{"id":168,"date":"2004-04-21T17:08:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-21T17:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=168"},"modified":"2004-04-21T17:08:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-21T17:08:00","slug":"168","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=168","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The fastest-growing religion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The notion that Wicca is America’s fastest-growing religion has achieved meme<\/em> status. Everyone says it, but who started it?<\/p>\n

Thanks to Jim Lewis<\/a>, I have been looking at some of the data collected by the American Religious Identification Survey<\/a>, conducted at CUNY, and comparing sociological changes in American religious populations between 1991 and 2001. <\/p>\n

Just a few observations from the “key findings” section:<\/p>\n

Religious identification is down:<\/em> “In 1990, 90 percent of the adult population identified with one or another religion group. In 2001, such identification has dropped to 81 percent.”<\/p>\n

“The proportion of the population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86 in 1990 to 77 percent in 2001”<\/p>\n

“Although the number of adults who classify themselves in non-Christian religious groups has increased from about 5.8 million to about 7.7 million, the proportion of non-Christians has increased only by a very small amount.”<\/p>\n

“The top three ‘gainers’ in America’s vast religious market place appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion.” <\/p>\n

Data on Wiccans and other Pagans seems a little shakey, because comparative numbers from the 1991 survey are mostly missing. Also, although the summary does not address this issue, I suspect that many contemporary Pagans are still shy about naming their affiliation to some stranger doing a survey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wicca: 1991–84,000
\n
Wicca: 2001–134,000<\/p>\n

Druids: 1991–not reported
\n
Druids: 2001–33,000<\/p>\n

Santeristas: 1991–not reported
\n
Santeristas: 2001–22,000<\/p>\n

Non-specific Pagans: 1991–not reported
\n
Non-specific Pagans: 2001- 140,000<\/p>\n

That is a 160-percent increased in the self-reported number of Wiccans. By comparison, the self-reported number of Muslims rose 208 percent, from 53,000 in 1991 to 1,104,000 in 2001. Things don’t look so good for the meme, do they?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another factoid<\/em>: “As in 1990 so too in the current study, the Buddhist and Muslim population appears to have the highest proportion of young adults under age thirty, and the lowest percentage of females.” <\/p>\n

There is much more — have a look.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fastest-growing religion? The notion that Wicca is America’s fastest-growing religion has achieved meme status. Everyone says it, but who started it? Thanks to Jim Lewis, I have been looking at some of the data collected by the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted at CUNY, and comparing sociological changes in American religious populations between 1991 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-168","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":772,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=772","url_meta":{"origin":168,"position":0},"title":"The "fastest-growing" religion?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":245,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=245","url_meta":{"origin":168,"position":1},"title":"More on the chaplaincy issue\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 14, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"More on the chaplaincy issue Terry Mattingly of the GetReligion blog has two entries (first and second on the issues raised by the Contra Costa Times that I referenced yesterday. So if this is the case, what set of universal standards or laws might U.S. military officials cite in order\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":270,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=270","url_meta":{"origin":168,"position":2},"title":"\"The fastest-growing religion\" James R.\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 26, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"\"The fastest-growing religion\" James R. Lewis (University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point) collects data on new religious movements in this article in the online Marburg Journal of Religion. In New Zealand, at least, \"The fastest growing segment is Paganism ('Nature and Earth Based Religions')\". The data from other English-speaking countries are suggestive\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":447,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=447","url_meta":{"origin":168,"position":3},"title":"Here's that meme againA New\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 29, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's that meme againA New York Times story on the Rites of Spring Pagan festival (login required) quotes two contemporary scholars of Paganism, Helen Berger and Sabina Magliocco on, among other things, the numbers of American Pagans.Ms. Magliocco favors the higher number [700,000] based on data like surveys, sales of\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=447#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":704,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=704","url_meta":{"origin":168,"position":4},"title":"Morwics and Mormon magic","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"John Morehead (of Sacred Tribes, mentioned earlier) blogs about his discovery of \"Morwics,\" Mormons who have adopted Wicca. (He lives in Salt Lake City, it should be noted.)It seems that ex-Mormons not only gravitate toward evangelicalism and atheism as their religious choice options, but also toward Paganism. This makes sense\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":261,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=261","url_meta":{"origin":168,"position":5},"title":"'Spiritual, not religious' Articles like\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 12, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"'Spiritual, not religious' Articles like this one from the Denver Post illustrate the difficulty in censusing non-mainstream religions. How many Pagans might answer \"none\" when our traditions don't appear in the menu of choices? Meanwhile, a friend is working on a sociological piece on the growth of Wicca and other\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}