December 3, 2001
American Protestants strong, but non-religious gaining
___NEW YORK (RNS)--A study of American religious identification shows the majority of adult adherents continue to be tied to Protestant and other non-Catholic denominations, but the numbers of those who say they are non-Christians or have no religion have risen substantially.
___The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 was released Oct. 22 by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It is a follow-up to a survey conducted in 1990.
___The survey found 52 percent of American adults identify themselves as Protestant, 24.5 percent as Catholic and 14.1 percent are not affiliated with a religion. Researchers determined 1.3 percent of adult Americans described their religion as Jewish and 0.5 percent as Muslim.
___The results, based on more than 50,000 adult respondents, found Protestant and other non-Catholic denominations continue to have the majority of adult adherents--more than 105.4 million--but their proportion dropped from 60 percent in 1990 to 52 percent in 2001.
___The number of adults who identify with a non-Christian religion rose dramatically from about 5.8 million to 7.7 million. Their proportion increased slightly--to 3.7 percent from 3.3 percent in 1990.
___Researchers found the number of adults identifying with no religion more than doubled, from 14.3 million (8 percent) in 1990 to 29.4 million (14.1 percent) in 2001.
___The number of adults describing their religion as Jewish dropped from 3.1 million to 2.8 million. An additional 2.5 million who said they had no religion or identified with another religion have Jewish parents, were raised Jewish or consider themselves Jewish for some other reason.
___Adults who described themselves as Muslim or Islamic totaled 1.1 million, almost double the number in 1990. Twenty-three percent of this group said they were black, while the vast majority of the others said they were white or Asian.
___The study was released the same week the American Jewish Committee announced new research it commissioned that estimates Muslims of all ages total about 1.8 million, far lower than current estimates reported by some media of 5 million to 8 million.
___"It is hard to accept estimates that Muslims are greater than 1 percent of the population, or 2,814,000," said Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center.
___The American Muslim Council responded with an open letter to the committee saying it was disturbed that the Jewish organization "would deny the existence of four and a half million American Muslims."
___The CUNY study was directed by Egon Mayer, a sociology professor at the Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, and Barry Kosmin, who directed the 1990 religion study.
___The results indicate what religion people identify with, a different measure than how actively they practice that religion or what type of personal spiritual commitments they have made.
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