Born in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Gen X-ers constituted the most Catholic generational cohort in American history, with fully one-third of them identifying as Catholics in 1990. But two decades later, approximately one out of five had fallen away from the faith. It was only thanks to the addition of approximately one million Latino Catholics their own age that the proportion of Gen X Catholics decreased to only 26 percent of the cohort.

In addition, shifts in religious identification since 1990 have resulted in the ranks of the Nones swelling by 67 percent (2.2 million persons) and those in the conservative, non-denominational Generic Christian tradition growing by 51 percent (1.8 million). Put another way, the percentage of self-proclaimed Nones increased from 11 percent to 16 percent of this cohort between 1990 and 2008. This increase is surprising since Americans have historically increased their religious identification between early adulthood and their mid-40s, as theymarry, have children, and become settled in their communities.

Those were among the key findings of a new report by Barry Kosmin and Juhem Navarro-Rivera at Trinity College, who looked at the religious and political affiliations of Generation X, whose members reached adulthood during an era when American society was much influenced by the Christian Right. The findings are important as predictorsabout the future of American society, particularly the relationship betweenreligion and politics, issues that have been front and center during this year’s presidential campaign.

The data are derived from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), a large, nationally representative sample of adults in the Continental United States. The surveys were conducted in 1990 and again in 2008, highlighting trends over an 18-year period. The 1990 ARIS involved 113,723 respondents, including 16,959 adultsbetween the ages of 18 and 25 years. The 2008 ARIS had an overall sample size of 54,461, with 6,407 respondents between the ages of 36 and 43 years.

“Generation X has shifted its allegiances to a surprising degree” said Barry Kosmin, director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC) at Trinity. “Many in this generation of Americans have abandoned their religious roots and political affiliations in adulthood. Historically and sociologically, that’s an unexpected development.”

In terms of political affiliation, Gen X-ers leaned Republican by 5 percentage points in 1990 (34 percent to 29 percent Democratic), but in 2008 they favored the Democratic Party by 7 percentage points (33 percent to 26 percent Republican) This partisan shiftaway from the GOP was even more pronounced among Generation X Nones. In 1990, Nones were evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, but by 2008, Nones leaned Democratic by more than 2 to 1 (33 percent to 15 percent).

“The fact that identification with religion declined among Generation X as they aged suggests that the secularization of Americans is not just about young people from today’s Millennial Generation abandoning religion because it has become too politicized,” said Juhem Navarro-Rivera, a research fellow at the ISSSC.  “It is also an ongoing and wider process that involves older generations in American society, as exemplified by Generation X.”

The report’s religion data are based on responses to the question: What is your religion, if any? And the political party data are based on responses to the question: Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, Democrat or Independent?

For more information about the ARIS series methodology, please visit: http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/about-aris/metholodogy.

For more information contact Barry Kosmin at 860-297-2388 or barry.kosmin@trincoll.edu; or Juhem Navarro-Rivera at 860-297-4227 or juhem.navarrorivera@trincoll.edu.

To download a copy of – The Transformation of Generation X:  Shifts in Religious and Political Self-Identification, 1990-2008 please visit:

http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/files/2012/05/ARISGENX2012.pdf

Analysis based on Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey

HARTFORD, CT, December 14, 2011 – Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons as they are popularly known, are twice as likely to favor the Republican Party than American adults who belong to other faiths and those who don’t identify with any religion, according to a new study based on the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) by Trinity College researchers.

The study shows that 59 percent of Mormons say they are Republicans compared to 27 percent of non-Mormons. In addition, a higher percentage of Mormons are registered voters (90 percent in Utah and 84 percent overall) as opposed to 78 percent of non-Mormon adults.

The findings suggest that the Mormon community has an above average interest in politics, concludes authors Ryan Cragun, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tampa and a research associate of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture (ISSSC) at Trinity who is also currently secretary of the Mormon Social Science Association, and Rick Phillips, associate professor of sociology at the University of North Florida and a former president of the Mormon Social Science Association. Their study is called “The Mormon Population of the United States 1990-2008: An Analysis of Socio-Demographic Trends and Regional Differences.”  For a copy of the report, please visit: http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/files/2011/12/Mormons2008.pdf.

Their portrait of the U.S. Mormon community is based on data provided by ARIS 2008, the third in a series of large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults in the 48 contiguous states conducted by Trinity Professors Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar. Employing the same research methodology as surveys in 1990 and 2001, ARIS 2008 questioned 54,461 adults in English and Spanish. With a margin of error of less than 0.5 percent, it provides an analysis of how contemporary Americans identify themselves religiously, and how that self-identification has changed over the past generation.

“This is a timely academic study that provides hard evidence on the social profile of a community which is unfamiliar to Americans living outside the Rocky Mountain region,” said Barry Kosmin. “As we approach the 2012 election, Mormons have never been as prominent in American public life as they are today with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney contending for the Republican Party presidential nomination and Harry Reid of Nevada leading the Senate on the Democratic Party side. We hope this new report based on the unique American Religious Identification Survey series will help people to better understand the contemporary Mormon population and how it is evolving over time.”

Although the Mormon Church was founded 180 years ago, wrote Cragun and Phillips, “Mormonism is poorly understood and poorly regarded by the general public.”

Some political experts ascribe the failure of Romney and Huntsman to gain traction among Republicans as being related to their religious affiliation. According to national polling data, Mormons are viewed less favorably by the American population than any other major Christian group and barely edge out Muslims. In their report, the authors argue that despite its putative size and rapid growth, Mormonism in America still retains some of the characteristics of the regional subculture founded in Utah by separatist pioneers in the second half of the 19^th century.

“This ‘guilt by association’ with the exoticism and esotericism of early Mormonism continues to this day,” wrote Cragun and Phillips, “and Mormons in Utah and the Rocky Mountain states, where they are both heavily concentrated and a large proportion of the local population, look different from their coreligionists in other parts of the country in several noteworthy ways.”

There is a debate over the number of Mormons in the U.S. today. The church counts anyone who has been baptized and confirmed as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints, including adults who no longer consider themselves to be members. ARIS

takes into account only those who presently self-identify with the church. Thus, at the end of 2008, the church claimed 5.97 million members or 2 percent of the U.S. population, while ARIS believes the more accurate figure is 3.2 million or 1.4 percent of the population, a figure unchanged from 1990. (The ARIS numbers are smaller, in part, because it only surveyed adults and did not count children.)

Mormons tend to be concentrated in the Rocky Mountain states, particularly in Utah. At the end of 2008, the church claimed 1.8 million members or 68 percent of Utah’s citizenry. The ARIS data estimate that the Mormon “market share” in Utah fell from 69 percent in 1990 to 57 percent in 2008. Nevertheless, Mormons are the only religious group in the U.S. today that forms a numerical majority of any one state’s population.

The regional concentration is such that 53 percent of Mormons live in the Rocky Mountain states and only 19 percent reside east of the Mississippi River. “This means Mormons are the most geographically isolated and uniquely distributed religious group in the U.S.,” wrote Cragun and Phillips.

Among the report’s other findings:

• Changes in the ratio of male to female church members in Utah confirm the assertion that young men in the Mormon Culture Region are defecting at substantially higher rates than young women, creating a growing gender imbalance and a surplus of Mormon women. In Utah, self-identified Mormon women outnumber men by a ratio of 3:2.
• As a result, Mormon women are increasingly likely to marry non-Mormon men. Children born to mixed marriages are less likely to remain in the church.
• Although Mormon women are no less likely to have college degrees than other women, Mormon women are more likely to be housewives and less likely to work full-time than other American women.
• American Mormons are remarkable for their racial homogeneity. Indeed, until 1978, men of African descent were denied full participation in the church – a policy that continues to haunt church leaders to this day, according to the authors. In 2008, 91 percent of Mormons identified themselves as white; 3 percent as black; 3 percent as Hispanic; and 3 percent as other. Utah is even more homogeneous, with 95 percent of that state’s Mormon population describing themselves as white.
• Mormonism is slowly getting more diverse, with Hispanics accounting for most of the change. Church missions have also been established in Africa, as well as in Latin American nations.
• The data show that Mormons are generally better educated than non-Mormons. College graduates comprise 28 percent of all Mormons and 31 percent of Mormon adults in Utah.
• Mormons in Utah had significantly larger households in 2008 than Mormons elsewhere – 4.2 persons per household vs. 3.7 persons per household, respectively — suggesting that the traditional norm of large families endures in Utah.
• The period 1990 to 2008 saw rising prosperity, with above-average increases in household income among Mormons in Utah. Although differences between Mormon and non-Mormon households outside Utah are negligible in both the 1990 and 2008 ARIS, Mormon households in Utah seem to have increased their incomes relative to non-Mormon households.

For more information, please contact: Ryan Cragun at ryantcragun@gmail.com or               at 813-466-4110; or Barry Kosmin at barry.kosmin@trincoll.edu or at 860-297-2388. For more information about the ARIS 2008 study, please visit: http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/

HARTFORD, Conn. – The growth in the Latino population in the United States from 1990 through 2008 has helped the Catholic Church maintain its position as the nation’s largest religious tradition, a new study by researchers at Trinity College shows. Over the 18-year period, the influx of 9 million Latino Catholics accounted for most of the 11 million additions to the U.S. Catholic population and, as a result, Latinos comprised 32 percent of all U.S. Catholics in 2008 compared to 20 percent in 1990.

Even so, the Catholic Church still lost ground, albeit proportionally, among the 31 million U.S. Latino adults as their identification with Catholicism decreased from 66 percent in 1990 to 60 percent in 2008.

Similar to the general American public, Latinos have become less identified with Christianity – down from 91 percent in 1990 to 82 percent in 2008. But other religions and faiths have failed to attract Latinos. Mirroring the overall national trend, there has been a significant jump in the number and percentage of Nones, the no-religion population. Nones increased fourfold among Latinos from 900,000 or 6 percent in 1990 to nearly 4 million or 12 percent in 2008, making it the fastest growing segment. Religious traditions that tripled their number of adherents in the past 18 years were Protestant Sects, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists, and the non-denominational Christian Generic tradition. During that same time, the number of Pentecostal adherents doubled but merely kept pace with Latino population growth.

These findings and more are revealed in a new report, U.S. Latino Religious Identification 1990-2008: Growth, Diversity & Transformation, which also sheds light on significant religious trends among Latinos by age, geography, education, gender, marital status, language and nativity, and political affiliation. The study, which is an outgrowth of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008, was conducted by Juhem Navarro-Rivera, a research fellow at Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC), and Trinity Professors Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar.

Navarro-Rivera observed that, “Over the past 18 years, there are probably few phenomena that have changed America and American religion more than the growth of the Latino population. The adult Latino population doubled from 14.6 million to 30.8 million to become the largest U.S. minority. This immense growth of more than 16 million people has inevitably had a major impact on the religious profile and trends at both the national and state levels.”

ARIS 2008 is the third in a series of landmark studies analyzing the religious beliefs and patterns of Americans in the 48 contiguous states. The earlier studies were conducted in 1990 and 2001. The 2008 survey of 54,461 adults (in English and Spanish) included a special section on language use and nativity among Latinos.

Of the ARIS 2008 sample, 3,169 individuals identified themselves as Latino, producing a margin of error of plus or minus 1.74 percent. For analytical exactitude, the results of the 2008 survey were compared with ARIS 1990 because it allowed for a greater time span to look at generational differences and the transformation wrought by massive recent immigration.

Other highlights of the study:

• The longer a Latino has lived in the United States, the less likely that he or she will be Catholic. Moreover, those most proficient in English are less likely to identify themselves as Catholic and more likely to self-identify as a None or affiliate with conservative Christian traditions.
• Latino religious identification shows a gender effect, as in the general U.S. population. Two traditions at opposite poles of the religious spectrum exhibit the largest gender imbalance: the None population is heavily male (61 percent) while the Pentecostal is heavily female (58 percent).
• Marital status reveals distinct patterns. The percentage of unmarried persons cohabitating with a partner and therefore outside of civil or religious marriage varies from 15 percent among the Nones to 11 percent among Catholics to 7 percent among non-Catholic Christians. In addition, Latinos who claim to be separated are overwhelmingly Catholic women, suggesting that Latinas are more loyal to Catholic Church prohibitions against divorce and remarriage than Latino men.
• There are over 1.1 million married male Latino Nones but fewer than 400,000 married female Nones, suggesting that many couples and many Latino homes are not religiously homogeneous.
• Considerable age differences exist between adherents of the various religious traditions, with the larger proportions of Nones and Protestant Sects under age 30. These are the fastest growing traditions among Latinos.
• Class differences are also in evidence. The most educated major group is the Nones (25 percent possessing a college degree), while the least educated is the Protestant sects (8 percent who are college educated). Mainline Protestant Latinos have the highest household incomes and sectarian Protestants the lowest. Meanwhile, the non-denominational Christian Generic tradition is the most suburbanized.
• Latino political party preference and voter registration varies by religious tradition. The study reveals that Latino Catholics and Nones are most likely to prefer the Democratic Party, while Republican Party preferences are more common among the non-Catholic Christian traditions.

Keysar suggested  that “distinct Latino religious communities and profiles are emerging in different parts of the country which reflect differences in socio-demographics and country of origin.”

• The most striking geographical change is the shift of the Christian Generic tradition towards the South, almost tripling its Latino population in the region. In Texas, Latinos grew from 8 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2008 of those in the Christian Generic tradition. The percentage of Latinos among Catholics in Texas dropped from 73 percent to 66 percent over the 18-year period, while Latino Nones rose from 15 percent to 28 percent of all Texans without a religious identification.
• Latinos went from being 51 percent of all Catholics in California in 1990 to 56 percent in 2008, while Latino Nones in that state climbed from 10 percent to 24 percent of all Californian Nones.
• The proportion (though not the number) of Nones has dropped among Latinos in New York. However, Protestant Sects tradition, such as Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, gained ground in New York and in Florida to become one-tenth of the Latino population in these states.

Kosmin stated that “whereas Latino immigrants are contributing significantly to the stability of American Catholicism, the younger generation and the U.S.-born population are tending to polarize between those moving away from religion and those moving towards conservative Christian traditions.”

In sum, the report shows that Latinos are undergoing a transformation by becoming more religiously diverse even as they are transforming the American religious landscape.

For more information contact Barry Kosmin at 860-297-2388 or barry.kosmin@trincoll.edu; or Ariela Keysar at 201-784-5724 or ariela.keysar@trincoll.edu.

Contacto en espanol Juhem Navarro-Rivera at 860-341-1485 or juhem.navarrorivera@trincoll.edu.

To download a copy of U.S. Latino Religious Identification 1990-2008: Growth, Diversity & Transformation, please visit: http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/latinos2008.pdf

“Nones” now largely mirror Mainstream America

HARTFORD, Conn. – The 34 million American adults who don’t identify with any particular religious group reflect the general population in terms of marital status, educational attainment, racial and ethnic makeup, and income, according to a new study by Trinity College researchers, American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population.

Report Highlights (click for full report)

• The 1990s was the decade when the “secular boom” occurred – each year 1.3 million more adult Americans joined the ranks of the Nones. Since 2001 the annual increase has halved to 660,000 a year. (Fig.3.1)
• Whereas Nones are presently 15% of the total adult U.S. population, 22% of Americans aged 18-29 years self-identify as Nones. (Fig.1.2)
• In terms of Belonging (self-identification) 1 in 6 Americans is presently of No Religion, while in terms of Belief and Behavior the ratio is higher around 1 in 4. (Fig. 1.17)
• Regarding belief in the divine, most Nones are neither atheists nor theists but rather agnostics and deists (59%) and perhaps best described as skeptics. (Fig.1.17)
• The most significant difference between the religious and non-religious populations is a gender gap. (Fig. 1.17)
  • Whereas 19% of American men are Nones only 12% of American women are Nones. (Fig. 2.1)
  • The gender ratio among Nones is 60 males for every 40 females. (Fig.1.1)
  • Women are less likely to switch out of religion than men.
  • Women are also less likely to stay non-religious when they are born and raised in a non-religious family.
• Most Nones are 1st generation – only 32% of “current” Nones report they were None at age 12. (Fig.1.10)
• 24% of current Nones (and 35% of 1st generation or “new” Nones) are former Catholics. (Fig. 1.10)
• Geography remains a factor – more than 1 in 5 people in certain regions (the West, New England) are Nones.
• Class is not a distinguishing characteristic: Nones are not different from the generalpopulation by education or income.
  (Figs 1.6 & 1.7)
• Race is a declining factor in differentiating Nones. Latinos have tripled their proportion among Nones from 1990-2008 from 4% to 12%. (Fig.1.4)
• The ethnic/racial profile of Nones shows Asians, Irish and Jews are the most secularized ethnic origin groups. One-third of the Nones claim Irish ancestry. (Figs 1.4 & 1.5)
• Nones are much more likely to believe in human evolution (61%) than the general American public (38%). (Fig. 1.15)
• Politically, 21% of the nation’s independents are Nones, as are 16% of Democrats and 8% of Republicans. In 1990, 12% of independents were Nones, as were 6% of Democrats and 6% of Republicans. (Fig. 2.1)

World Union of Jewish Studies, August 2009

The author presents data from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) Time Series, which tracks changes in the religious loyalties of the American public. He looks at the three surveys which replicate the methodology of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. These surveys contain large nationally representative sub-samples of self-identified Jewish respondents which then form a weighted national Jewish data set. The author finds that though the total Jewish population is relatively stable in size, disaffection from Judaism and intermarriage have combined to change the identity profile of American Jewry in the past 20 years. Fewer American Jews self-identify on the basis of religion and fewer have two Jewish parents or four Jewish grandparents; the total population of all ages adhering to any type of Judaism is around 3.3 – 3.4 million people; only a minority of the population that self-identifies as Jewish on the basis of religion is Orthodox (c. 25%); the adult Jewish by Religion population (JBR) seems to be declining currently by around 22,000 persons a year.

The Changing Population Profile of American Jews 1990-2008

Para español oprima aquí

HARTFORD, Conn. – The Catholic population of the United States has shifted away from the Northeast and towards the Southwest, while secularity continues to grow in strength in all regions of the country, according to a new study conducted by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College. “The decline of Catholicism in the Northeast is nothing short of stunning,” said Barry Kosmin, a principal investigator for the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). “Thanks to immigration and natural increase among Latinos, California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than New England.”

Conducted between February and November of last year, ARIS 2008 is the third in a landmark series of large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults in the 48 contiguous states conducted by Kosmin and Ariela Keysar. Employing the same research methodology as the 1990 and 2001 surveys, ARIS 2008 questioned 54,461 adults in either English or Spanish. With a margin of error of less than 0.5 percent, it provides the only complete portrait of how contemporary Americans identify themselves religiously, and how that self-identification has changed over the past generation.

In broad terms, ARIS 2008 found a consolidation and strengthening of shifts signaled in the 2001 survey. The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. Given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million “Nones.” Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country, with Vermont, at 34 percent “Nones,” leading all other states by a full 9 points.

“Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly,” Keysar said. We now know it wasn’t. The ‘Nones’ are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union.”

The percentage of Christians in America, which declined in the 1990s from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent. Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans, and the United Church of Christ. These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent.

Most of the growth in the Christian population occurred among those who would identify only as “Christian,” “Evangelical/Born Again,” or “non-denominational Christian.” The last of these, associated with the growth of megachurches, has increased from less than 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to over 8 million today. These groups grew from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 8.5 percent in 2001 to 11.8 percent in 2008. Significantly, 38.6 percent of mainline Protestants now also identify themselves as evangelical or born again.

“It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism–mainline versus evangelical–is collapsing,” said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. “A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United State s.”

Other key findings:

• Baptists, who constitute the largest non-Catholic Christian tradition, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population.

• Mormons have increased in numbers enough to hold their own proportionally, at 1.4 percent of the population.

• The Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .5 percent in 2001 to .6 percent in 2008.

• The number of adherents of Eastern Religions, which more than doubled in the 1990s, has declined slightly, from just over two million to just under. Asian Americans are substantially more likely to indicate no religious identity than other racial or ethnic groups.

• Those who identify religiously as Jews continue to decline numerically, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2008–1.2 percent of the population. Defined to include those who identify as Jews by ethnicity alone, the American Jewish population has remained stable over the past two decades.

• Only1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.

• Adherents of New Religious movements, inc luding Wiccans and self-described pagans, have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s.

Professors Kosmin and Keysar are, respectively, director and associate director of Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. The Program on Public Values at Trinity College comprises the Institute and the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, which is also directed by Professor Silk. ARIS 2008 was made possible by grants from Lilly Endowment, Inc. and the Posen Foundation. To receive a copy of the ARIS 2008 Summary Report by email, contact any of the above.