I thought the rest of the Newspaper article was also interesting :
The denominations that recorded the next highest growth were the conservative Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, with 18.6 percent; the Assemblies of God, a major Pentecostal denomination, with 18.5 percent; and the Roman Catholic Church, with 16.2 percent.
Because the Census Bureau does not ask about religion, some scholars regard this study, first done in 1971, as the most comprehensive assessment available of the changes in American religious affiliation. The study is based on self-reporting by religious groups, a method that the study's authors acknowledge is imprecise because religious groups can inflate their numbers. The study was conducted by Glenmary Research Center and sponsored by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.
"I was astounded to see that by and large the growing churches are those that we ordinarily call conservative," said Ken Sanchagrin, director of the Glenmary Research Center and a professor and chairman of the department of sociology at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, N.C. "And when I looked at those that were declining, most were moderate or liberal churches. And the more liberal the denomination, by most people's definition, the more they were losing."
The churches that lost the highest percentages of members were the Presbyterian Church USA (11.6 percent) and the United Church of Christ (14.8 percent).
The Catholic Church is still the nation's largest, with more than 62 million adherents, about a quarter of the population. Many Catholics have moved in the last decade from the Northeast and the Midwest to the South and Southwest, the survey found.
The next largest denomination is the Southern Baptists, with nearly 20 million members. Protestant churches all together reported 66 million members.
About half of Americans belong to one of the 149 religious groups included in the study. Utah, North Dakota and the District of Columbia, have the highest percentages of religious adherents, it found; Oregon and Washington have the lowest.
The 2000 study is the first to include information on religious groups other than Christians and Jews. But Mr. Sanchagrin acknowledged yesterday that the numbers of Muslims and Jews reported in the survey could be misleading. The estimate of Jews was 6.1 million, but the count included Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues the only group in the survey to use identity and not membership as its criteria in the count.
The estimate of Muslims was 1.5 million, derived by counting the members reported by a third of the nation's 1,200 mosques, which often do not maintain membership rolls. Because some Muslims are new immigrants and others are recent converts, reliable estimates are difficult. The study's number is far lower than the seven million claimed by most American Muslim groups
Edited by - Double Edge on 18 September 2002 20:47:14
ocially conservative churches that demand high commitment from their members grew faster than other religious denominations in the last decade, according to a study released yesterday by statisticians who count American religious affiliations every 10 years.