Rearranging the Pews: Pew Survey

The Pew Research Center[1] released a couple of interesting reports[2,3] with detailed survey data about current religious beliefs and affiliations in the USA. I've been playing with the numbers to try to get an overall picture of the changes and broad trends in retention and conversion. In other words: when kids grow up, do they keep their parents' faith (or lack thereof)? If not, then where do they go?

Conveniently, Pew asked people what group they were raised in and what they are a member of now[4]. The Pew table[4] give percentages of each group.  I used their reported group sizes to convert the numbers to percent of total population and grouped the smaller ones together, giving this transition chart:

Group membership transitions as a percent of total population

Where did you go?	Where Did You Come From?
	Catholic	Evangelical	Mainline	Hist. Black	Other	Unaffiliated
Catholic	18.7	0.6	0.6	0.2	0.2	0.4
Evangelical	3.3	15.5	3.6	0.8	0.5	1.8
Mainline	1.8	2.9	8.5	0.1	0.4	0.9
Hist. Black	0.3	0.4	0.1	5.1	0.1	0.4
Unaffiliated	6.4	3.6	4.8	0.9	2.3	4.8

For example, 18.7% of the US population were raised Catholic as a child and are still Catholic as adults, and 3.3% were raised Catholic and are now Evangelical Protestants.

Here's a more colorful and graphical way to see the data. For each pair of bars, the left bar answers the "Where did you go to?" question, and the right bar answers the "Where did you come from?" question. In other words, each left bar is a stacked plot of the corresponding table column and each right bar is a table row.  Some things that quickly pop out in this view:

• The Historically Black denominations are sort-of in a group by themselves. There's not a lot of flow either in or out of that category.
• About the only way people become Catholic is to be born Catholic. There's a lot of outflow (mostly to Un's and to Protestants), but very little inflow. That's not an encouraging situation for the long-term future of the Catholic church in the US. This set of data largely predates Pope Francis - it will be interesting to see how he influences these trends.
• Evangelical Protestants are the only religious group that's growing (a little). That's mainly the result of a large net inflow of Catholics, which more than makes up for the net outflow to Unaffiliated. That could become a long-term problem if society runs out of disaffected Catholics.
• There's a nearly-balanced flow between Evangelical and Mainline protestants.
• the Mainline groups show a net loss: unlike the Evangelicals, the Catholic inflow doesn't make up for the Unaffiliated outflow.
• The big winner is the Unaffiliated group: dramatic growth due to a net inflow from all groups.

So that's what's happening; the next question is "Why?" The Patheos[6] website has some good discussions from various perspectives and backgrounds, but little consensus on what's happening. I plan to weigh in after looking at some more numbers.

Links

1. www.pewforum.org
2. www.pewforum.org/files/2015/05/RLS-08-26-full-report.pdf
3. www.pewforum.org/files/2015/11/201.11.03_RLS_II_full_report.pdf
4. Table on p. 43 of [2], titled "Most 'nones' were raised in a religion"
5. A commonly-asked question in other situations as well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=liVyZ4IzRLM
6. www.patheos.com/Topics/Religion-in-America.html