The American Freedom Network

Media slant – purposeful or cultural?

March 10, 2009 – 5:44 am

In a widely distributed (ABC and AP) the MSM claims Americans are “losing their religion“.

As we’ve noted before many of us distinguish between faith and religion.  The media story seems to take an assumption based only on statistics they want to cite.

Family Insight took a deeper dive (below) that shows more detail on the demographics reported on.  It seems SOME denominations are decreasing, some are stable and some are GAINING (as are “atheists”).

Here is the Family Insight report (received via email)

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Faith is an important part of healthy family life, but according to many papers and news sources today, fewer Americans are calling themselves “Christian” over the last few decades.

There is some truth to this, but the story is actually good news for serious, biblical Christianity.

The report actually indicates there have been moderate to strong increases in general non-denominational and evangelical Christian identification since 1990 and dramatic drops for mainline Protestant Churches.

One negative sign is that one of the greatest increases is from “no identification” respondents which the authors say is more of an apathetic rather than a rejecting position toward religion.

This report is mostly good news, indicating that people are still interested in and being attracted to Christian traditions that are more biblically serious and faithful. And for all the increased community and PR efforts of Mormons, their numbers have remained flat since 1990.

Below are some of the most interesting changes in religious identification.

Self-Identification of U.S. Adult Population by Religious Tradition

Faith Tradition	1990	2001	2008	Change
Mainline Protestant	18.7%	17.2%	12.9%	signif. decline
Catholic	26.2%	24.5%	25.1%	decline
Christian (unspecified)	4.6%	6.8%	7.4%	increase
Protestant (unspecified)	9.8%	2.2%	2.3%	signif. decline
Non-Denom. Christian	0.1%	1.2%	3.5%	signif. increase
Born Again/ Evangelical	0.3%	0.5%	0.9%	increase
Pentecostal/ Charismatic	3.2%	3.8%	3.5%	increase
No Religious Affiliation	8.2%	14.1%	15.0%	signif increase
Mormon	1.4%	1.3%	1.4%	stable
Agnostic	0.7%	0.5%	0.9%	increase

Report: American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS 2008) was released today by Trinity College in Connecticut and is an ongoing look at religious identification on the U.S., having conducted over 220,00 interviews.