FaithWorld, Religion Clause, and Religion Dispatches all point to a newly-released poll from Public Religion Research and the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics that compares conservative and progressive/liberal religious activists. While it “contains very little that will surprise anyone”, the poll does starkly display the vast differences in diversity between the politically active religious “left” and “right”. To quote the findings:

“Conservative and progressive religious activists are deeply religious, but have strikingly different religious profiles. In terms of religious affiliation, conservative activists are almost exclusively Christian, whereas progressive activists are more diverse.”

Let’s have a look at the graphs.

I think “strikingly different” is a fair assessment. Not even 1% of conservative activists would admit to being non-Christian, while 2% of progressive activists admit to being in the “other” category (the happy land of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Pagans that exists only in the minds of polling organizations) and an impressively significant 12% labeled themselves as Unitarian-Universalist or mixed-faith.

“Progressive activists are markedly more diverse in terms of religious affiliation. No single faith tradition makes up a majority of progressive religious activists. A plurality (44%) of progressive religious activists identify as Mainline Protestants, one?sixth (17%) are Roman Catholics, and one?tenth are Evangelical Protestants. Twelve percent identify with Unitarian?Universalists, interfaith, or mixed faith groups. Six percent of progressive religious activists are Jewish. Interestingly, 8% of these activists have no formal religious affiliation or identify as formerly affiliated. Two percent identify with other religious traditions.”

So what does it all mean? First it confirms that majority-holding conservative evangelicals (54%), in alliance with conservative Catholics (35%), completely dominate religiously-motivated activism on the right, and the likelihood of non-Christian faiths ever having a significant voice in the current state of right-wing politics is slim-to-nil. Meanwhile, no one group holds a majority within the world of religious progressives, allowing for a far more diverse coalition to exist. This reality has some wide-ranging political implications, it means that as minority religions grow they may be far more likely to vote for a liberal/progressive candidate, even if they disagree on some issues, because the opposition is seen as uniquely hostile to them. Around 74% of modern Pagans voted for Obama in the last election, and I bet that Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims had similarly lopsided polling numbers.

“Among progressive activists, 58% say Obama was their first choice in the Democratic primary, and 93% supported him in the general election … Among progressive activists, 1-in-5 say faith was the most important factor, and 41% report that faith was as important as other factors in deciding who to support in the election.”

Further, while minority faiths are vastly smaller in number compared to evangelicals or Catholics, some polling suggests that people who have a “favorable” opinion of minority faiths are more likely to vote in their interests, creating a sphere of influence that far outstrips their actual population. Conservative activists should see these polling results with some dismay, while they have a dependably large bloc of support amongst conservative evangelicals, the candidates that make them happy can often deeply alienate non-Christians who might otherwise be interested in conservative stances on various issues. As for liberal and progressive organizers, they need to recognize that a large portion of their religious coalition doesn’t identify as Christian, and to stop over-privileging “nice” pseudo-moderate Christians like Jim Wallis and Rick “Purpose Driven Life” Warren up as the voice of a “religious left” that will draw more evangelical voters away from the conservatives. This new poll makes it pretty clear that isn’t about to happen no matter who you get to make an invocation.

Pagan scholar Helen Berger, co-author of “Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States”, has announced that she and fellow researchers James R. Lewis and Henrik Bogdan are revisiting the Pagan Census project. The Pagan Census was first initiated nearly twenty years ago, and compiled data from thousands of modern Pagans to give a fascinating snapshot of our communities during Paganism’s meteoric rise in the 1990s. Now, in an age of blogs and instant communications, an update is underway to compare and contrast just how much we’ve changed.

“A number of scholars have noted that it would be helpful to have a follow-up of that survey to see if and how the community has changed or remained the same. The survey that follows uses many, although not all of the same questions that were in the original survey to provide that comparison. There are also new questions, for instance about the Internet, something that was of little interest 20 years ago but is now, and some from other studies, that again permit a comparison. This has resulted in the survey being somewhat long–we appreciate your taking the time to complete it.”

I urge all my readers who identify in any way with the modern Pagan/Heathen movement to participate in this census and spread the word to everyone you know. The more respondents the census has, the more accurate the data. You can find it, here. You can be sure that I will be paying attention to this renewed project as it goes forward, and will keep you appraised of any updates or results.

Yesterday the Gallup polling organization released a new set of analyses from 170,000 interviews over the last six months regarding religion in America. The focus was on religious identity in different states, showing where different religions were the most (and least) concentrated.

“The accompanying maps give a portrait of this remarkable pattern of religious dispersion in the U.S. for these religious groups, based on a new analysis of more than 170,000 Gallup interviews conducted between January and June of this year. A good deal of the religious dispersion across the states is explainable by historical immigration patterns — particularly the impact of the large waves of European Catholics and Jews who came through ports of entry in the Middle Atlantic states in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Their results are much what you’d expect, the Pacific Northwest has a lot of “nones”, Utah and surrounding states have a lot of Mormons, Protestantism dominates in the South, there are lots of Jewish people in New York and Florida, and Catholicism remains vital in New England. All fine and good, but when I looked at the breakdown of their numbers I noticed something odd.

Why were “other” non-Christians not included? No Muslims, no Buddhists, no Pagans. Nothing. They must have that data, so why not release it with the rest? It can’t be simple numerical preferences since the recent ARIS data puts “NRMs and Other Religions” on par with religiously observant Jews and just behind the Mormons, two groups that were included in the released data. Is it down to political influence? I’ve sent a request to Gallup to release the “others” data, but haven’t received a response yet. With such a large sample size we could get some interesting results as to where the “others” live, data that could be useful to Pagan organizations and advocacy groups as we continue to grow. Hopefully the rest of their data is forthcoming, but it couldn’t hurt to politely and respectfully request that Gallup release their state-by-state data on “Other non-Christian Religions”.

ADDENDUM: Folks in the comments are starting to get the following canned reply from Gallup on the matter of the “others”.

“As noted in our article, “Religious Identity: States Differ Widely,” the table “does not include Muslims or other non-Christian religions due to small sample sizes. Table also does not show “No opinion” responses.” Added together, all the “No opinion” responses and “other non-Christian” responses were about 5% of the total responses. Individually, each of the many religions included in the “other non-Christian” category received less than 1% of the responses – many were substantially less than 1%. The numbers were, in fact, so small that differences between states were not statistically significant, and could be misleading. That’s not to say there aren’t significant numbers of people associated with each of these religions, but they are relatively small percentages of the total population. Because the margin of error depends on sample size, a much larger (and more expensive) survey would be required to get reliable figures for the smaller groups.”

If there is a standard reply, we must not be the only ones wondering about Gallup’s omissions.

The past couple years have given much food for thought to those who are interested in the state of religion in the United States of America. In 2008 you had the release of the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, and then at the beginning of 2009 you had Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey data from 2008. Both not only showed an ongoing increase in the population of modern Pagans, but that the “religiously unaffiliated” or “nones” now claim around 15% of our total population. But are the “nones” really not religious? While the Pacific Northwest is only second to New England in the percentage of “unchurched” adults (hovering around 25%), some assert that the Cascadian “nones” are actually deeply spiritual and look to nature and the New Age as inspirations in crafting their own belief systems.

“According to the just-published “Cascadia: the Elusive Utopia.” … a lot of these “nones” in the Pacific Northwest are actually very spiritual, walking a path of their own making, but not into organized religions and churches. Sociology professor Mark Shibley of Southern Oregon University wrote the lead essay called “The Promise and Limits of Secular Spirituality in Cascadia.” “This region is different. The people here are not as connected to religious institutions,” he says. The alternative spirituality here shows itself in two main ways, Shibley notes: “nature spirituality,” such as you see in the secular environmental movement, and the more well-known New Age spirituality, where the gaze is shifted inward.”

If thousands of Cascadian residents are drawing on “nature spirituality” and “New Age spirituality”, you potentially end up with a whole lot of (what we would probably recognize as) Pagans who just aren’t bothering to label themselves that way in surveys. As if to confirm that thesis, the Ashland Daily Tidings rounds up a Pagan priestess and three other residents of the Pacific Northwest to talk about their beliefs. At times, it becomes very hard to differentiate the Pagan answers from the (ostensibly) non-Pagan answers.

“Absolutely. There are lots of different sources [for the spiritual and sacred]. Nature is the core. It’s earth-centered, an awareness of things greater than me, that science can’t explain.”

That’s not the Pagan priestess, that’s Dominick Della Sala, Ph.D. – chief scientist, National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, in Ashland. Sala was raised Catholic in Brooklyn, NY. Perhaps merely living in the Pacific Northwest makes one predisposed to see the sacred within nature, which would explain why Oregon (and the Pacific Northwest in general) is such a Pagan mecca (I moved here after all). So when we parse those surveys to get an idea of how we’re growing, “we” might be far larger than we expected in places where the “nones” thrive. For more on the spirituality of the Northwest, you might want to pick up “Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia: Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest”, as mentioned earlier in this post, for more insight. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to continue watching the sun rise in Eugene.

It’s like George Barna is trying to win us over. First, the head of Christian polling organization The Barna Group seems to hint at wanting a cease-fire in the culture wars, and now he’s humanizing gays and lesbians!

George Barna, whose company conducted the research, pointed out that some popular stereotypes about the spiritual life of gays and lesbians are simply wrong. “People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts,” declared the best-selling author of numerous books about faith and culture. “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today … Although there are clearly some substantial differences in the religious beliefs and practices of the straight and gay populations, there may be less of a spiritual gap between straights and gays than many Americans would assume.”

I can tell you that the above paragraph won’t win him any fans from any number of prominent conservative Christians. Then again, Barna has been increasingly re-positioning himself as something of a maverick within evangelical Christianity. So what else does this recent batch of polling data reveal? Well, while “straight” America and “gay” America have an awful lot in common, spiritually speaking, according to Barna there is one somewhat noticeable difference.

One of the most basic beliefs has to do with one’s understanding of God. This proved to be one of the biggest differences noted in the study. While seven out of every ten heterosexuals (71%) have an orthodox, biblical perception of God, just 43% of homosexuals do. In fact, an equal percentage possesses a pantheistic view about deity – i.e., that “God” refers to any of a variety of perspectives, such as personally achieving a state of higher consciousness or maximized personal potential, or that there are multiple gods that exist, or even that everyone is god.

In other words, homosexuals tend to be more “pagan” that heterosexuals. But this “pantheism” isn’t a barrier to finding common ground, as according to Barna all the “faith tribes” (including the pantheists) need to work together to restore America.

Citing his research, Barna indicated that the United States has seven dominant faith tribes that hold the key to the restoration of the nation. “We must recover the values that made this nation great and that must be firmly in place for order, reason, freedom and unity to prevail,” the researcher explained. “Our faith tribes are central to the development and application of people’s worldviews, which in turn produce the values on which we base our daily decisions. It is on the basis of such values that a nation rises to greatness or plummets to oblivion. The choice is ours. And it is up to our faith tribes to demonstrate the courageous leadership necessary to facilitate a national restoration of the mind, heart and soul. Without a nationwide commitment to this process, we are destined to become a country of historical significance and present-day insignificance.”

This is an awfully big tent that Barna is building. Is he being prophetic, or simply marketing to the changing times? I’d be curious to know how his largely evangelical audience is responding to this shift towards inclusion, bridge-building, and interfaith outreach. Perhaps he’s making a break from the old evangelical order and embracing the (generally) more tolerant “Mosaic Generation” (aka “Generation Y”)? I guess I’ll just have to wait for the next installment of George Barna’s quest to “unite the tribes”.

For as long as I can remember Pagans of various stripes have been quick to point out that they don’t recognize the existence of (or worship) Satan, that an embodiment of pure evil just doesn’t fit into a nuanced polytheistic (or pantheistic, or duotheistic) model of the divine. Well it seems that we aren’t the only ones, according to the evangelical polling outfit The Barna Group, most Christians don’t believe in Satan either.

“Four out of ten Christians (40%) strongly agreed that Satan “is not a living being but is a symbol of evil.” An additional two out of ten Christians (19%) said they “agree somewhat” with that perspective. A minority of Christians indicated that they believe Satan is real by disagreeing with the statement: one-quarter (26%) disagreed strongly and about one-tenth (9%) disagreed somewhat. The remaining 8% were not sure what they believe about the existence of Satan.”

Interestingly, roughly half of the Christians who don’t believe in a literal Satan do believe that there are “demons” or “evil spirits” that can play havoc with your life. Does this mean that in a sizable portion of the Christian mind a pantheon of spiritual forces (good and evil) seems more likely a single living embodiement of supreme evil? Looks like Pagans and Christains have more in common than I thought! Not that it is helping us have better relations, only 5% of Christians have a positive view of Wicca (and by extension, I assume other Pagan faiths) while a whopping 55% percent don’t like us one bit. Still, it does open some interesting doors for conversation don’t you think?

As news concerning Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey data from 2008 starts to seep into the blogosphere, we’re starting to get some initial reactions and meditations on what it all means. Beliefnet’s Pagan blogger Gus diZerega wonders if the religious right has poisoned the well, ultimately benefiting the Pagan community.

“Now the Religious’ Right has worked hard to push their ghastly conception of a deity down everyone’s throats, where all talk of love and charity has been drowned out by belches of bigotry and ignorance, hatred and greed.  Fortunately more people are repulsed by this business than are attracted … [Pagans] have no problem with science, are tolerant of spiritual differences, and address constructively many of the biggest political and cultural issues of our day. The numbers of nontraditional religious groups, including us, now number 2.8 million calling themselves Wiccan, Pagan, or Spiritualist, up to 1.4% from .8% since 1990, all without seeking converts.  Our biggest problem is a shortage of qualified teachers compared to the demand for them. I believe there will be more of us in the next survey.”

Another Pagan blogger, Lonnie at “Here In The Cave of Wonder…”, looks at the numbers on a state-by-state basis.

“That said, while specific numbers aren’t available for Virginia yet, “other” religions seemed to have grown at a rate of only 1%. So, it’s still likely that my own observations have been true, but just not true for Connecticut (+5%). Other areas, did indeed shrink in numbers of people practicing alternative religions including RI (-1), FL (-1), MA( -1), NY (-2%), NH (-2%), and WY (-8%). For around 15 states there was no change at all.”

Meanwhile, the Get Religion blog names the “mini-rise of the Wiccans” as a discernable subplot to the ARIS story. So you can expect a number of journalists will most likely be nosing around the “NRMs and Other Faiths” in the near future to figure out why we’re growing while others shrink. As for Christian pundits, there is some (prophetic?) doom-saying going on. Pastor Tony Beam at Crosswalk partially blames “aggressive atheism” and “new age nonsense” for the current declines in Christendom.

“The combination of traditional religious teaching with the new age concept of spirituality.  The “Oprahization” of the church is well under way with millions now tuning in (through TV and the web) and turning on to Oprah Winfrey’s brand of homogenized religion.  Being spiritual, as defined by Eckhart Tolle and others means simply believing in a nebulous force that might work well for Star Wars Jedi but in the real world, is nothing but new age nonsense.”

While Beam thinks Christians can turn things around if they buckle down, author Michael Spencer at the Christian Science Monitor believes a major evangelical collapse is right around the corner.

“Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century. This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good. Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline.”

That’s some strong stuff, and it gets even stronger on his blog. This (alleged) fragility of the evangelical boom seems to born out by ARIS researcher Mark Silk who discusses the finding with the Telegraph.

Mark Silk, who oversaw the findings, said: “There is now this shift in the non-Catholic population – and maybe among American Christians in general – into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism. “If people call themselves evangelical, it doesn’t tell you as much as you think it tells you about what kind of church they go to. It deepens the conundrum about who evangelicals are.”

And the media storm continues fast and furious. Steven Waldman notes that “No Religion” is now the fastest growing religion in America (sorry Wicca!), while Touchstone Magazine claims that Wiccans and “self-described pagans” are growing faster than we did in the 1990s, and Commonweal bemoans the “real-time effects” of  America’s “anti-religion” bias. And on, and on, and on. It looks like there is some serious re-evaluating going on and modern Pagans (being one of the few “winners” here) may end up getting a lot more attention from this story than we think. Expect lots and lots of essays and articles in the coming weeks and months to mention the ARIS data, and for some religious groups to be emboldened (or feel threatened, or both) by what that survey says.

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.

Conservative Christian polling organization The Barna Group has put out the results of a new national survey that tracks knowledge and opinions concerning the religion of Wicca. Leaving aside my usual reservations about their methodology (which I believe skews heavily towards “born-again” Christians and conservatives), it does say some interesting things about the perceptions and depth of knowledge people have of this Pagan faith nearly fifty years after it being introduced to America.

A slight majority of Americans (55%) say they have not heard the term “Wicca.” Among the 45% who have heard of, the segments most familiar with Wicca include people younger than 60 (50% are familiar with the name, compared to 35% of older adults); Christian evangelicals (65%); Skeptics (61% of atheists and agnostics); Asian Americans (52%); upscale adults (62%); and those who describe themselves as socio-politically liberal in most cases (55%).

While only about half of Americans have heard of Wicca (according to this survey), a surprisingly large percentage (62%) accurately define it as an “organized form” of religious Witchcraft. Only seven percent thought Wicca was Satanic in nature. So, if so many people know who we are, do they like us? According to Barna, not really.

When asked to express their view of Wicca, 6% held a favorable view (2% very favorable and 4% somewhat favorable), and 52% held unfavorable views (7% somewhat unfavorable and 45% very unfavorable). Perhaps the most intriguing response was from the remaining 43% who said they did not know what they thought of Wicca or had no particular opinion about it.

So only around 6% of people who’ve heard of Wicca like Wiccans? That can’t be good. Especially if the large percentage of people who have unfavorable (or very unfavorable) opinions come in at a whopping 52%. Which group do you think will have more influence on the 43% with no particular opinion? Of course they don’t define what “unfavorable” really means. It could be someone who is merely annoyed at a teen-aged Witch they know, or it could be evangelical Christians actively spreading falsehoods about Wiccans.

Despite this somewhat dis-favorable outlook, Barna believes there are many factors that will continue contribute to Wicca’s growth, and that teens will continue to adopt various Wiccan-friendly beliefs.

Barna said he expects Wicca to continue to fly below people’s religious radar until it develops higher profile, more structured leadership, which is in some ways antithetical to Wiccan practices. However, he also expects significantly growing numbers of young Americans to embrace elements of Wiccan practice, such as spell casting and performing magic rituals, which have proven to be central behaviors featured in various popular media presentations in recent years. Many young adults will not consider themselves to be Wiccan but will adopt some of its practices and thinking alongside their more traditional religious views and behaviors.

Like I said earlier, I feel that Barna’s surveys often over-emphasize the conservative Christian voice. So these numbers could be seriously skewed. I also think that his estimates of the number of Wiccan practitioners (which he puts as under 250k) are too low, especially considering the data from the far more robust (and religiously non-partisan) Religious Landscape survey from the Pew Forum. However, I do think this data sends an important message to Wiccans and the wider Pagan community concerning just have far we’ve come, and how far we have to go. It’s why media depictions of modern Pagans are still an important issue. We may be jaded to all the innaccurate and exaggerated lampoons of our belief systems, but for around half of America it may be their first glimpse of what Witches do.

Conservative Christian polling organization The Barna Group has released the results of a new study that claims a majority of Americans no longer believe Christianity is America’s “default” faith.

For much of America’s history, the assumption was that if you were born in America, you would affiliate with the Christian faith. A new nationwide survey by The Barna Group, however, indicates that people’s views have changed. The study discovered that half of all adults now contend that Christianity is just one of many options that Americans choose from and that a huge majority of adults pick and choose what they believe rather than adopt a church or denomination’s slate of beliefs. Still, most people say their faith is becoming increasingly important as a source of personal moral guidance.

According to their numbers, 50% of those polled think Christianity is no longer the automatic faith of people born in America (44% disagreed, 6% did not know).  What does all that mean? Maybe nothing. Attitude isn’t the same as reality, and Christianity (of various denominations) is still the overwhelmingly dominant faith choice in America, but it could mean that people are less likely to assume that everyone around them is Christian. Such a shift could change the way battles over religion in the public square are handled, and maybe usher in a more inclusive era (or maybe not).