American religion reflects the diversity of the population of the United States. Historically America is a nation of immigrants who brought both Protestant and Catholic Christianity; Judaism; Buddhism; and Islam—and continues as a nation of the faithful, innovating new faiths such as Mormon, Christian Scientist, Jehovah’s Witness, Seventh-Day Adventist, and New Age adherents.
Americans cherish their constitutional right prohibiting state-sponsored religion. Despite the varieties and variances of the religions practiced in the United States, most Americans focus more on the shared characteristics and commonalities of their respective faiths. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have the largest number of practitioners and are the dominant religions in the United States: Jews represent 5.7 million Americans; Muslims, 6.5 million; Buddhists, 2.9 million; and Hindus, 1 million. The rapid growth of evangelical Protestant congregations and more charismatic, less hierarchical faiths like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), the Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses contrast with the shrinking overall membership of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, and other mainline Protestant groups. Some sociologists claim that American faith groups have entered a post-denominational era, citing as evidence the growth of 5,000-plus-member megachurches complete with coffee bars and fast food restaurants. However, 62 percent of all U. S. congregations have strong denominational loyalties. In the 1950s newly organized Roman Catholic parishes represented about 10 percent of all new churches; by the beginning of the 21st century, that figure dropped to 5 percent.
While still more religious when compared to western Europe, in the past 60 years numerous surveys on religion have painted an overall trend of a country becoming an increasingly secular nation. Political events do seem to have an impact o responses to survey questions, and there are stark differences between some regions of the coutnry. In general, however, the picture is one of a nation that is slowly becoming less religious, with declining numbers in terms of church or synagogue membership, weekly attendance at religious services, the value Americans place on religion, confidence in organized religion, the proportion who give a religious preference, the percentage who say religion can answer the problems of the era, belief in God, and belief in the honesty and ethics of the clergy.
Americans express overall confidence in the church and “organized religion,” although this confidence was shaken by TELEVANGELISM scandals of the late 1980s. Correspondingly, the clergy’s ethics and honesty ratings on opinion polls have consistently been among the highest of any field or profession tested, with 60 percent of Americans giving them a high score, although these numbers too have fluctuated. Clergy members have not been invulnerable to the effects of adverse publicity: Positive ratings of their honesty and ethics fell from 67 percent to 55 percent between 1984 and 1989. The Catholic clergy experienced its own scandal when sexual abuse among some clergy made headlines in early 2002. A Boston priest who had been accused in 1991 of indecent assault and defrocked in 1998 was convicted and sentenced in 2002. The Boston Archdiocese revealed that he had not been removed from active clerical work even though accusations against him spanned many years. Dioceses nationwide had to deal with similar allegations, bringing three to the brink of bankruptcy because of lawsuit settlements. The scandal received wide MEDIA coverage, even though accusations touched only a small minority of priests and such accusations have not been shown to be more prevalent among priests than among ministers of other denominations or among any persons who work with youth. Still, little change occurred between 2001 and 2005 in the percentage of Catholics contributing to their parishes or attending mass at least weekly, and the percentage of self-identified Catholics among the total population remained steady at 23 percent. Only diocesan appeals for support were noticeably affected.
A consistent majority of Americans continue to believe in the ability of religion to answer today’s problems, although this belief has varied widely over the decades, from a high of 81 percent in 1955 to a low of 53 percent in 2008. The religious belief in creation became the object of debate beginning in the mid-1980s. In a 1987 decision, Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a 1981 Louisiana law that prevented the teaching of evolution in public schools unless accompanied by the teaching of creation. The Court ruled that the Louisiana law violated the Establishment clause of the U. S. Constitution in seeking to promote a religious viewpoint. Proponents of creationism believed that it ought to be taught because it represented the only viable alternative to evolution theory as an explanation for the origins of life.
Beginning with biochemist Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in 1986 and then Phillip E. Johnson’s Darwin on Trial in 1991, a new movement to explain first origins emerged. The intelligent design (ID) movement challenged the Darwinist theory of macroevolution— the evolution of all life forms from common ancestors. In 1996 biology professor Michael Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box, which argued that biochemical complexity could not be explained through Darwinian evolution and suggested that an “intelligent designer” is the “agent of creation,” rather than natural selection. Behe and other ID scholars resisted the labels “new creationism” or “intelligent design creationism,” with which Darwinists attempted to dismiss challenges to evolution theory. ID advocates believed that by excluding even the possibility of intelligent design, Darwinists artificially restricted the field of scientific inquiry. Critics of ID, however, argue that intelligent design’s “agent of creation” is just another name for God, and that ID is merely creationism dressed up as science. The vast majority of scientists in this area dismiss ID theory because—unlike Darwin’s theory—it has no tangible empirical evidence to prove its claims, nor does it hold up to rational, non-supernatural scientific inquiry.
In 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to deemphasize the teaching of macroevolution in the public schools. But in 2001 the more conservative members were voted off the board, and Kansas reversed its earlier decision. In 2005 a district court judge in Pennsylvania struck down the teaching of intelligent design as science, ruling in Ki-tzmiller v. Dover Area School District that ID was another form of creationism, and thus, violated the Establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Modern churchgoers have also been confronted with debates over the use of public space for religious purposes. The U. S. Supreme Court has ruled on several issues including public displays of the Ten Commandments, nativity scenes, and menorahs in parks, schools, and government buildings; the use of public school facilities for private worship services; and the expression of religious beliefs and prayer at school-sponsored events. In addition, a small number of atheists have sought to have the words “under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.
Since 1950, roughly nine out of 10 Americans have consistently given a religious preference. The percentage of Protestants and Jews has declined sharply since then, while the percentage of Catholics has remained at approximately the same level. Among Jews there has been a shift from Reform Judaism to Conservative and Orthodox Judaism. Paralleling these trends has been a growth in the proportion of those who name other religions, or do not give a preference. At the close of the century, religion in the United States is broadly ecumenical and increasingly tolerant, reflecting a multicultural and pluralistic American society.
See also McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU of Kentucky and Van Orden v. Perry; multiculturalism; New Age Movement.
Further reading: Martin Marty, Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); M. A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform
Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert Wuthnow, Christianity in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
—Michele Rutledge and Cynthia Stachecki
World History
