Who are we? The religious composition of the United States

Source: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Lora Wegman Illustration

Correction appended

Columbia atheist Ken Albright was a little boy when he first started questioning the fundamentalist Christian beliefs being taught to him at the Church of the Nazarene after a Sunday school teacher told him the moon would turn to blood during the rapture, the Christian prophesy of the end times on Earth.

"I thought, ‘I know the moon isn’t made of cheese, so how are they going to do that?’ You know, they talked about people rising up from the dead - what age are they going to be in heaven? … When babies go to heaven, is someone going to have to change their diapers? There are so many issues with the after-the-rapture stuff if you try to apply any logic to it that it falls apart, but most religion does if you apply logic to it," Albright said, "and I was a logical squirt, I guess."

It took Albright until he was 18 or 19 and in school at a Christian college to realize he was an atheist, he said, becoming part of a trend recently discovered by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that shows the number of people unaffiliated with a religion doubles between childhood and adulthood. About 16.1 percent of American adults in the Pew study are religiously unaffiliated, which makes it the fourth-largest religious group in the nation, as well as in Missouri.

If changes within the Protestant denomination are included, 44 percent of American adults have changed religious affiliation, including people who became affiliated after being unaffiliated and the other way around. The Pew Forum surveyed 35,000 Americans in English and Spanish and plans to survey the same 35,000 on their social, political and religious beliefs, said Robbie Mills, a communications associate with The Pew Forum.

The survey reported 1.6 percent of unaffiliated people identify as atheists, 2.4 identify as agnostic, and the remaining 12.1 percent identify as nothing in particular, but an informal survey of Columbia’s unaffiliated shows that this group holds a wide range of beliefs.

Albright likened discovering he was an atheist at a Christian college to discovering he was gay, and said atheists often face discrimination here and that’s because atheists separate themselves from the herd. "I think, this is my opinion, I think most people just decide not to think, they just go with the crowd," Albright said.

"In the past, religion has been family-based and location-based, and now we move around, and the families aren’t as strong … so it doesn’t matter anymore … religion now is choosing which football team you’re going to cheer for," Albright said. "Most people don’t really know the theology or care about it. If they did, they’d be appalled. Most holy books support the oppression of women, war, capital punishment, all sorts of nasty things. No one actually reads them."

Raised as a Unitarian

Rebecca MacLeod, 21, was raised in the Unitarian Universalist church - the church of the unaffiliated, she calls it - where the guiding religious philosophy is to learn about as many of the world’s belief systems as possible. MacLeod likes the way she was educated but said she eventually decided the spectrum of human existence wasn’t fully represented in any single religion.

"I try not to put walls up around my belief system. I try not to reject anything. The more prejudices you have, the less experiences you’ll have," she said.

MacLeod’s mother tells a story about her daughter when she was 6 years old. "A kid said to me, ‘If you don’t believe in a God, you’re going to hell.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t believe in a God that would send me to hell.’ "

MacLeod said she has a hard time reconciling certain religious beliefs, like the fact that her baby niece was born with sin. "She doesn’t know about good and evil, and she doesn’t have to," MacLeod said.

She can’t accept Jesus Christ being a man and God at the same time, and she doesn’t think there is a way to have God’s word - as in religious texts - without proving the existence of God in the first place.

"I find that there is a lot of beauty and truth just experiencing the world through five senses, and if you need something more than that, then you’re not experiencing what’s happening - the journey, if you will," she said.

MacLeod said she calls herself an atheist when asked, but the one-word description doesn’t sum up her beliefs. "I’m 21. I’m a kid. I don’t know anything yet," the philosophy major said. "Aristotle said you have to be 40 before you started studying philosophy."

Son of a Baptist minister

Ted Jensen, 68, doesn’t know what he is exactly. He is the son of a Baptist minister and believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ but said he rarely, if ever, goes to church. "Life’s a mystery. It’s a mistake for people to think they’ve got it all figured out," Jensen said. "Believing in a religion doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an open mind. The mind and a parachute only function when open."

Jensen doesn’t like the intolerance of religions toward each other and thinks religions often can hide irrational thinking like religious radicals. "There’s good religion and bad religion," Jensen said.

From Jewish to Catholic to unaffiliated

Nick Hinshaw’s parents converted to Judaism; his mother’s mother was Roman Catholic, and his father’s family was Southern Baptist. Even after converting, his family really just went through the motions, said Hinshaw, 59, who never had a bar mitzvah. Hinshaw converted to Catholicism after marrying a devout Catholic, he said, not because she wanted him to convert, but because he developed a genuine interest in the religion. He was a Catholic for 12 years - three years longer than he was married - and didn’t switch to being unaffiliated until he started reading about all the world’s religions and philosophies.

"I wasn’t really doubting," he said. "I just love reading."

Hinshaw said he pondered the different ideas of God’s involvement in the world like deism, which says God created the world and then left it to run on its own, with the idea that God is constantly shaping and controlling our lives. "You know those light bulb moments when it all clicks? Well, I thought, ‘This is it. When you die, you die.’ "

He considers organized religion to be the equivalent of an ancient labor and human rights movement. "The Jews, who gave us the Ten Commandments and honoring the Sabbath, it’s almost like a Jewish joke," Hinshaw said. "They were working seven days a week, and they went to the king and said, ‘We have this invisible God who is going to punish you if you don’t give us the Sabbath off to worship.’ "

Marriage was a way to prevent the king from appropriating your wife in a royal property grab, Hinshaw said. Religion is a way for people who feel powerless in this giant thing we call life to feel some control, he said.

"I just think it’s a power movement," he said. "If you go way back, they say primitive man was afraid of the dark. Primitive man was not afraid of the dark; he was smart enough to be afraid of what’s in the dark."

This page has been revised to reflect the following correction:

SECOND THOUGHTS: Monday, March 24, 2008

Because of an editing error, a Spiritual Life story Saturday about people unaffiliated with a particular religion misstated survey results from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The story should have said 44 percent of American adults have changed religious affiliation if changes within the Protestant denomination are included, not that 44 percent of adult American Protestants have changed religious affiliation.

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