The Share of Religious Americans will continue to decline- New York Times. Why? New Pew Study

by Balaamsass2 15 Replies latest watchtower scandals

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  Balaamsass2

  Locally, in northern California I have seen/heard a drop in JW and mainstream church attendance especially in person attendance. (Exception: a new creepy local new-age charismatic/Pentecostal group: "Bethel church" 11,000 and growing mega church(Kundalini yoga/sex combined with prosperity gospel, Trumpism, guns, rock music, dancing, glitter, speaking in tongues, and faith healing).

  For me this paragraph sums it up regarding Jehovah's Witnesses: " ...Smith described organized religion to me as having become a “polluted” idea in the American mainstream, because of the publicity around sex abuse scandals and financial malfeasance in many different faiths in the ’80s and ’90s as millennials came of age. “The scandals violated most of the virtues believed to make religion good,” Smith wrote. “They demonstrated that religion did not make people moral, did not help its own leaders cope with life’s challenges and temptations, did not promote social peace and harmony and did not model virtuous behavior for others.” Those scandals helped destroy religion’s credibility — and led to millennials no longer believing that religion could be a “glue” that held America together, Smith’s research showed. "

  NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/opinion/decline-religion-america.html?unlocked_article_code=1.304.DpxA.pGC1Fq6eB8YA&smid=url-share
  
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  Balaamsass2

  Here is the link to the latest PEW Study:

  https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
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  Rivergang

  "Bethel church" 11,000 and growing mega church(Kundalini yoga/sex combined with prosperity gospel, Trumpism, guns, rock music, dancing, glitter, speaking in tongues, and faith healing).

  Crikey!

  Upon reflection, I think I will stay on as a paid-up member of the Reverend Harley Davidson's Church of the Righteous Hog!
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  resolute Bandicoot

  Hey Rivergang, I like the Church of the Righteous Hog!

  But in Australia... we have
  

  The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

  https://www.spaghettimonster.org/
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  Sea Breeze

  Looks like the Spaghetti monster church has been declinng too.

  On July 24, 2013, CNS News reported: "Atheism is in decline worldwide, with the number of atheists falling from 4.5% of the world’s population in 1970 to 2.0% in 2010 and projected to drop to 1.8% by 2020, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass.

  On September 27, 2014 in a blog post entitled The Atheist Disillusionment, the prominent atheist PZ Myers declared:

  “

  "I will make a prediction, right here and now.... The number of people identifying as atheists will stagnate or even shrink, because organized atheism is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on irrelevant metaphysical differences that don’t help people...Unless we change. I don’t know that we can". Atheists as a percentage of the world's population have declined since 1970 and global atheism is expected to face long term decline. On March 15, 2024, Frontier Partners International reported concerning global atheism: "Simultaneously, atheism, which once saw a peak around 1970 with 165 million adherents, is on the decline. The current growth trend for atheism is -0.12 percent, with their number falling from 147 million in 2020 to 146 million in 2024.
• 

  Vidiot

  Interesting piece.

  This bit in particular stood out to me…

  ”… Part of why we’re seeing a particularly virulent strain of Christian Nationalists fight for power in American society right now is because, deep down, they know that they’re losing the long game. But the irony that Smith points out is that the more religious Christians tightly embrace electoral politics, the more they will continue to repel many of those they seek to attract...”

  
  
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  Rivergang

  Sea Breeze,

  That has got more to do with fertility rates than anything else

  The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 | Pew Research Center

  Islam is by far the fastest growing religion in the world, simply because Muslims out-breed everybody else by a long shot! (Assisted, too, by the fact than in at least 13 of the world's countries, it is a capital crime to be an atheist).
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  Anony Mous

  Christian church attendance has been declining for certain types of churches. There we see a decline of 30% or more in the past few decades, however Atheism hasn’t become much more prevalent, only increasing by 2%. Question is where did those people go. Around here most seem to go to non-denominational churches that aren’t politically affiliated and aren’t counted towards a major religious group.

  There has been a notable increase in church attendance among millennials, with 39% reporting weekly attendance, up from 21% in 2019. Especially the traditional Latin Catholic Mass has seen a major bump.

  So the numbers don’t really square up, these old traditional media survey/pollsters aren’t connecting with the majority of people and you basically end up polling an increasingly irrelevant portion of the population.
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  Balaamsass2

  I have recently been looking at the ex-jw Reddit site. Many of the posts show 2k readers online. Wow. I am surprised at how many people the governing body videos turn off. The self-assuming nature of the GB is one of the most effective things turning people away from JWs now. A fountain of toxic soup of mean self-righteousness, pride, abuse, and greed$$ straight from the GB mouths at headquarters.
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  careful

  BA2, thx for the PEW study link. Interesting, given how the decline of religion in almost all areas of American subculture, liberal/conservative, Christian/Jewish, Protestant/Catholic has been going on for decades now. If it has indeed been leveling off, that's a significant change.

  The one place it has been increasing is in the extreme right wing of evangelical Protestants, Trump supporters and all.

  RG, that's an important observation re: Islam. I realize you're speaking of those native lands. I wonder if that's true among Moslem immigrants to the USA, especially the first-generation born-ins whose parents immigrated. Do they have the same fervor for Islam that their parents have, or are they becoming secularized like the young native-born American Jews, Protestants, and Catholics are? I remember having a young doctor not long back whose parents immigrated from the Middle East. He had a typical Arab last name, El- or Ab- something that was definitely Arabic. I asked him once about something about Arabic. He looked at me blankly and said, "I don't know about that stuff" with a degree of disdain. He wound up marrying an attractive blonde American woman. Their kids surely won't be raised Moslems!