Catholic population in New England declines, 1990-2008 (user search)
       |           

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
April 27, 2024, 12:04:41 PM
News: Election Simulator 2.0 Released. Senate/Gubernatorial maps, proportional electoral votes, and more - Read more

  Talk Elections
  General Politics
  Political Geography & Demographics (Moderators: muon2, 100% pro-life no matter what)
  Catholic population in New England declines, 1990-2008 (search mode)
Pages: [1]
Author Topic: Catholic population in New England declines, 1990-2008  (Read 2434 times)
Verily
Cuivienen
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 16,663


Political Matrix
E: 1.81, S: -6.78

« on: March 09, 2009, 07:34:59 PM »
« edited: March 09, 2009, 07:36:34 PM by Verily »

Having now read this report in three different publications today, I am curious as to why you failed to mention that the survey found a general decline in almost all religious affiliation.

His source is the Boston Globe, which focused on the trend in New England. It is also the most drastic trend in the data that I can find, although it is certainly the case that Catholicism declined everywhere except the Mexican border states and most other forms of Christianity declined everywhere.
Logged
Verily
Cuivienen
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 16,663


Political Matrix
E: 1.81, S: -6.78

« Reply #1 on: March 09, 2009, 11:43:18 PM »

The data show that this has resulted from Catholics disaffiliating with the church, at least in their heads, and not the growth of other religions or denominations.

It looks like New England Catholics are following the "self-secularization" trend of many northern mainline Protestants. Smiley

It's particularly interesting because Catholics-by-birth have elsewhere exhibited surprising resistance to being labeled nonreligious.

For example, while religious surveys in most of Canada find at least 20% claiming no religion, in Quebec around 90% of the population claims to be Catholic (with additional small percents of Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, etc., making nonreligious a very small group indeed). This despite the fact that Quebec is undeniably the most secular province in Canada; only BC would try to dispute that, and even BCers would admit that interior BC is quite religious. Similar trends have been observed in Britain and in other European countries with substantial Catholic and Protestant populations.

But here we have an example of Catholics-by-birth relinquishing the label as readily as Protestants. I suspect it's related to the extreme polarization of religion in the United States; moderate-to-liberal Catholics-by-birth feel isolated from religious experience in the United States by the extremely conservative nature of public religion and have therefore ceased, in many cases, identifying as religious at all. I'm sure controversies around sexual abuse by the clergy haven't helped matters, either.
Logged
Pages: [1]  
Jump to:  


Login with username, password and session length

Terms of Service - DMCA Agent and Policy - Privacy Policy and Cookies

Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines

Page created in 0.025 seconds with 13 queries.