{"id":772,"date":"2006-11-29T18:03:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-29T18:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=772"},"modified":"2006-11-29T18:03:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-29T18:03:00","slug":"the-fastest-growing-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=772","title":{"rendered":"The "fastest-growing" religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Pitzl-Waters links to a survey<\/a> showing “nature religion” to be the fastest-growing religious category in Australia.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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<\/b>, I have no idea.<\/p>\n

“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].”<\/p>\n

Yeah. Whose numbers do you trust?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/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-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-cs","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":168,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=168","url_meta":{"origin":772,"position":0},"title":"The fastest-growing religion? The notion\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 21, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1260,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1260","url_meta":{"origin":772,"position":1},"title":"Pagan Studies Call for Papers, AAR 2010","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is for anyone who has not already seen the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group's call for papers for next year's AAR meeting in Atlanta posted on some e-list or other.For details on paper submission, see the AAR's page for that meeting. Note that some information will not be posted\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"scholarship\"","block_context":{"text":"scholarship","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=scholarship"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12050,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12050","url_meta":{"origin":772,"position":2},"title":"Pagan Studies Call for Papers, American Academy of Religion 2021","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 5, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the call for papers for the Contemporary Pagan Studies unit of the American Academy of Religion for the 2021 annual meeting, to be held in San Antonio, Texas, Nov. 20\u201323. (Insert pandemic disclaimer here.) Contemporary Pagan Studies is an interdisciplinary unit, and we welcome submissions of theoretically and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/SanAntonioWelcomeHeader-633x260-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/SanAntonioWelcomeHeader-633x260-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/SanAntonioWelcomeHeader-633x260-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10197,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10197","url_meta":{"origin":772,"position":3},"title":"“Solitary Pagans,” a New Academic Study","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 4, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Back in the mid-1990s, Nancy Mostad, then the acquisitions editor at Llewellyn, told me that they estimated that 70 percent of purchasers of books on Paganism were solitaries.Hence the immense success -- by their standards -- of Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. Meanwhile, sociologist of religion\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10799,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10799","url_meta":{"origin":772,"position":4},"title":"A New Study of Solitary Pagans","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 19, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Solitary Pagans: Contemporary Witches, Wiccans, and Others Who Practice Alone is a new study from Helen A. Berger, a sociologist of religion who has been studying contemporary Paganism for decades. Her body of work is large enough now that future scholars will be returning to it again and again for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/solitary-pagans.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":447,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=447","url_meta":{"origin":772,"position":5},"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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","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=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}