More Americans’ faith defies easy labeling

From the Kansas City Star: More Americans’ faith defies easy labeling

In the ever-intensifying push by politicians, journalists and marketers to analyze Americans’ religiousness down to its last molecule, did 10 million people get misplaced?

That is the argument posited by sociologists at Baylor University, who on Monday released research that said the last 15 years of polling has overestimated the percentage of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation.

The unaffiliated — people who check “none” or “no religion” when asked their affiliation — have been closely tracked since 1990, when major surveys showed that they doubled, from 7 percent of the U.S. population to 14 percent. Sociologists said the increase reflected the rising secularization that was occurring at the same time American society was becoming more religious.

The Baylor survey found that a tenth of respondents who picked “no religion” out of 40 possible groups did something interesting when asked later where they worshiped: They wrote down a place.