What’s Missing from the Unsurprising Pew Study

The recent Pew Forum study on religious switching is old hat. The ARIS report (American Religious Identification Survey) reported on this panorama back in 2002. So the authors of ARIS – Drs. Barry Kosmin, Ariela Keysar and the late Egon Meyer – were far ahead of Pew on this issue. I was able the following year (2003) to use this data for the PARAL Study that looked at the nation’s Latinos and Latinas of faith. (It speaks badly of the scholarship from the Pew folks like Luis Lugo to have identified their findings as a “surprise.”)

There are two reasons none of this is new: 1) religious identity with institutions changes when people migrate; and 2) personal religious preferences change when people of different faiths intermarry. To dispatch the last point first: the percentage of people married to a person of another church in the Pew Study is 40% and that is the same as the percentage who have switched religion. Protestants, like Baptists and Methodists, switch from congregation to congregation with amazing ease. The more intermarriage among people of different denominations, the more one or both leave the original congregation. Moreover the so called “non-denominational” churches serve the purpose of reconciling the religious differences between two Protestants by providing a vanilla brand with which both can feel comfortable.

All of this is common sense and has been researched before Pew came along. What it might mean is a thornier issue. Accommodating contemporary patterns of choice is considered by some a sign of religious weakness, but as proof of religious vitality by others. Like the argument about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, solving the puzzle is more a statement about the observer’s preconceptions than an evaluation of fact.

In the PARAL Study we found that the religion of the mother is more likely to dominate in a family where only one faith is chosen for the children. This is Jewish law, of course, but it also demonstrates that practice of religion while a child falls within the realm of the woman. Professor Ana María Díaz-Stevens of Union Seminary in New York calls it “the matriarchal core.” Unlike the Pew study results which lumped together all people, the PARAL Study found that among Latinos the Catholic religion of the mother is more likely to be the children’s religion in two out of three households.

The role of migration is also a major factor in religious switching. The Pew Study pointed out that Catholicism rests today on the new members added by immigration. What was left unstudied was the larger theme explored in the PARAL Study about how Latino immigrants have changed U.S. Catholicism. In fact, the supposed “defection” of Latinos and Latinas is really more about “disaffection” for new parishes and lackluster liturgies. We found that as upper mobile Latinos and Latinas move to the suburbs, there is a tendency to perceive the suburban parish as not as welcoming as the typical mission or barrio congregation where Latinos predominated. Social distance is the result.

Finally, there is the issue of the 16% of Americans who profess no religion according to Pew. This number is the same as in the PARAL Study and the ARIS Report some five years ago. We found that U.S. Catholicism lost more members to this category proportionately than the other churches. It means that saying you are not Catholic anymore is not the same as being converted to a Pentecostal Church.

There are a couple of explanations for the Catholic situation that produces a high percentage of the non-religious. For one, their disaffection for the religion of their youth does not lead them to Protestantism, but to “no-religion.” This is in contrast with Methodists or Presbyterians who often blend in with generic Protestantism. Secondly, since the pontificate of John Paul II, Catholicism has been trying to eliminate “cultural Catholicism.” In practical terms, this means that you can’t baptize your child as a Catholic without going to classes and attending services. There is a denial of communion to people remarried outside the church. Politicians who uphold the law that allows birth control or abortion have been punished. And so it goes. You reap what you sow: by arguing that persons whose attachment is only cultural are no longer Catholic, the Church has created a new category of Catholic believers who no longer profess to belong to any religion. They have been told they are no longer Catholic, but they can’t bring themselves to become Protestant.

The Pew Study repeated old hat statistics and contributed little to exploring the real issues. One can rest satisfied, however, that today’s headlines repeat for the general public what many of us already knew about the complexities of faith in America today.

By Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo  |  March 3, 2008; 7:35 AM ET  | Category:  Interfaith Issues Save & Share:                 
Previous: Church Must Change or Die | Next: Losing My Religion, American Style

Posted by: Matt | March 17, 2008 11:24 AM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: Paganplace | March 3, 2008 6:49 PM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: DZ | February 28, 2008 9:58 AM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: Cecilio Morales | February 27, 2008 12:42 PM
Report Offensive Comment

The comments to this entry are closed.