UNITED STATES
Salt Lake Tribune
By KIMBERLY WINSTON Religion News Service
It’s bad news for organized religion: A majority of the religiously unaffiliated — the so-called “nones” — say they fell away from faith not because of any negative experience, but because they “stopped believing,” usually before age 30.
Gloomier still for religion is this: Nones make up 25 percent of the American population, making them the single largest “faith group” in the U.S., ahead of Catholics (21 percent) and white evangelicals (16 percent).
And only a fraction — 7 percent — say they are looking for a religion to belong to at all.
Those are among the more salient findings of a new study of the religiously unaffiliated conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.
The study challenges the assumption that the unaffiliated are leaving religion because they are offended by religious institutions’ treatment of gay and lesbian people or clergy sex abuse scandals, said Daniel Cox, PRRI’s research director.
“Those things matter,” he said, “but they are dwarfed by this central idea that people no longer believe in religious teachings.”
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