THE PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life released this week the most comprehensive survey of the American religious landscape ever conducted. We can now say, with reasonable certainty, that almost half of Americans switch religious affiliation in the course of their lives and that only slightly more than half (51.3 percent) identify themselves as Protestants.
While Catholics still constitute roughly a quarter of Americans, about one-third of native-born Catholics have left the Church, their seats in the pews now occupied by recent immigrants. America remains a Christian majority country, but its Christianity is distinctly consumer-friendly; people shop for God, and churches and denominations tailor their teachings to attract them.
Christianity may be the dominant product in this religious marketplace, but it is by no means the only one. Most surveys interview a little more than 1,000 people, not a high enough number to obtain reliable information on minority religions. Pew interviewed 35,000 people. Because it did, it offers the first real glimpse of how many Americans are Jewish (1.7 percent), Mormon (1.7 percent), Muslim (0.6 percent), Buddhist (0.7 percent), or unaffiliated (16.1 percent). Two trends, moreover, suggest that these numbers will rise over time: younger Americans are more likely to belong to minority churches than to Christian ones, and higher birthrates among immigrants will diversify America's future religious population even more.
The findings of the Pew Survey contain implications for both American politics and American culture.
Neither the religious right nor the secular left can be all that happy with what Pew has uncovered. If you believe, as leaders of the Christian right do, that conservative Protestant values undergird morality, the country cannot have a moral majority if it will soon lack a Protestant majority, let alone a conservative Protestant one.
The idea that this country can return to an era in which God commanded and people obeyed is impossible, not because secular people demand control over the decisions that affect their lives, but because religious people do as well. And it surely cannot be good news for religious conservatives that one of the fastest growing "religious" communities in the United States are those with no pronounced religious convictions.
Nor does the Pew Survey offer much comfort for those who have been arguing that the United States is increasingly in the hands of fundamentalist religious zealots. It is true that religions generally identified as conservative, such as Baptists and Pentecostals, are attracting new members, but they are also shedding old ones; add up the plusses and minuses, and the Baptists are "losers" in the game of religious composition while Pentecostals are barely holding even.
To the extent that people move from one religion to another, moreover, their reasons often have more to do with intermarriage - nearly four in 10 Americans are married to someone from a different faith tradition than their own - than to church teachings. We cannot have an established church because no church is well enough established.
The Constitution separates church and state but says nothing about church and culture. The result is that we have long been guided by informal versions of Christian, if not distinctly Protestant, cultural signals: Lincolnesque speeches, the work ethic, manifest destiny, powerful narratives of sin and redemption, African-American sermons. These too will have to go if the trends identified by Pew prove accurate.
Clearly we are not there yet; mentioning Barack Obama's middle name of Hussein is something his opponents do to attack him, not something he does to celebrate the polygot religious heritage of his parents. But just as we changed our identity from Christian to Judeo-Christian after World War II, we will need a term even more inclusive to characterize what will be in the future.
And that, perhaps, is the single most important conclusion to be drawn from the Pew survey. Americans have long viewed themselves as belonging to God's chosen country, charged by the Creator to fulfill his special providence.
As the United States begins to resemble the rest of the world in the astonishing variety and volatility of its religious traditions, it will become increasingly difficult for leaders to rally around the flag by rallying around the faith. That may make some Americans, especially those who believe we once were, and should always be, a Christian country, unhappy. But it ought to make those who take pride in its diversity and tradition of religious freedom proud.
Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
