When I was younger, I lived in a neighborhood where all my best friends were Jewish.

I wasn’t.  I might have told you I was a Christian, but only because I lived in America - and wasn’t Jewish. I couldn’t understand why people would say that America was a Christian nation.  I would have put my money on it being a Jewish nation!   So what kind of a nation is America – spiritually speaking?

 

Recently the Pew Foundation did an exhaustive survey of the spiritual propensities of our country.  You might find the results interesting.  First, you can say with a high degree of certainty that American is an overwhelmingly spiritual nation.  Over 85% of those surveyed identified themselves with one of the major world religions.  

 

The numbers break down like this:

 

78% of Americans report being some kind of Christian.  This number is   the total of those who reported they were either Catholics (24%), Evangelical Christians (26%), Mainline Protestants (18%), members of historic Black denominations (7%), Mormons (1.7%), Orthodox – as in Greek, Russian, Ethopian, etc, - (.7%), and “others” (.3%).  I’m not exactly sure what an “other” Christian is, but I could be one of them for all I know.  A number of years ago, the Gallup organization found that 80% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, so it looks like the Christians are losing a little ground here.  I’ll tell you what happened to the 2% in a minute.

 

The second largest group was composed of those who reported being part of the Jewish faith.  According to the study, this group represents roughly 2% of the American population.  If you had grown up in the neighborhood I did, you would have sworn that something was obviously wrong with the research!

 

 Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus combined add up to almost the exact number of those who are Jewish, with each group coming in at just under .7% of the population.

 

All other faiths, of all other kinds, add up to 1.5%.  If you add all these numbers together, you will discover that we are still missing 16.5% of the American population, or roughly 5,027,284 people as of noon today.  That is the number of Americans who identify themselves as no longer having any faith at all.  The Pew report indicated that .5% of the 16.5% refused to even answer the question.  (A footnote only found in some copies of the report indicates that most of these people are now living in either Hollywood or Washington, D.C.  Just kidding!)  Ironically, 10% of those who report to be atheists also indicate that they pray regularly.  They must have heard what Woody Allen once said, "I don't believe in an afterlife, but I'm packing an extra pair of underpants, just in case."