call “social desirability bias”: that is, respondents
hope to impress interviewers by claiming a virtuous habit, whether or not
they practice it faithfully. However, the more substantial explanation for
this difference is that respondents, when questioned about a given week,
are describing what they customarily do, not what they may have done in the
queried instance (Hadaway et al., 1993, pp. 748–749; Marler & Hadaway,
1999, pp. 177 and 182–185). The misreporting of activity “results from
active church members reporting behavior that is consistent with their
perceptions of themselves as active churchgoers” (Marler & Hadaway, 1999,
p. 184).
NON-AFFILIATION IN, AND DISAFFILIATION FROM, THE CHURCHES
After a long spell of relative stability, the rates at which Americans admit
to survey interviewers that they have “no religion” have risen sharply in
recent decades. Two sociologists (Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 166 and 188), analyzing decades of data from sample survey questions, discovered that the
proportion of American adults who declared no religious preference actually doubled, from 7% to 14%, during the 1990s. By 2008, that proportion
had reached 17% (Chaves, 2011, p. 17). For these reasons, religious “nones”
have been characterized as “the fastest growing religious category in America … ” (Lim, MacGregor, & Putnam, 2010, p. 613; compare Baker & Smith,
2009a).
A number of factors account for this change, from mere cohort replacement
(younger respondents are more likely to indicate a lack of a religious affiliation than older ones [Roof & McKinney, 1987]), the fact that more young people today than in the past were raised in nonreligious households, a later age

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at first marriage (freeing some from conformity to spousal pressures regarding religion [Hadaway & Marler, 1993, p. 108]), and the greater accessibility
of higher education (Baker & Smith, 2009a, pp. 1257–1259; Hadaway & Marler, 1993, p. 104; Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 168–172). These patterns prevail
not only in the United States and Canada, but throughout Western Europe in
countries such as Denmark, France, and the Netherlands (Hayes, 2000, pp.
192 and 199–204).
It would be a grave error, however, to assume that persons who subscribe
to no particular religion are all staunch secularists, or, as two authors on
the topic (Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 731) have put it, “part of an increasing
wave of secularity.” To the contrary, those with no religion are in actuality
a diverse group (Greeley & Hout, 1999, p. 813; Hayes, 2000, pp. 195–198
and 205–206; Hout & Fischer, 2002, p. 173) that includes only a small core
of convinced atheists—perhaps 3% to 5%, a tiny slice of the total population,
reviled and rejected by their fellow citizens (Edgell, Gerteis, & Hartmann,
2006, pp. 214, 217–220, and 223–225). Atheists are less popular in American
society than either homosexuals or Muslims (Edgell et al., 2006, pp. 217–218
and 230)—although surveys seldom ask their respondents to compare atheists to homosexual Muslims.
The atheists are dwarfed by a much larger number of agnostics (religious
doubters who nevertheless are “not vehemently opposed to religion in all
forms” [Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 731]) and a sizeable plurality of what some
have labeled “unchurched believers,” whose private religious thoughts and
behaviors are not much different, in at least some respects, from those of
churchgoers (Baker & Smith, 2009a, p. 1260). To illustrate this similarity, the
General Social Surveys from 1998 and 2000 found that more than two thirds
of religious “nones” reported “belief in God or a higher power,” while 57% in
1998 believed in life after death. More than one-third endorsed the existence
of miracles that were accomplished through religion. Ninety-three percent
confessed that they prayed at least occasionally, and a surprising one-fifth
answered that they prayed daily (Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 173–175). Hence,
“the new ‘nones,’” Hout and Fischer (2002, pp. 173 and 175) have deduced,
are “believers opting out of organized religion rather than people who lost
faith as well as religion … . Their most distinguishing feature is their avoidance of churches.”
These believers who normally avoid churches constitute the most organizationally unstable component of the “no religion” category. The line in their
own minds that separates religious belonging from independence is fluid
and floating, porous and penetrable: about equal numbers of loosely connected believers shift into church membership and out again from year to
year (Lim et al., 2010, pp. 603–604). They are reputed to sustain “a weak sense
of attachment to a religious tradition and thus may identify with the tradition

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sometimes, if not always.” As a result, “each of the major religious traditions
seems to be surrounded by a penumbra of loosely attached ‘liminal’ affiliates” (Lim et al., 2010, pp. 597 and 610).
Looming large among those who stand aloof from “organized” religion are
the rising numbers of people who profess that they are “spiritual, but not religious” (Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 724). Their self-identification as nonreligious
notwithstanding, about 40% of those who forsake a stable denominational
tie say that they are “at least moderately spiritual.” Their estrangement from
an active church life, suggests survey evidence, reflects “significant antipathy toward organized religion” (Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 176 and 177). This
animus, in turn, is concentrated among political moderates and liberals and
appears to be rooted in a distaste for the increasingly vocal advocacy of conservative public policies on the part of many churches (Chaves, 2011, pp.
20–21; Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 178–186).
GROWTH IN NON-JUDEO-CHRISTIAN FAITHS
In recent years, the presence in the United States of persons who practice
faiths outside of the Judeo-Christian majority has grown markedly. Although
the numbers of such practitioners are still small in absolute terms, their
proportion of the national population has been steadily increasing. Taken
together, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism comprised around one-half of 1%
of Americans in the early 1970s, according to the General Social Survey; by
the year 2000, that percentage had approximately tripled (Smith, 2002, p.
578). Again, this change makes for persistently low totals, but it raises the
visibility and therefore the attention that such faiths receive in the broader
culture (Smith, 2002, pp. 582–583).
A parallel development in religion, not just for the United States but also for
Western Europe and much of the developed world, has been the emergence
and proliferation since the 1960s of an eclectic variety of spirituality referred
to as the New Age. While this movement to date does not entail large numbers of participants, some deem it to offer a glimpse of religion’s future in
postmodern circumstances. As two Dutch sociologists (Houtman & Aupers,
2007, p. 315) have remarked, “What we are witnessing today is not so much a
disappearance of religion, but rather a relocation of the sacred. Gradually losing its transcendent character, the sacred becomes more and more conceived
of as … residing in the deeper layers of the self.”
Critics of this brand of religion have taken to calling it diffuse and fragmented, even incoherent. Its promoters, however, regard its ideological
looseness as welcome freedom and its sprawling quality as testimony to
the expanding consciousness of the sacred that is necessary for personal
growth (Houtman & Aupers, 2007, pp. 306–308). Indeed, in many New Age

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groups, the sacred is treated as immanent: that is to say, it is individual and
in-dwelling. The divine is not confined to a distant, hard-to-reach realm
residing over and above our pedestrian reality. Rather, religions of the New
Age teach that spiritual enlightenment is achievable because its rudiments
are embedded in our everyday experience. What is required for us to notice
and to understand them, however, are new cognitive and emotional lenses
through which to view and to think about that experience. New Age religions find spiritual truth not in a fixed creed that is reinforced by dogmatic
consensus among believers. For them, the New Age is anti-authoritarian in
matters of the spirit. Purported insights that for others are disorganized and
irrational to the point of being nonsensical are to New Agers holistic and
intuitive—even playful.
Survey research (e.g., Houtman & Aupers, 2007, pp. 314–315) has established that New Age beliefs are more prevalent in younger cohorts than
among the older population and that they are found more commonly among
those who have renounced cultural traditionalism, often as a consequence
of advanced education.
FUTURE PATTERNS
Scholars of population (e.g., Skirbekk et al., 2010) have projected religious
trends 30 years into the future. Considering trends in migration and fertility,
in addition to patterns of conversion, these projections forecast some substantial changes in the religious backgrounds and affiliations of the American
public by the middle of the twenty-first century. The United States especially
will remain a religiously diverse country with a Christian majority. Nevertheless, the groups that compose its religious system will be undergoing
profound changes.
In particular, the size of America’s “Protestant Establishment” is fated
to further erosion as its members age and are not replaced in sufficient
numbers. Numbers of Jews in the United States will decline modestly
as well. The Roman Catholic proportion of the national population will
continue to gain in size, as will the fractions of Muslims, Buddhists, and
Hindus. The religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious also will grow
(Hadaway & Marler, 1993, p. 112; Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 302), although
possibly at a slower rate than in the recent past because of the passing of
the countercultural cohorts that matured in the 1960s and 1970s (Hout &
Fischer, 2002, pp. 182–185; Schwadel, 2010, pp. 311–319).
The Catholic population will see considerable growth in the next
half-century. White (i.e., non-Hispanic) Catholics have reached replacementlevel fertility, yet their future numbers are expected to suffer from continued
switching to Protestant denominations, and more so, to the ranks of those

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

with no reported religion. These losses, however, are more than compensated
for, statistically, by immigration from countries where Catholicism is the
dominant faith and by the younger age profile and the higher-than-average
fertility of Catholic Latinas (Sherkat, 2001, pp. 1470–1473, 1487, and 1489
[Note 6]; Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 294). Assuming the maintenance of existing
rates of immigration and religious switching,
Catholics in the youngest age cohorts will outnumber their Protestant counterparts by 2043 and take over some time in the second half of the twenty-first
century. This would principally be due to higher Hispanic Catholic fertility
and immigration … . This represents a historic moment for a country settled by
anti-Catholic Puritans, whose Revolution was motivated in part by a desire to
spread dissenting Protestantism and whose population on the eve of revolution
was 98% Protestant.
[Skirbekk et al., 2010, pp. 303 and 307]

In addition, increasing in size will be the nonreligious share of the American
population. However, although this group posts large gains from switchers
who are fleeing conventional faiths, its future growth is ultimately checked
by very low rates of fertility. Thus, the disaffiliating swell the ranks of the
unaffiliated, but once situated there, they do little to perpetuate themselves
(Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 304). In this way, it is possible for “society to grow
more religious even as individuals tend to become less religious over time”
(Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 308; emphasis in the original).
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
THE FOCUS AND LOCUS OF RELIGION
If it is true that the central focus for the academic analysis of religion is changing from the end product of tradition, the result of ascription, and the consequence of culture, to how institutional authority is abandoned to individual freedom and personal choice, then new ways of thinking and theorizing
about the operation of religion should be summoned.
Room should be carved out conceptually, too, for the study of religion’s
absence, or minimally, its minimal presence. Contend a pair of contributors
to this area of research, “sociologists of religion seek to understand how
belief systems are organized and the relationship between these systems and
attitudes, action, and social institutions. Viewed in this light, nonreligious
beliefs constitute an important aspect of such an academic endeavor” (Baker
& Smith, 2009a, pp. 1260–1261; emphasis in the original).
If, as in the recent past, the public role of religion is consumed by its political
force, more and more believers may decide that so long as organized religion

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is to be about politics, their lives will be about principles and practices other
than those that derive from religious organizations. Religion under such current conditions, then, would only accelerate its retreat on all fronts into the
relative latitude of the private sphere.
If the locus of religious action so shifts, and the settings for “lived religion”
(Edgell, 2012, pp. 253–255) migrate farther beyond the familiarity of churches
and congregations (and churches transform themselves into “art galleries
and cafés” (O’Leary, 2012), students of religion will need to devise modes
of inquiry that would adequately open up to study the spiritualities that are
lodged in such varied locales as the noisy cubicles in commercial workplaces,
the hushed confines of hospital examining rooms, or the bored humdrum
wafting through waiting areas at social-service agencies, in addition to the
bustling lobbies of legislatures and the boisterous gatherings of eager volunteers. New techniques will be demanded for reaching religious actors well
outside the regular realm of formal religion (Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 730):
historical methods for encountering religious meanings in the secular records
of the past and qualitative methods for the real-time observation and interpretation of the religious components of everyday life in the present day.
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United States, 1940–1984. American Sociological Review, 52, 325–345.
Hout, M., Greeley, A. M., & Wilde, M. J. (2001). The demographic imperative in religious change in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 468–500.
Houtman, D., & Aupers, S. (2007). The spiritual turn and the decline of tradition: The
spread of post-Christian spirituality in 14 Western countries, 1981–2000. Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion, 46, 305–320.
Iannaccone, L. R. (1990). Religious practice: A human capital approach. Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 29, 297–314.
Lim, C., MacGregor, C. A., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Secular and liminal: Discovering
heterogeneity among religious nones. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49,
596–618.
Marler, P. L., & Hadaway, C. K. (1999). Testing the attendance gap in a conservative
church. Sociology of Religion, 60, 175–186.
Musick, M., & Wilson, J. (1995). Religious switching for marriage reasons. Sociology
of Religion, 56, 257–270.
O’Leary, A. (2012). Building congregations around art galleries and cafes as spirituality wanes. The New York Times (December 30), A14.
Presser, S., & Chaves, M. (2007). Is religious service attendance declining? Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion, 46, 417–423.
Roof, W. C., & McKinney, W. (1987). American mainline religion: Its changing shape and
future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Scheitle, C. P., Kane, J. B., & Van Hook, J. (2011). Demographic imperatives and religious markets: Considering the individual and interactive roles of fertility and
switching in group growth. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50, 470–482.
Schwadel, P. (2010). Period and cohort effects on religious nonaffiliation and religious
disaffiliation: A research note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49, 311–319.
Sherkat, D. E. (2001). Tracking the restructuring of American religion: Religious affiliation and patterns of religious mobility, 1973–1998. Social Forces, 79, 1459–1493.
Skirbekk, V., Kaufmann, E., & Goujon, A. (2010). Secularism, fundamentalism, or
Catholicism? The religious composition of the United States to 2043. Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 49, 293–310.
Smith, T. W. (2002). Religious diversity in America: The emergence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 577–585.

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

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Smith, T. W., & Kim, S. (2005). The vanishing Protestant majority. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 44, 211–223.
Swatos, W. H., Jr., & Christiano, K. J. (1999). Secularization theory: The course of a
concept. Sociology of Religion, 60, 209–228.
Thomas, J. N., & Olson, D. V. A. (2010). Testing the strictness thesis and competing theories of congregational growth. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49,
619–639.

FURTHER READING
Christiano, K. J., Swatos, W. H., Jr., & Kivisto, P. (2008). Sociology of religion: Contemporary developments (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Dobbelaere, K. (2002). Secularization: An analysis at three levels. Gods, humans, and
religion series (Vol. 1). Brussels, Belgium: P.I.E. – Peter Lang Publishing.
Fischer, C. S., & Hout, M. (2006). Century of difference: How America changed in the last
one hundred years. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Greeley, A. M. (1989). Religious change in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, R. D., & Campbell, D. E. (2010). American grace: How religion divides and unites
us. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Warner, R. (2010). Secularization and its discontents. London, England: Continuum
International Publishing Group.

KEVIN J. CHRISTIANO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Kevin J. Christiano is an associate professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Higgins Labor Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.
He has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at Princeton
University and in the Canadian Studies Center at Duke University.
He is the author or coauthor of three books: Religious Diversity and Social
Change: American Cities, 1890–1906 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987 and 2007); Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Reason Before Passion (Toronto: ECW
Press, 1994 and 1995); and Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments,
with William H. Swatos, Jr., and Peter Kivisto (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press, 2002; Lanham, MD, and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2008 and 2015).
Christiano was elected president of both the American Council for Québec
Studies (2003–2005) and the Association for the Sociology of Religion
(2005–2006). He has chaired the Finance Committee of the North Central
Sociological Association and the Publications Committee of the Religious
Research Association and has served as secretary-treasurer of the Section on
the Sociology of Religion of the American Sociological Association. He is an

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

associate editor of Social Compass and Québec Studies. At the same time, he is
a member of the board of Mens: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle.
Web site:
http://sociology.nd.edu/faculty/faculty-by-alpha/kevin-j-christiano/
RELATED ESSAYS
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker



Trends in Religiosity and Religious
Affiliation
KEVIN J. CHRISTIANO

Abstract
This essay examines studies of trends in religion and religiosity, concentrating on the
case of the United States but periodically comparing that country to other societies
as well.
The summary of research opens with an overview of the putative wisdom received
from the once-dominant belief in the process of secularization. It proceeds to a
consideration of American habits of religious affiliation and switching, followed
by a discussion of rates of participation in religious activities (most notably, the
reported reductions across denominations in attendance at church services over the
past half-century). Featured next are recognition of the rising proportions of people
who claim no religious preference at all and of those who adhere to a world faith
other than Judaism or Christianity.
Finally, the narrative ventures several informed predictions concerning the contours
of religion’s future and concludes by identifying some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that any disciplinary or interdisciplinary understanding of religion will confront in a changed and changing world.

INTRODUCTION
For much of the past two centuries, social thinkers and theorists approached
ideas about the relationship between religion and society through the prism
of the process of secularization. In the broadest use of this term, writers in
the social sciences ordinarily have meant the steady and inexorable decline of
religion as a force both in collective institutions and in the lives of individuals.
Religious trends, therefore, were expected to follow a path of linear descent
as societies progressed and modernity wrapped its reach around the globe.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
SECULARIZATION AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE
In its simplest form, the secularization thesis implies “that there has been an
enormously significant change in the ways in which society and religion have
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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interacted in the past from the ways they do now” (Swatos & Christiano,
1999, p. 213; emphasis in the original). Major social transformations—the
march from feudalism as a socioeconomic system to capitalism, the shift
from agricultural to industrial production and the accompanying movement
from rural to urban residence, the introduction of dissenting theologies
and the decay of state-church monopolies, the change from folk tradition
as a basis for knowledge and technique to the application of scientific
rationality, and the substitution of bureaucratic organization for face-to-face
interaction—were all thought to have reduced the viability of religion as a
source of deep personal meaning and effective social control (Clark, 2012,
pp. 174–186; Swatos & Christiano, 1999, pp. 214–215).
Yet, as decades of debate and study have demonstrated, the empirical
evidence for this proposition in many parts of the world is ambiguous
where it is not simply absent. As the British historian Clark (2012, p. 182) has
observed, “Religious practice changed greatly in the twentieth century, as it
has changed in every century, and these changes are historically important.”
Yet, he added, “it is highly problematic to argue from that evidence to an
underlying change in religiosity.” Certainly what he has written applies
to the American case: Chaves and Anderson (2012, p. 212) bear witness
to the obvious when they write that “High levels of religious belief and
practice have characterized American society from its beginnings.” Indeed,
if secularization is the destination that awaits all modernized societies, the
United States has been uniquely tardy in getting there.
Statistical support for this proposition is abundant. For example, each and
every Gallup Poll that has asked the question since 1976 has yielded the
finding that more than 90% of American adults believe in “God or a universal spirit” (Hout & Fischer, 2002, p. 173). Further, between the 1970s and
the 1990s, the percentage of the American public that asserted a belief in an
afterlife increased steeply. This proportion rose specifically among Catholics
and Jews: the former went from 74% agreement with life after death to 83%
(roughly the same rate as Protestants), whereas for the latter, the climb was
from a small minority, 19%, to a majority, 56%. Over the quarter-century, people with no religious preference also increased their rate of belief, from 44%
to 63% (Greeley & Hout, 1999, pp. 814–815).
Moreover, the picture of most religion in the United States is remarkably
static over time; most measures remain robust and exhibit few signs of wholesale deterioration. What change as can be documented since the middle of the
twentieth century is ordinarily “slow-moving—even glacial” (Chaves, 2011,
p. 2).

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3

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AND SWITCHING
At the turn of the twenty-first century, various surveys of the American
public agreed for the most part on the varied shape of the nation’s religious
landscape: slightly more than one-half of adults in the United States identified with one or another Protestant church, about one-quarter indicated to
pollsters that they were Catholics, followers of other faiths accounted for
less than one-tenth of the total, and between one-in-eight and one-in-six
respondents expressed no religious affiliation at all (Schwadel, 2010, p. 311;
Skirbekk, Kaufmann, & Goujon, 2010, pp. 295–296; Smith & Kim, 2005, pp.
214–215).
In the 30 years between 1972 and 2002, the Protestant proportion of the
American population had dipped more than 10 percentage points; Catholics
were off only two points, whereas the Jewish rate was halved, from 3% to
1.5%. At the same time, those who answered with “no religion” and “other
religion” more than doubled their presences (Chaves, 2011, pp. 23–24; Hout
& Fischer, 2002, pp. 166 and 188). The unaffiliated rose from 5.1% in 1972 to
13.8% in 2002 to 17% in 2008, at the same time that the constituencies for
“other” faiths went from 1.9% to 6.9% of total adults. Fully 27% of those
respondents who were born since 1980 said that they had no religious
preference; more than 13% had been raised without any such influence
(Chaves, 2011, p. 19; Hadaway & Marler, 1993, pp. 100–104; Schwadel, 2010,
pp. 314–319; Sherkat, 2001, p. 1472; Smith & Kim, 2005, pp. 215–216). Indeed,
Sherkat (2001, p. 1471) has written that “in recent decade of the twentieth
century more Americans reported growing up with no religious affiliation
than were raised in Judaism, or as Episcopalians.”
A minor cause of the growth or decline of religious groups is the “switcher”:
someone who, over the course of a lifetime, moves from one category of
denominational affiliation to another—or from religion to nonreligion, or the
reverse. In the United States, a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom
means that such “mobility” is “not uncommon” (Sherkat, 2001, p. 1459). True,
in the 25 years from 1973 to 1998, from 60% to 70% of Americans persisted in
the same religious affiliation; that is, the faith (or nonfaith) in which they were
raised is the one that they professed consistently. However, about one-third
of people in the United States shift from one group to another at some point
in their lives (Sherkat, 2001, p. 1467).
Switches between denominations often occur immediately before or after
marriage to a spouse of a different religious affiliation (Hadaway & Marler,
1993, pp. 99 and 108; Iannaccone, 1990, p. 302; Musick & Wilson, 1995;
Sherkat, 2001, p. 1489 [Note 4]). However, when people do switch, the
change is most often from one religious identity to another that is closely

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

related—theologically, socially, or historically (Musick & Wilson, 1995, p.
262; Sherkat, 2001, p. 1485). Travel up and down the religious spectrum,
then, is usually a short trip along a familiar trail and not a long trek into an
unknown wilderness.
Part of the reason for the tendency of the denominationally mobile not to
stray too far from their points of religious origin lies in their accumulation,
earlier in life, of what has been termed religious human capital (Iannaccone,
1990, p. 299). Having learned adequately and practiced proficiently the rudiments of one religious tradition, switchers seem reluctant to jettison all of
that experience, a “sunk cost” of time and energy, to adopt an entirely novel
identity. Rather, they gravitate toward a new affiliation that contains some (or
many) of the same (or similar) elements of belief and practice as the option
that they recently left behind (Iannaccone, 1990; compare Sherkat, 2001).
It follows from this reasoning also that “distinctive,” “quasi-ethnic” religious groups (such as Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, and Mormons) retain more
of their original members because the religious capital that they impart is
both considerable and not easily portable (Iannaccone, 1990; Sherkat, 2001).
For instance, when presented with the prospect of marriage to a member of a
different denomination, Catholics tend to gain through the switches of their
would-be spouses rather than to lose through conversions to the faiths of
their partners; indeed, when Catholics do shift at marriage, it is frequently
out of organized religion altogether (Musick & Wilson, 1995, pp. 261–268).
“Persons who were reared Catholic,” note Hadaway and Marler (1993, p.
100), “tend to remain Catholic, and Catholics are still among the most stable
of denominational families. Nevertheless,” they observe, “Catholic stability has eroded.” In recent years, Catholics have been particularly prone to
losses from switching, with many Hispanic Catholics seeking membership
in Pentecostal or fundamentalist Protestant sects and about an equal proportion of their white coreligionists seeking out mainstream Protestantism,
non-Christian traditions, or disaffiliation from religion entirely (Hadaway &
Marler, 1993, pp. 100–104; Scheitle, Kane, & Van Hook, 2011, p. 473). According to the General Social Survey, early in the twenty-first century about one
out of every six persons who belonged to the Catholic Church at age 16 was
no longer maintaining that identity (Sherkat, 2001, pp. 1469–1473; Skirbekk
et al., 2010, p. 300).
Despite the amount of switching between denominations that takes place
in American society, an even more potent force in the growth of various
religious groups is demographic. After all, the surest (if not the quickest)
means of augmenting the ranks of any group is to prod it to make its own
members and then strive to keep them within the fold. (As Sherkat [2001,
p. 1485] has commented of conservative religious groups, “Sects are not so
much attractive for switchers as they are retentive of members … ”) Research

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

5

has established that persons who are members of theologically conservative
churches marry at younger ages, stay married longer, have more children,
and keep those offspring within the church more successfully than do members of more liberal bodies (Hout, Greeley, & Wilde, 2001; Roof & McKinney,
1987; compare Scheitle et al., 2011; Thomas & Olson, 2010).
RATES OF RELIGIOUS INVOLVEMENT AND PARTICIPATION
A prime illustration of religion’s “glacial” pace of change in the United States
is the chart of church attendance rates by year. There exists some evidence
that rates are not as high today as in the 1950s. Yet, “However one reads
the evidence about trends between World War II and 1990,” estimate Stanley Presser and Mark Chaves, “the recent past has been a time of stability,”
in that, they write, “weekly attendance at religious services has been stable
since 1990.” Thus, the two broadly concur with the judgment that “religious
service attendance in the United States has been essentially constant throughout the second half of the twentieth century” (Presser & Chaves, 2007, p. 417).
Simultaneously, north of the border in Canada, something different has been
happening: proportions of worshipers who attended church at least monthly
declined measurably between 1986 and 2008 (Eagle, 2011).
For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, from 41% to 46%
of Americans who belonged to Protestant denominations contended that
they had gone to church in the previous 7 days; the comparable rate for
American Catholics was about 50% (Chaves, 1989, p. 465; Hadaway, Marler,
& Chaves, 1993, p. 741 [Note 2]). The essential stability in these statistics to
the present day can be explained by the dual effects of an aging population
(which produces a more devoted pattern of attendance) and the replacement
of older cohorts by younger ones (which depresses attendance rates). In
aggregate, these influences work to cancel out each other (Chaves, 1989, pp.
475–476). All the same, a deterioration in church attendance by Americans
has been detected and documented, but only for a single group (Roman
Catholics) and for one period (from the late 1960s to the middle 1970s), when
weekly Mass attendance for Catholics dipped sharply (Hout & Greeley,
1987, pp. 325–326, 328, and 341). Hout and Greeley (1987, pp. 332–335
and 340–342) associate this change with a one-time event: the sweeping
erosion in confidence among Catholics about the teachings of their church’s
hierarchy dealing with sexuality in the wake of the encyclical Humanae vitae
(1968).
As elevated or diminished as present rates of church attendance in North
American societies may be, evidence suggests that current reports actually
overstate the true frequency of participation in religious services. Research

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

that compared projections of total attendance from survey data with estimates (Hadaway et al., 1993) and with physical counts (Marler & Hadaway,
1999) of persons in congregations has revealed that the true rates of church
attendance “are approximately one-half the generally accepted levels” (Hadaway et al., 1993, p. 742; emphasis in the original; see also Chaves, 2011, pp.
42–45). For instance, in one rural county in Ohio, 36% of Protestant survey
respondents said that they had attended church in the previous week. However, researchers could account for only enough worshipers to produce an
attendance rate of about 20% (Hadaway et al., 1993, pp. 743–744). Counts
from 18 Catholic dioceses in the United States yielded a similar result. Instead
of the Mass attendance rate of 51% calculated by the Gallup Poll, just 28%
of Catholics appeared in the flesh to occupy a pew in those places on the
weekend (Hadaway et al., 1993, pp. 745–748).
A portion of the gap dividing reported from actual rates can be blamed
on what polling experts call “social desirability bias”: that is, respondents
hope to impress interviewers by claiming a virtuous habit, whether or not
they practice it faithfully. However, the more substantial explanation for
this difference is that respondents, when questioned about a given week,
are describing what they customarily do, not what they may have done in the
queried instance (Hadaway et al., 1993, pp. 748–749; Marler & Hadaway,
1999, pp. 177 and 182–185). The misreporting of activity “results from
active church members reporting behavior that is consistent with their
perceptions of themselves as active churchgoers” (Marler & Hadaway, 1999,
p. 184).
NON-AFFILIATION IN, AND DISAFFILIATION FROM, THE CHURCHES
After a long spell of relative stability, the rates at which Americans admit
to survey interviewers that they have “no religion” have risen sharply in
recent decades. Two sociologists (Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 166 and 188), analyzing decades of data from sample survey questions, discovered that the
proportion of American adults who declared no religious preference actually doubled, from 7% to 14%, during the 1990s. By 2008, that proportion
had reached 17% (Chaves, 2011, p. 17). For these reasons, religious “nones”
have been characterized as “the fastest growing religious category in America … ” (Lim, MacGregor, & Putnam, 2010, p. 613; compare Baker & Smith,
2009a).
A number of factors account for this change, from mere cohort replacement
(younger respondents are more likely to indicate a lack of a religious affiliation than older ones [Roof & McKinney, 1987]), the fact that more young people today than in the past were raised in nonreligious households, a later age

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

7

at first marriage (freeing some from conformity to spousal pressures regarding religion [Hadaway & Marler, 1993, p. 108]), and the greater accessibility
of higher education (Baker & Smith, 2009a, pp. 1257–1259; Hadaway & Marler, 1993, p. 104; Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 168–172). These patterns prevail
not only in the United States and Canada, but throughout Western Europe in
countries such as Denmark, France, and the Netherlands (Hayes, 2000, pp.
192 and 199–204).
It would be a grave error, however, to assume that persons who subscribe
to no particular religion are all staunch secularists, or, as two authors on
the topic (Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 731) have put it, “part of an increasing
wave of secularity.” To the contrary, those with no religion are in actuality
a diverse group (Greeley & Hout, 1999, p. 813; Hayes, 2000, pp. 195–198
and 205–206; Hout & Fischer, 2002, p. 173) that includes only a small core
of convinced atheists—perhaps 3% to 5%, a tiny slice of the total population,
reviled and rejected by their fellow citizens (Edgell, Gerteis, & Hartmann,
2006, pp. 214, 217–220, and 223–225). Atheists are less popular in American
society than either homosexuals or Muslims (Edgell et al., 2006, pp. 217–218
and 230)—although surveys seldom ask their respondents to compare atheists to homosexual Muslims.
The atheists are dwarfed by a much larger number of agnostics (religious
doubters who nevertheless are “not vehemently opposed to religion in all
forms” [Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 731]) and a sizeable plurality of what some
have labeled “unchurched believers,” whose private religious thoughts and
behaviors are not much different, in at least some respects, from those of
churchgoers (Baker & Smith, 2009a, p. 1260). To illustrate this similarity, the
General Social Surveys from 1998 and 2000 found that more than two thirds
of religious “nones” reported “belief in God or a higher power,” while 57% in
1998 believed in life after death. More than one-third endorsed the existence
of miracles that were accomplished through religion. Ninety-three percent
confessed that they prayed at least occasionally, and a surprising one-fifth
answered that they prayed daily (Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 173–175). Hence,
“the new ‘nones,’” Hout and Fischer (2002, pp. 173 and 175) have deduced,
are “believers opting out of organized religion rather than people who lost
faith as well as religion … . Their most distinguishing feature is their avoidance of churches.”
These believers who normally avoid churches constitute the most organizationally unstable component of the “no religion” category. The line in their
own minds that separates religious belonging from independence is fluid
and floating, porous and penetrable: about equal numbers of loosely connected believers shift into church membership and out again from year to
year (Lim et al., 2010, pp. 603–604). They are reputed to sustain “a weak sense
of attachment to a religious tradition and thus may identify with the tradition

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sometimes, if not always.” As a result, “each of the major religious traditions
seems to be surrounded by a penumbra of loosely attached ‘liminal’ affiliates” (Lim et al., 2010, pp. 597 and 610).
Looming large among those who stand aloof from “organized” religion are
the rising numbers of people who profess that they are “spiritual, but not religious” (Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 724). Their self-identification as nonreligious
notwithstanding, about 40% of those who forsake a stable denominational
tie say that they are “at least moderately spiritual.” Their estrangement from
an active church life, suggests survey evidence, reflects “significant antipathy toward organized religion” (Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 176 and 177). This
animus, in turn, is concentrated among political moderates and liberals and
appears to be rooted in a distaste for the increasingly vocal advocacy of conservative public policies on the part of many churches (Chaves, 2011, pp.
20–21; Hout & Fischer, 2002, pp. 178–186).
GROWTH IN NON-JUDEO-CHRISTIAN FAITHS
In recent years, the presence in the United States of persons who practice
faiths outside of the Judeo-Christian majority has grown markedly. Although
the numbers of such practitioners are still small in absolute terms, their
proportion of the national population has been steadily increasing. Taken
together, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism comprised around one-half of 1%
of Americans in the early 1970s, according to the General Social Survey; by
the year 2000, that percentage had approximately tripled (Smith, 2002, p.
578). Again, this change makes for persistently low totals, but it raises the
visibility and therefore the attention that such faiths receive in the broader
culture (Smith, 2002, pp. 582–583).
A parallel development in religion, not just for the United States but also for
Western Europe and much of the developed world, has been the emergence
and proliferation since the 1960s of an eclectic variety of spirituality referred
to as the New Age. While this movement to date does not entail large numbers of participants, some deem it to offer a glimpse of religion’s future in
postmodern circumstances. As two Dutch sociologists (Houtman & Aupers,
2007, p. 315) have remarked, “What we are witnessing today is not so much a
disappearance of religion, but rather a relocation of the sacred. Gradually losing its transcendent character, the sacred becomes more and more conceived
of as … residing in the deeper layers of the self.”
Critics of this brand of religion have taken to calling it diffuse and fragmented, even incoherent. Its promoters, however, regard its ideological
looseness as welcome freedom and its sprawling quality as testimony to
the expanding consciousness of the sacred that is necessary for personal
growth (Houtman & Aupers, 2007, pp. 306–308). Indeed, in many New Age

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

9

groups, the sacred is treated as immanent: that is to say, it is individual and
in-dwelling. The divine is not confined to a distant, hard-to-reach realm
residing over and above our pedestrian reality. Rather, religions of the New
Age teach that spiritual enlightenment is achievable because its rudiments
are embedded in our everyday experience. What is required for us to notice
and to understand them, however, are new cognitive and emotional lenses
through which to view and to think about that experience. New Age religions find spiritual truth not in a fixed creed that is reinforced by dogmatic
consensus among believers. For them, the New Age is anti-authoritarian in
matters of the spirit. Purported insights that for others are disorganized and
irrational to the point of being nonsensical are to New Agers holistic and
intuitive—even playful.
Survey research (e.g., Houtman & Aupers, 2007, pp. 314–315) has established that New Age beliefs are more prevalent in younger cohorts than
among the older population and that they are found more commonly among
those who have renounced cultural traditionalism, often as a consequence
of advanced education.
FUTURE PATTERNS
Scholars of population (e.g., Skirbekk et al., 2010) have projected religious
trends 30 years into the future. Considering trends in migration and fertility,
in addition to patterns of conversion, these projections forecast some substantial changes in the religious backgrounds and affiliations of the American
public by the middle of the twenty-first century. The United States especially
will remain a religiously diverse country with a Christian majority. Nevertheless, the groups that compose its religious system will be undergoing
profound changes.
In particular, the size of America’s “Protestant Establishment” is fated
to further erosion as its members age and are not replaced in sufficient
numbers. Numbers of Jews in the United States will decline modestly
as well. The Roman Catholic proportion of the national population will
continue to gain in size, as will the fractions of Muslims, Buddhists, and
Hindus. The religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious also will grow
(Hadaway & Marler, 1993, p. 112; Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 302), although
possibly at a slower rate than in the recent past because of the passing of
the countercultural cohorts that matured in the 1960s and 1970s (Hout &
Fischer, 2002, pp. 182–185; Schwadel, 2010, pp. 311–319).
The Catholic population will see considerable growth in the next
half-century. White (i.e., non-Hispanic) Catholics have reached replacementlevel fertility, yet their future numbers are expected to suffer from continued
switching to Protestant denominations, and more so, to the ranks of those

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with no reported religion. These losses, however, are more than compensated
for, statistically, by immigration from countries where Catholicism is the
dominant faith and by the younger age profile and the higher-than-average
fertility of Catholic Latinas (Sherkat, 2001, pp. 1470–1473, 1487, and 1489
[Note 6]; Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 294). Assuming the maintenance of existing
rates of immigration and religious switching,
Catholics in the youngest age cohorts will outnumber their Protestant counterparts by 2043 and take over some time in the second half of the twenty-first
century. This would principally be due to higher Hispanic Catholic fertility
and immigration … . This represents a historic moment for a country settled by
anti-Catholic Puritans, whose Revolution was motivated in part by a desire to
spread dissenting Protestantism and whose population on the eve of revolution
was 98% Protestant.
[Skirbekk et al., 2010, pp. 303 and 307]

In addition, increasing in size will be the nonreligious share of the American
population. However, although this group posts large gains from switchers
who are fleeing conventional faiths, its future growth is ultimately checked
by very low rates of fertility. Thus, the disaffiliating swell the ranks of the
unaffiliated, but once situated there, they do little to perpetuate themselves
(Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 304). In this way, it is possible for “society to grow
more religious even as individuals tend to become less religious over time”
(Skirbekk et al., 2010, p. 308; emphasis in the original).
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
THE FOCUS AND LOCUS OF RELIGION
If it is true that the central focus for the academic analysis of religion is changing from the end product of tradition, the result of ascription, and the consequence of culture, to how institutional authority is abandoned to individual freedom and personal choice, then new ways of thinking and theorizing
about the operation of religion should be summoned.
Room should be carved out conceptually, too, for the study of religion’s
absence, or minimally, its minimal presence. Contend a pair of contributors
to this area of research, “sociologists of religion seek to understand how
belief systems are organized and the relationship between these systems and
attitudes, action, and social institutions. Viewed in this light, nonreligious
beliefs constitute an important aspect of such an academic endeavor” (Baker
& Smith, 2009a, pp. 1260–1261; emphasis in the original).
If, as in the recent past, the public role of religion is consumed by its political
force, more and more believers may decide that so long as organized religion

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

11

is to be about politics, their lives will be about principles and practices other
than those that derive from religious organizations. Religion under such current conditions, then, would only accelerate its retreat on all fronts into the
relative latitude of the private sphere.
If the locus of religious action so shifts, and the settings for “lived religion”
(Edgell, 2012, pp. 253–255) migrate farther beyond the familiarity of churches
and congregations (and churches transform themselves into “art galleries
and cafés” (O’Leary, 2012), students of religion will need to devise modes
of inquiry that would adequately open up to study the spiritualities that are
lodged in such varied locales as the noisy cubicles in commercial workplaces,
the hushed confines of hospital examining rooms, or the bored humdrum
wafting through waiting areas at social-service agencies, in addition to the
bustling lobbies of legislatures and the boisterous gatherings of eager volunteers. New techniques will be demanded for reaching religious actors well
outside the regular realm of formal religion (Baker & Smith, 2009b, p. 730):
historical methods for encountering religious meanings in the secular records
of the past and qualitative methods for the real-time observation and interpretation of the religious components of everyday life in the present day.
REFERENCES
Baker, J. O. B., & Smith, B. G. (2009a). The nones: Social characteristics of the religiously unaffiliated. Social Forces, 87, 1251–1263.
Baker, J. O. B., & Smith, B. G. (2009b). None too simple: Examining issues of religious
nonbelief and nonbelonging in the United States. Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, 48, 719–733.
Chaves, M. (1989). Secularization and religious revival: Evidence from U.S. church
attendance rates, 1972–1986. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 464–477.
Chaves, M. (2011). American religion: Contemporary trends. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Chaves, M., & Anderson, S. (2012). Continuity and change in American religion,
1972–2008. In P. V. Marsden (Ed.), Social trends in the United States, 1972–2008:
Evidence from the General Social Survey (pp. 212–239). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clark, J. C. D. (2012). Historiographical reviews. Secularization and modernization:
The failure of a ‘grand narrative.’. The Historical Journal (London), 55, 161–194.
Eagle, D. E. (2011). Changing patterns of attendance at religious services in Canada,
1986–2008. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50, 187–200.
Edgell, P. (2012). A cultural sociology of religion: New directions. Annual Review of
Sociology, 38, 247–265.
Edgell, P., Gerteis, J., & Hartmann, D. (2006). Atheists as “other”: Moral boundaries
and cultural membership in American society. American Sociological Review, 71,
211–234.

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Greeley, A. M., & Hout, M. (1999). Americans’ increasing belief in life after death:
Religious competition and acculturation. American Sociological Review, 64, 813–835.
Hadaway, C. K., & Marler, P. L. (1993). All in the family: Religious mobility in America. Review of Religious Research, 35, 97–116.
Hadaway, C. K., Marler, P. L., & Chaves, M. (1993). What the polls don’t show: A
closer look at U.S. church attendance. American Sociological Review, 58, 741–752.
Hayes, B. C. (2000). Religious independents within Western industrialized nations:
A socio-demographic profile. Sociology of Religion, 61, 191–207.
Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2002). Why more Americans have no religious preference:
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Hout, M., & Greeley, A. M. (1987). The center doesn’t hold: Church attendance in the
United States, 1940–1984. American Sociological Review, 52, 325–345.
Hout, M., Greeley, A. M., & Wilde, M. J. (2001). The demographic imperative in religious change in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 468–500.
Houtman, D., & Aupers, S. (2007). The spiritual turn and the decline of tradition: The
spread of post-Christian spirituality in 14 Western countries, 1981–2000. Journal for
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Lim, C., MacGregor, C. A., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Secular and liminal: Discovering
heterogeneity among religious nones. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49,
596–618.
Marler, P. L., & Hadaway, C. K. (1999). Testing the attendance gap in a conservative
church. Sociology of Religion, 60, 175–186.
Musick, M., & Wilson, J. (1995). Religious switching for marriage reasons. Sociology
of Religion, 56, 257–270.
O’Leary, A. (2012). Building congregations around art galleries and cafes as spirituality wanes. The New York Times (December 30), A14.
Presser, S., & Chaves, M. (2007). Is religious service attendance declining? Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion, 46, 417–423.
Roof, W. C., & McKinney, W. (1987). American mainline religion: Its changing shape and
future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Scheitle, C. P., Kane, J. B., & Van Hook, J. (2011). Demographic imperatives and religious markets: Considering the individual and interactive roles of fertility and
switching in group growth. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50, 470–482.
Schwadel, P. (2010). Period and cohort effects on religious nonaffiliation and religious
disaffiliation: A research note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49, 311–319.
Sherkat, D. E. (2001). Tracking the restructuring of American religion: Religious affiliation and patterns of religious mobility, 1973–1998. Social Forces, 79, 1459–1493.
Skirbekk, V., Kaufmann, E., & Goujon, A. (2010). Secularism, fundamentalism, or
Catholicism? The religious composition of the United States to 2043. Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 49, 293–310.
Smith, T. W. (2002). Religious diversity in America: The emergence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 577–585.

Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation

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Smith, T. W., & Kim, S. (2005). The vanishing Protestant majority. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 44, 211–223.
Swatos, W. H., Jr., & Christiano, K. J. (1999). Secularization theory: The course of a
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Thomas, J. N., & Olson, D. V. A. (2010). Testing the strictness thesis and competing theories of congregational growth. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49,
619–639.

FURTHER READING
Christiano, K. J., Swatos, W. H., Jr., & Kivisto, P. (2008). Sociology of religion: Contemporary developments (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Dobbelaere, K. (2002). Secularization: An analysis at three levels. Gods, humans, and
religion series (Vol. 1). Brussels, Belgium: P.I.E. – Peter Lang Publishing.
Fischer, C. S., & Hout, M. (2006). Century of difference: How America changed in the last
one hundred years. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Greeley, A. M. (1989). Religious change in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, R. D., & Campbell, D. E. (2010). American grace: How religion divides and unites
us. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Warner, R. (2010). Secularization and its discontents. London, England: Continuum
International Publishing Group.

KEVIN J. CHRISTIANO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Kevin J. Christiano is an associate professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Higgins Labor Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.
He has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at Princeton
University and in the Canadian Studies Center at Duke University.
He is the author or coauthor of three books: Religious Diversity and Social
Change: American Cities, 1890–1906 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987 and 2007); Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Reason Before Passion (Toronto: ECW
Press, 1994 and 1995); and Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments,
with William H. Swatos, Jr., and Peter Kivisto (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press, 2002; Lanham, MD, and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2008 and 2015).
Christiano was elected president of both the American Council for Québec
Studies (2003–2005) and the Association for the Sociology of Religion
(2005–2006). He has chaired the Finance Committee of the North Central
Sociological Association and the Publications Committee of the Religious
Research Association and has served as secretary-treasurer of the Section on
the Sociology of Religion of the American Sociological Association. He is an

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

associate editor of Social Compass and Québec Studies. At the same time, he is
a member of the board of Mens: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle.
Web site:
http://sociology.nd.edu/faculty/faculty-by-alpha/kevin-j-christiano/
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Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker