Jason Pitzl-Waters links to a survey showing “nature religion” to be the fastest-growing religious category in Australia.

Jim Lewis, a long-time scholar of new religious movements, presented a similar roundup last week at AAR-SBL. Interestingly, he found the number of Pagans in English-speaking countries to come in consistently at about 0.1 percent. (That’s one-tenth of one percent.)

I think that should Pagans reach about the 2-percent mark, it would be a sort of tipping point. What that Paganism would look like, I have no idea.

“Growth” is a debatable term, of course. The steering committees for each AAR program unit are supposed to track how many people come to each session for institutional-research purposes. At one of the new religious movements sessions, an attendee cracked, “Let’s just be like the Scientologists and count everyone who comes through the door [as a member].”

Yeah. Whose numbers do you trust?