Albert Mohler: The Great Clarification: Fuzzy Fidelity and the Rise of the Nones

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Meet the unaffiliated. An increasing number of Americans identify with no church, denomination, or religious tradition, and this development represents a truly significant shift in the nation’s pattern of belief.

America’s religious landscape is changing, and the contours of that change will determine the shape of the church’s challenge for decades to come. An important study recently released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life points to several developments worthy of our attention — and some of these deserve rather urgent analysis. the rest

The Pew study also confirms that Protestants are now a religious minority in America — a development that reverses the nation’s entire history until the present. According to the Pew data, only 48% of Americans identify as members of Protestant churches or claim a Protestant identity. The nation was overwhelmingly Protestant until waves of immigration altered that picture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Those decades saw millions of immigrants arrive on American shores, and many of these new Americans were Roman Catholic. By the middle of the twentieth century, Will Herberg would famously describe the American religious landscape in the title of one of his most influential books, Protestant, Catholic, Jew.