The top religion-oriented story of the day is the release Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey data from 2008. A survey of 54,000 people (in contrast, Pew’s religious landscape survey had 35,000) , ARIS is one of the biggest and most influential snapshots of faith in America. The most popular ledes from the newly available data is the ongoing erosion of denominational protestantism, the overall shrinkage of Christian adherence, and the growth of people claiming “no religion”.

“The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had “no” religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.”

While I love to pontificate on the looming post-Christian society (and there’s plenty of meat here to feed such pontifications), you, gentle reader, are no doubt wondering how Pagans and other fellow travelers are faring according to this data. Well, from a cursory examination of the data it looks like we’re doing just fine.

As you can see, ‘New Religious Movements and Other Religions’ packed on over a million adherents since 2001, and over 1.5 million in the last twenty years. That brings the total of “others” to nearly 3 million. Who are the others according to ARIS?

“New Religious Movements and Other Religions: Scientology, New Age, Eckankar, Spiritualist, Unitarian-Universalist, Deist, Wiccan, Pagan, Druid, Indian Religion, Santeria, Rastafarian.”

Now that’s a rather interesting stew of faiths there. How to tell who’s growing and by how much? For that, let’s turn to the Pew Forum’s religious survey, which while slightly smaller in sample size, mirrors the ARIS data rather well. Both Pew and ARIS give “other” faiths 1.2% of the (American) pie. That in turn seems to back up my earlier assertion that there are at least one million modern Pagans in America (probably more like 1.5 million), add in the over half-million UUs (around 20% of whom are “earth-based” or Pagan in some respect), close to a million practitioners of Santeria (in North America), and a few hundred thousand indigenous practitioners, and it seems clear that notions of our continued (slow and steady) growth aren’t unfounded. The ARIS data also makes clear that it isn’t the myth of an exploding Pagan population that Christians have to worry about.

“The 2008 findings confirm the conclusions we came to in our earlier studies that Americans are slowly becoming less Christian and that in recent decades the challenge to Christianity in American society does not come from other world religions or new religious movements (NRMs) but rather from a rejection of all organized religions. To illustrate the point, Table 1 shows that the non-theist and No Religion groups collectively known as “Nones” have gained almost 20 million adults since 1990 and risen from 8.2 to 15.0 percent of the total population. If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse to answer our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble “Nones” in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.”

In other words, America is becoming less Christian, but it isn’t really our fault. Just think of all the wasted time and resources fighting Harry Potter and other “occult” menaces. The kids aren’t becoming occultists, they’re becoming (spiritual but not religious) secularists! Meanwhile, while Christian religions still overwhelmingly dominate numerically, a majority of Christian adults believe the days of their faith being the “default” religious setting in America are essentially over. In the coming days and weeks it should be interesting to see how other journalists and religious groups spin this new ARIS data. Debunkings? Denials? Gloomy acceptance? Whichever the direction, I’ll content myself with the ongoing modest growth of our family of faiths.

Tags: ARIS, Paganism, Religion, survey