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Christianity, especially Catholicism, Pew reports, has been losing more adherents through "religious switching" than it has been gaining. "More than 85% of American adults were raised Christian, but nearly a quarter of those who were raised Christian no longer identify with Christianity," it says. Within Christianity the greatest net losses, by far, have been experienced by Catholics. Nearly one-third of American adults (31.7%) say they were raised Catholic. Among that group, fully 41% no longer identify with Catholicism. This means that 12.9% of American adults are former Catholics, while just 2% of U.S. adults have converted to Catholicism from another religious tradition. No other religious group in the survey has such a lopsided ratio of losses to gains. Though Pew found that the Catholic Church in America has lost almost three percentage points during the seven years since the last survey, it admits that its numbers may be off...

Speaking of the last survey:

Catholics are leaving the faith at four times the rate that newcomers are joining. "Religious change is not simply a function of retention; it's a function of recruitment. It's both sides of the ledger," explains the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's Greg Smith. "In no other religious groups we looked at did we see this high a ratio people leaving versus joining."
-- from the 2009 thread Does the American Catholic Church Have a Numbers Problem?

No other religion in the United States has lost more members to other faiths, or to no faith at all, than Catholicism, according to the new survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The survey, conducted in 2007, found that 31 percent of Americans were raised Catholic, but less than 25 per cent of them still identify as Catholic. Roughly 10 percent of all Americans have strayed from Catholic roots, the study reported.....
-- from the 2008 thread Study: Catholics losing the faith

No one ever said it was easy to be a practicing Catholic, but then Jesus said it would never be easy to follow Him either.

There is a lot going on in our world right now. Lots of evil and deceptions on ALL fronts.

Faith isn’t easy.

I would be interested to see that join versus leave ratio for Episcopalians, the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Lutherans. I bet when broken out like that, their bleed approaches that of the Catholic Church.

For many of the same reasons....

May 13, 2015

Bill Donohue comments on remarks made last night by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on the Pew Research Center survey of religion:

Here is what O’Reilly said last night: “The main reason Christianity is on the decline is poor leadership and corruption within the Catholic Church. The priest scandal devastated the Catholic landscape in America.”

O’Reilly is not a scholar, and has written nothing on this subject, so he may be forgiven for his misunderstandings. But one does not have to be a social scientist to know that Catholicism is not dispositive of Christianity: In fact, Protestants outnumber Catholics by more than 2-1.

More important, the decline in the mainline Protestant denominations has been going on for a half-century. They are the ones who have been devastated, not the Catholic Church. So blaming the priest scandal for the precipitous drop in the Protestant community is simply absurd. Also, as I pointed out yesterday, the Pew survey showed that Catholicism has the highest retention rate of any religion: 90 percent of those who identify as Catholics today were raised Catholic. Looks like “poor leadership and corruption” didn’t act as a catalyst to bolt.

There are many reasons why Americans are less inclined to be religiously affiliated these days, but not among them are the sources cited by O’Reilly. It is more complex than he realizes.

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