Goodbye Protestants
• Hodgepodge
Over a five-year period the number of Americans who call themselves Protestant declined from 63% to 52%. This probably means the remainder is the hard-line fundagelicals: Baptists, Pentecostals, "mega churches."
And appears to be another conformation that folks in the US are losing any sense of church affiliation.
At the same time, the number of people who said they had no religious affiliation rose from 9 percent to nearly 14 percent, and many are former Protestants, the survey's authors said.
Naturally most of these people still believe silly, nutty things but it does cut into the political clout of the hate mongers.
The report implies that non-Protestant immigrants account for part of the dilution. I thought that might mean that more Hispanic Roman Catholics were entering the US but the survey says the percentage of Catholics remained steady during the survey period.
More Muslim immigrants? While fundamentalist Muslims share much of the moral agenda of the fundagelicals the intolerant nature of each groups' beliefs might keep them from aligning.