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Related: About this forumThe Catholic Church’s American downfall: Why its demographic crisis is great news for the country
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/21/the_catholic_churchs_american_downfall_why_its_demographic_crisis_is_great_news_for_the_country/THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2015 11:27 AM EDT
There's a huge political upside to the decline of Christianity across the country
PATRICIA MILLER
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rick Santorum (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig/Nati Harnik/Photo montage by Salon)
The big news out of the new Pew poll on Americans and religion was the precipitous drop in the number of Americans calling themselves Christian and its potential impact on the Christian Right and future religion itself in the U.S.
But theres another number lurking in the poll that may prove just as consequential: there are 3 million fewer people calling themselves Catholic today than in 2007, the last time Pew conducted their extensive poll. As a result, the share of the U.S. population that identifies as Catholic dropped from approximately 24 percent to 21 percent.
Why is this such big news? Because despite unpopular popes and still-simmering pedophilia scandals, the percentage of Catholics in the U.S. has remained remarkably steady for decades. The relative stability of the Catholic population allowed many on the Catholic right to dismiss calls for reform in the church and gave the Catholic bishops political clout when it came to opposing things like no-cost contraception in the Affordable Care Act in the name of Catholics.
But now it appears that the Catholic Church is in a demographic free-fall, as it sheds adherents faster than any faith other than the mainline Protestant denominations, which have been in decline for decades. Nearly one-third of all American adults were raised Catholic, but a stunning 41 percentfour in ten of those who marched to the alter in their little white First Communion dresses and suitsno longer identify with Catholicism.
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The Catholic Church’s American downfall: Why its demographic crisis is great news for the country (Original Post)
cbayer
May 2015
OP
trotsky
(49,533 posts)1. Duplicate.
CanonRay
(14,113 posts)2. My sister-in-laws whole family left the church
She is now UU, her husband and eldest daughter are unaffiliated, and the youngest daughter is Evangelical. This all happened since the 2007 survey. They had been "every Sunday" Catholics, even when on vacation, they'd find a Catholic church.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)3. Well the data is consistent with what you are observing.