GODLESS WEDNESDAY: 24% Of Americans Are Religiously Unaffiliated

For today's Godlesss Wednesday post I want to return to the topic of how the demographics of religious identity are changing in the United States. A report from the PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) titled "America's Changing Religious Identity"  released on September 6 2017 chronicles these changes. Some of the findings are:

• White Christians, 81 percent of the population in 1976, now account for less than half the public — 43 percent of Americans identify as white Christians, and 30 percent as white Protestants.
• 92 percent of Lutherans are white, more than in any other denomination.
• White Christians are aging. About 1 in 10 white Catholics, evangelicals and mainline Protestants are under 30, compared with one-third of all Hindus and Buddhists.
• Muslims and Mormons are the youngest faith groups in the U.S., with 42 percent of all Muslims under 3o, and nearly a quarter of all Mormons.

The PRRI report is based on a survey of 101,000 Americans in all 50 states and has a margin of error of 0.5 percentage points. Another big take-away from the report is that no single religious group in the United States is larger than the group of "religiously unaffiliated," which makes up 24% of the population.

This is awesome news!