No positive correlation between religion and social morality

The World Values Survey has some interesting data on how religion and social morality correlates. Unfortunately, the article I'm referring to is from the Norwegian magazine Fri Tanke, but there's always Google Translate.

"[Bo Rothstein] points out that none of the 25 different indicators World Values ​​Survey's measure of human welfare, such as absence of corruption or the degree of confidence increases if religion gets more influence. Rather, it is quite the opposite. The results show that the more a society dominated by secular values, the higher is the human welfare.

- And, add to Rothstein, the same pattern is also evident if one only looks at the country dominated by Christianity

[...]

The degree of religiosity is composed of answers to the following six questions:

- Regardless of whether you go to organized religious practice or not, would you say that you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?

- Apart from weddings, funerals and baptisms, how often you will meet up at religious arrangements?

- How important is God in your life?

- Do you believe in God?

- Do you believe in life after death?

- Does your religion give you well-being and strength?"

Well, enough talk. Let's see some charts:

 

Secular-rational values vs. Control of Corruption

 

Religiosity scale vs. life expectancy

 

Religiosity scale vs. average schooling years

 

Traditional values vs. secular rational values

Also, take a look at this Swedish article by Bo Rothstein. (Original)

Better sex without religion, survey shows

"Uh oh. Sex. As America's "war on sex" once again heats up as the country slides toward another presidential election, a new Sex and Secularism study conducted by Kansas University undergraduate Amanda Brown and Dr. Darrel W. Ray is bound to raise some hackles among the religiously faithful. Controversy abounds.

After surveying over 14,500 secularists about their sex lives the study's key findings were as follows:

    Sex improves dramatically after leaving religion.
    Sexual guilt has little staying power after leaving religion.
    Those raised most religious show no difference from those raised least religious in their sexual behavior.
    Those raised most religious experience far more guilt but have just as much sex.
    Religious parents are far worse at educating their children on matters of sex.
    Religious guilt differs in measurable amounts according to denomination.

The authors admit the study was not perfect. It was conducted online, with respondents self-reporting their responses to questions posed, and all of the participants self-identified as currently secular, which could imply a certain motivation on their part to paint a rosy picture of post-religion sexual bliss. The authors feel the sheer number of respondents goes a long way to make up for its methodological weaknesses, and the authors freely admit the purpose of the study was to test six specific hypotheses that can be found on the link bottom of this piece.

[...]

 The study's authors state:

    "Most religions preach strongly against pornography so it is reasonable to think that porn use would be less among the more religious. This survey found that porn use is quite high in all groups and is a key source of sex education for religious teens. The most religious teens said they got their sex education from porn 33% of the time, the less religious 25.2% of the time. The survey found that 90% of men were using pornography by age 21 with no significant difference between those most and least religious. For women, over 50% were using porn by age 21 and 70% at age 30, with little difference between most and least religious.""

Medicalnewstoday.com, 25 May 2011

Is religion good for society? See how God's own country compare.

"Take homicide, which is way higher in the United States than in any other advanced country. Same with incarceration – we have more people in prison than China does, and China is four times our size. In no other first world state do so many die as children. Life spans are notably shorter than in other nations. Abortion rates are higher. Also high are gonorrhea and syphilis infections, which are dozens of times lower in parts of Europe. Out of wedlock teen pregnancy? We’re #1. Divorce? Only the Swedes beat us out. Illicit drug use is exceptionally high. As is mental illness. The U.S.is not a total societal basket case, we are typical in suicide rates and alcohol consumption, and score high on marriage rates and income. But when I tallied up the factors used in my Evolutionary Psychology paper on a zero-10 scale American scored a meager three, while the most atheistic democracies scored up to a remarkable eight (none reached 10, there being no utopias.

[...]

So the line that societies cannot help but go to hell in a handcart if they do not follow the dictates of a God is nothing more than a great big lie. Instead, it is the most atheistic democracies, where few ask what Jesus would do, that enjoy the best overall lifestyle conditions. The same trends hold up within the U.S, too: The Northeast is already as secular as parts of Europe and enjoys less dysfunction than the Southeast which is the most conservative Christian; life spans are actually decreasing in the Bible belt. "

Washington Post, Gregory Paul, 10/17/2011

See the full report here: The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions

Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment

"Sociologist Zuckerman spent a year in Scandinavia seeking to understand how Denmark and Sweden became “probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world.” While many people, especially Christian conservatives, argue that godless societies devolve into lawlessness and immorality, Denmark and Sweden enjoy strong economies, low crime rates, high standards of living and social equality. Zuckerman interviewed 150 Danes and Swedes, and extended transcripts from some of those interviews provide the book's most interesting and revealing moments."

Publishers Weekly, 8/11/2008

Considering the sheer amount of American Christians who refer to the Soviet Union as a prime example of what an irreligious society can be like, this should provide some food for thought.

Religion is ‘the new social evil’

"A CHARITY set up by an ardent Christian to fight slavery and the opium trade has identified a new social evil of the 21st century - religion. A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution. Pollsters asked 3,500 people what they considered to be the worst blights on modern society, updating a list drawn up by Rowntree, a Quaker, 104 years ago. The responses may well have dismayed him. The researchers found that the “dominant opinion” was that religion was a “social evil”. Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies. One said: “Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires hatred and prejudice throughout the world, and is commonly used as justification for persecution of women, gays and people who do not have faith.”
Many respondents called for state funding of church schools to be ended."

The Sunday Times, April 20, 2008

An excerpt from the report:

"There was disagreement among participants around the issue of religion. Some identified the decline of religion in society as a social evil. [...]
A more dominant opinion, however, stood in stark contrast to this: some people identified religion itself as a social evil. This group generally focused on one of three issues: the “erosion of secularism”; religion as cause of intolerance and conflict; and religion as a source of irrationality."

What are today’s social evils? The results of a web consultation (Pages 30-31) (PDF, 418KB)

See also: Socialevils.org.uk

Christian think tank doesn’t know the difference between atheism and secularism

"A new survey by the Christian “think tank” Theos shows that there are more people in Britain who describe themselves as atheists and doubters than there are self-described Christians. Theos manages to interpret this as a failure of secularism.
Theos describes itself as a “public theology think tank”. Well, it had better get its thinking cap on and reconsider the honesty of its approach.
The poll, conducted for Theos by ComRes, questioned 1100 people about what they believed, and although it was presented by Theos as proof of Britain’s continued “spirituality”, it was actually very bad news for the churches.
When asked “How would you describe your beliefs?” A total of 48% of respondents said either “I am a doubter” or “I am an atheist”. Only 38% said they were “a Christian who doesn’t go to Church regularly” and 8% said they were Christians who “regularly attends church”. This rather dramatically contradicts the finding of the 2001 census, which showed 72% of people describing themselves as Christians.
When asked about their opinions on Jesus, a total of 41% of the ComRes respondents said they thought he never existed or they didn’t know whether he existed or not. Only 40% definitely thought he was “the son of God”. 26% thought that the Easter story had no real meaning today. Only 31% disagreed with the statement that “death marks the end of human existence”. Only 9% believed in “physical resurrection”.
These results were launched by Theos with the claim: “The new Theos Easter research makes uncomfortable reading for those who would claim Britain is, in any meaningful sense, secular.”

National Secular Society, 20 March 2008

Read the poll results in full
Read the Theos analysis of the results

Increasing defection rate among Catholic entrants

"According to official church statistics, from 1978 to 2005 the number of religious priests worldwide declined from 158,000 to 137,000, while religious brothers decreased from about 75,000 to 55,000. The sharpest drop was in the number of women religious, which went from 985,000 to 783,000.

The situation is clearly going to get worse in coming years, mainly because of the aging population of the largest religious orders.

There are other problems, too, including the increasing defection rate of new entrants; in many places, 40 percent to 60 percent of those entering religious order formation programs leave before making their final commitment.

[...]

For example, [Father Lewandowski] said, many orders formed over the last 200 years were based on the secular principle of being useful to society in educational, health care or other social roles, which have now been largely taken over by government organizations or by lay Catholics.

"All of these orders are now in significant crisis," he said.""

Catholic News, Feb-22-2008

The last paragraph shows that it is of the utmost importance with a proper state welfare system.

Catholic Church blamed for high abortion rate

"Who carries the greatest responsibility for the deaths of unborn children in this country? I accuse the leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, His Eminence Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. I charge that he is partly to blame for our abnormally high abortion rate.

[...]

A study published in the Lancet shows that between 1995 and 2003, the global rate of induced abortions fell from 35 per 1,000 women each year to 29. This period coincides with the rise of the "globalised secular culture" the Pope laments. When the figures are broken down, it becomes clear that, apart from the former Soviet Union, abortion is highest in conservative and religious societies. In largely secular western Europe, the average rate is 12 abortions per 1,000 women. In the more religious southern European countries, the average rate is 18. In the US, where church attendance is still higher, there are 23 abortions for every 1,000 women, the highest level in the rich world. In central and South America, where the Catholic church holds greatest sway, the rates are 25 and 33 respectively. In the very conservative societies of east Africa, it's 39. One abnormal outlier is the UK: our rate is six points higher than that of our western European neighbours.

[...]

When the Pope tells bishops in Kenya - the global centre of this crisis - that they should defend traditional family values "at all costs" against agencies offering safe abortions, or when he travels to Brazil to denounce its contraceptive programme, he condemns women to death."

George Monbiot, Guardian, February 26 2008

Karen Armstron on secularism

"Q: Is the separation of religion from politics practicable in the context of Islam?
A: It has worked very well for us in the west, and one of the reasons for that is that when we did mix religion and politics during our modernisation period, it was a horror. There were terrible wars of religion in the 17th century that left 35 percent of the population dead. This was one of the great catastrophes of European history, and it was that experience which made the enlightenment - people said, ‘No, we’ll keep politics out of religion.’ Now, we had a long time to develop institutions - we didn’t have to do it overnight.
In the Muslim world, secularism has been introduced far too rapidly. When Kemal Ataturk secularised Turkey, he closed down all the madrassas and pushed the Sufis underground; the Shah of Iran used to make the soldiers go out with their bayonets, taking off the women’s veils and ripping them into pieces in front of them. In this context, secularism seems like an assault upon religion — it is too quick, and this has given it a bad name.

The News(Pakistan), February 03, 2008

She's right here. It is tragic that secularism has been given a bad name in the Middle East, simply because it was forced upon people. (Same thing with USSR for that matter.) However, if there's a time for secularism among Muslims, it's now. We can hardly let 35% of the population die so they will appreciate secularism they way we do. But no bayonets.

"My next book will be titled ‘The Case for God.’ It looks at some of the modern atheists; the movement of atheism; and how the present-day atheism is due to bad modern theology. The book will be with the publisher by September 2009."

Turkey: After Headscarves, What's Next?

"What will happen now that the turban is permitted? [turban: "a specific, nontraditional type of headwear that arose in Turkey during the early 1980s after first appearing in other Muslim countries. The turban exposes no hair and, unlike the other scarves, covers part of the face."] Conditions in much of Istanbul and the West will not change much. In low-tolerance areas, however, things will be different. In rural central Turkey, women may feel uncomfortable without the turban, and in the southeast women will feel compelled to wear them. Instead of resolving the issue, lifting the turban ban will create a new problem for the many Turkish women who choose to not wear the turban. These women will be under social pressure to conform to the new practice of "virtuous living."
In order to resolve this issue, the AKP must convince the Turkish population that it is ready to protect women who do not wear the turban and that it is genuinely interested in women's freedom. For instance, the AKP could pass legislation protecting women who do not cover their heads as well as those who do. According to a recent poll, 10 percent of women who cover their heads are forced to do so by their families and husbands. What is more, to assure secular Turks that it is not a single-issue party, the AKP should pass the turban legislation as part of a package of freedoms and liberties towards European Union (EU) accession -- lately, the party has shied away from EU reforms. Third, the AKP should allow more room for debate; the amendments passed after only three weeks of public discussion.
In the absence of these steps, Turkey will not necessarily become a fundamentalist state overnight, but it will become a country in which one symbol of religious practice -- the turban -- will become universally enforced in many areas. Religious homogenization will ensue, resulting in court interventions and counter-protests by secular Turks. What lies ahead for Turkey is a period of soul-searching and, unfortunately, political turmoil, until the country settles on a new balance between religion and politics."

Soner Cagaptay, Washingtoninstitute.org/PostGlobal, February 13, 2008

Homicide and religion linked

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

Legend: A = Australia, C = Canada, D = Denmark, E = Great Britain, F = France, G = Germany, H = Holland, I = Ireland, J = Japan, L = Switzerland, N = Norway, P = Portugal, R = Austria, S = Spain, T = Italy, U = United States, W = Sweden, Z = New Zealand.

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies. Gregory S. Paul, 2005.

Plenty of other figures and text in the article.
See also a new article (1. February 2008) by Gregory S. Paul: Why is Secular European Society Doing so Much Better Than God-Fearing America?

How alternative are youths and grown-ups?

I earlier posted a PDF with some interesting international statistics in my Norwegian blog, but the charts are easy to grasp and there's a brief explanation in English under each chart too:

First of all, the PDF is a combination of two studies: 1. ROSE (The relevance of science education) (International, 15 yearolds) og 2. The Eurobarometer. (Europe, grown-ups). You'll most likely find the information elsewhere in English if you need it, but the charts can be enlightening.
Read more about ROSE here in English.


I'll breiefly explain what the charts shows
Part 1. Rose (15 yearolds, international)

Page 8: Mean H28. taken herbal medicines or had, alternative treatments (acupuncture, homeopathy, yoga, healing, etc.)
A little difference between genders, but Northern Europe are the least interested and Africa the most.

Page 9: Mean C12. Interest for alternative therapies (acupuncture, homeopathy, yoga, healing, etc.) and how effective they are.
In this chart, you'll see a very big difference between the genders in Europe. Boys have little interest while
girls have more interest than both women and men in the third world countries.

Page 10: Mean H2. read my horoscope (telling future from the stars)
Also very big differences between the genders all over Europe. Almost all girls have read it. In Africa, there's little difference bwteen the genders, and they all read the horoscope less than European girls

Page 11: Mean C9. Interest for astrology and horoscopes, and whether the planets can influence human beings
While European girls still are much more interested than men, it is nowhere near the same as having merely read the horoscope. African countries top the score here.

The rest pretty much explain themselves
Page 12: Mean C11. Interest for life and death and the human soul
Page 13: Mean C13. Interest for why we dream while we are sleeping, and what the dreams may mean
Page 14: Mean C14. Interest for ghosts and witches, and whether they may exist
Page 15 Mean C15. Interest for thought transference, mind-reading, sixth sense, intuition, etc.

Page 16: Mean E34. Interest for why religion and science sometimes are in conflict
This is an interesting chart. It can be interpreted in two ways. Say, in Norway, most youths are not interested in learning about this. Is it because they're less religious over all, or is it because religion here is more adapted to the scientific outlook, and the conflict is less obvious than elsewhere?

Part 2: Eurobarometer, (grown-ups, Europe)
(Some of the questions are normal health questions and I'll skip them)

Page 26: Praying? (last year, to cure a health problem)
This is the graph I posted on top here.The numbers are all over the place, but women are always praying the most.

Page 27: Tried homeopathy? (last year, to cure a health problem)
Page 28: Herbal medicine? (last year, to cure a health problem)
Page 29: Tried Ostheopathy? (last year, to cure a health problem)
Page 30: Tried meditation or yoga? (last year, to cure a health problem)

Northern Ireland: 'Dangers of secularism'

"A new thought-provoking survey on religion has raised eyebrows across Northern Ireland. Belfast Telegraph Religion Correspondent Alf McCreary looks at the wider implications and argues that Churches need to remain aware of the dangers of secularism"

Belfast Telegraph, December 12, 2007

Haha! Yeah, we all long back to the days when religion was a matter of life and death in Northern Ireland. It is going to be a lot more dangerous now.

Anyway, let's take a look at the stats:

"For example, the survey found that only 42% of those questioned could name the four Gospels, with a 52% response from Catholics, compared with 36% from Protestants.
Other key findings were that only 54% could name the Holy Trinity (Catholics 65%, Protestants 45%) and that only 31% could name Martin Luther as a leader of the Protestant Reformation.
A Prime Time survey in the Republic last year claimed that 67% there attended church at least monthly, whereas a Tearfund poll in the UK more recently found that the equivalent figure for Northern Ireland was 45%."

Somehow I think it would be good if the Middle East forgot who received the Koran too.

Christmas abolished!

"Increasingly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many people, especially the more Godly, came to frown upon this celebration of Christmas, for two reasons. Firstly, they disliked all the waste, extravagance, disorder, sin and immorality of the Christmas celebrations. Secondly, they saw Christmas (that is, Christ’s mass) as an unwelcome survival of the Roman Catholic faith, as a ceremony particularly encouraged by the Catholic church and by the recusant community in England and Wales, a popish festival with no biblical justification – nowhere had God called upon mankind to celebrate Christ’s nativity in this way, they said. What this group wanted was a much stricter observance of the Lord’s day (Sundays), but the abolition of the popish and often sinful celebration of Christmas, as well as of Easter, Whitsun and assorted other festivals and saints’ days.

[...]

Specific penalties were to be imposed on anyone found holding or attending a special Christmas church service, it was ordered that shops and markets were to stay open on 25 December, the Lord Mayor was repeatedly ordered to ensure that London stayed open for business on 25 December, and when it met on 25 December 1656 the second Protectorate Parliament discussed the virtues of passing further legislation clamping down on the celebration of Christmas (though no Bill was, in fact, produced)."

"Why did Cromwell abolish Christmas?", olivercromwell.org

With all the talk about "war on Christmas" everywhere, I thought it would be appropriate to show that the only ones ever at war with Christmas were Christians themselves.

Here's an improvement on democracy

"Consider some dates. Native Americans got the vote in the United States in 1924. Spanish women were given the same privilege in 1931, French women in 1944. Lords of the Realm in the United Kingdom could not vote in parliamentary elections until 1999. Although democracy began in Athens two and a half thousand years ago, it was for centuries a fragile flower and has blossomed only recently.
Democracy, we tell ourselves, is a hallmark of “the West”, the treasure that the rest of the World envies and that accounts for the pre-eminence of Europe and North America in economic progress, intellectual dominance and moral freedoms.
But it's not the case when you examine the chronology. The rise of the West had much less to do with democracy than with the rise of secularism. The West's advance was chiefly related to the decline in the influence of religion that sought the truth by “looking in” to see what God had to say, and its replacement by looking out, deriving authority from observation, experimentation and exploration."

Peter Watson, The Times, December 1, 2007

It's very true. Democracy rests on the idea that the population can rationally discuss and select the best options. But what if people aren't rational?

Religion and Social Issues

"The survey finds a strong relationship between a country's religiosity and its economic status. In poorer nations, religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations.1 This relationship generally is consistent across regions and countries, although there are some exceptions, including most notably the United States, which is a much more religious country than its level of prosperity would indicate. Other nations deviate from the pattern as well, including the oil-rich, predominantly Muslim -- and very religious -- kingdom of Kuwait."

Pew Research Center, October 4, 2007

Lot's more numbers in the report.
See also this, which taken from the same survey:

"Pakistanis who believe that religion and government should remain separate were only 33 per cent of the population in 2002. Five years later their size grew to 48 per cent, a 15 per cent increase. In Turkey, support for secularism declined by 18 per cent over the same period. In 2002, 73 per cent Turks said they believed religion and politics did not mix. Although secularists are still a majority in Turkey, their size declined to 55 per cent in 2007."

Pakistan Dawn, October 08, 2007

The Muslim World's Embattled Secularists

"Who will defend the Muslim who doubts his faith? Who speaks for the man or the woman who might believe in Allah, by his or her own lights, but does not wish to worship? We hear a great deal in the West about the need for freedom of religion in the Muslim world, usually meaning for observant Christians and Jews. But what about freedom of non-religion: the liberty of the individual to think, to reason, to speak out loud rejecting the dictates of public piety? Few voices are raised, if any, in his or her defense.

[...]

Perhaps this was inevitable. Not so long ago, in mid-20th century, secularists were the great "modernizers": the leading intellectuals and artists, the ambitious military officers, the charismatic politicians and, yes, the dictators of the Arab world. They saw themselves and were widely seen, then, as the cosmopolitan voices of progress and, not least, of a proud and assertive nationalism.

Today Arab secularists are silent if not, in fact, silenced. The ideologies that once united many of them (Communism, Nasserism, Baathism) have been discredited by time and tyrants. The milder forms of intellectual liberalism – an openness to other cultures, faiths and ways of life; the questioning of opinions presented as absolute truths – find themselves branded as treason to some greater Muslim identity, or worse, as heresy."

Christopher Dickey, On Faith/Newsweek, July 2007

Religions more safe in ‘secular’ nations, U.S. nun says

"Faith believers are safer in a secular society than in one that professes to be religious, said a Benedictine nun.
During a series of July talks in New Zealand, Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pa., weighed in on the discussion of whether the South Pacific country is or should designate itself as a Christian nation, stating that New Zealand and all other countries should be secular.
"In a secular state, all religions are safe," Sister Chittister responded to a group at St. Matthew-in-the-City, an Anglican church here, at which she preached on July 15. "In a religious state, few religions are safe,” she said."

Catholic Online, 7/31/2007

[Stats] LifeWay Research Examines Teenagers' Views on Eternity

More than 1,000 [American] teenagers were surveyed in January and February of 2007 by mail questionnaire. These results are compared to an identical survey conducted in 2005. Each sample consisted of 12-19 year-olds.

Though the large majority of teenagers believe heaven exists (69 percent), there has been a 6 percent drop since 2005 (75 percent) in the percentage of teens who are sure in their belief of heaven. Only 5 percent of teenagers strongly agree that they do not believe heaven exists.

African American teenagers are more likely to believe in heaven than the average teen (81 percent vs. 70 percent). Girls (73 percent) are also more likely to strongly agree heaven exists when compared to guys (66 percent).
Four percent of teenagers strongly agree with the statement, “I don’t care if I go to heaven.”

When asked about personal religious activity within the last 30 days, 39 percent of respondents said they prayed regularly and 14 percent said they read the Bible regularly during that time.
Compared to the 2005 results, there are several significant statistical declines. Fewer teens are attending Sunday school (20 percent vs. 24 percent) and small-group Bible studies (14 percent vs. 18 percent).

As for outreach activity, fewer teenagers are discussing their beliefs with friends and inviting them to church activities. Twenty-four percent said they had told a friend about their religious beliefs in the last 30 days (compared to 30 percent in 2005). Fifteen percent had invited someone to a church activity in the last 30 days (compared to 19 percent in 2005).
Female teens are more active religiously than their male counterparts. More females pray regularly (48 percent vs. 31 percent) and read the Bible regularly (17 percent vs. 11 percent) than male teenagers.

The level of teen participation is also higher for females than males for church youth group social activities (26 percent vs. 20 percent), small group Bible studies (18 percent vs. 11 percent), and leadership roles in their church youth group (10 percent vs. 6 percent).

Lifeway.com, May 2007

There are a lot more numbers in the original article. Notice the decline, and that females seems to be more religious than males, and that African Americans seems to be more religious than the average.

See also: Knockin' on Heaven's Door: Teens confused about heaven and how to get there

"A warning signal to the church?
These observations should send out a warning signal to the church: INFLUENCE IS BEING LOST WITH THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH."

Thanks!

[Comment] Gingrich's War on 'Secularism'

"All 43 American presidents – even those who doubted religion – associated themselves with the Christian faith. Today, it is still far easier for a politician from a fringe religious sect, such as Mormonism, to be a serious national candidate than it would be for an atheist or an agnostic.
Yet, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is basing his political comeback, in part, on an assertion that the real bias in America is against those who believe in religion and that “radical secularism” is oppressing them.

[...]

There is, of course, a grave danger when a powerful group begins to view itself as the victim, because its real power allows these ersatz oppressed to inflict far greater harm on their imaginary persecutors than could a group with little or no power.

Historically, the world has seen this phenomenon many times, such as when Christians in Europe convinced themselves that they were at the mercy of cunning Jews. Many of the continent’s anti-Jewish pogroms were conducted by Christians convinced that they were simply defending their way of life, that they were the real victims."

Robert Parry, Baltimore Chronicle, May 21, 2007.