Are Americans Losing Their Faith?

The Number of Religious Americans Has Dropped by Half 
  

According to a new study published in the journal Sage Open, Americans’ faith in religion has fallen significantly, reports mainenewsonline.com.  Since 1980, the number of religious Americans has reduced by half, and the number of those who pray has declined by five times. Interestingly, however, there has been a surge of those who believe in life after death.

During the last decade, Americans had lost their faith in religious institutions but not their spirituality. They were no longer participating in formal services, but were praying and believing in private. However, researchers are now seeing a drastic decline in those practices as well, with Millennials being the least religious American generation in memory. 

As part of the study, researchers took 58,893 entries from the GSS, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults. They observed that there was a fall in the number of Americans who pray, believe in God, take the Bible literally, attend religious services, or identified themselves as religious. A third of those around the age of 30 called themselves secular, while one fifth said they were not even spiritual. The next generation might be even more secular as the number of 18- to 22-year-olds without any religious affiliation soared from 11 percent in the 1970s to 36 percent in 2014. Those who claimed that they never pray rose from 4 percent to 28 percent during the same period. 

 

 

 

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