>tracking spir i tual t rends in the 21st centur y

v o l u m e 2 0 : 2 8 ( 1,2 5 7 ) / a u g u s t 1 2 , 2 0 1 5

In this issue:

AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY - looking behind the numbers

CULTURE - “more romantic options than previous generations could have ever imagined ... and romance gone haywire”

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AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY“US Christians ‘decline sharply,’ poll finds” — so reads the May 12, 2015 BBC News headline announcing the Pew Research Center’s report “America’s Changing Reli-gious Landscape” <www.goo.gl/Is56D3>. The BBC summary notes that “The number of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen nearly eight percentage points in only seven years, according to a new survey. Pew Research Center found that 71% of Ameri-cans identified as Christian in 2014 — down from 78% in 2007.

“In the same period, Americans identify-ing as having no religion grew from 16% to 23%.” <www.goo.gl/fLH1Np>

The related May 12th Associated Press story by Rachel Zoll adds that “The num-ber of Americans who don’t affiliate with a particular religion has grown to 56 mil-lion in recent years, making the faith group researchers call ‘nones’ the second-largest in total numbers behind evangelicals, accord-ing to a Pew Research Center study released Tuesday, May 12, 2015.” Zoll also notes that “Researchers have long debated whether people with no religion should be defined as secular since the category includes those who believe in God or consider themselves ‘spiritual.’ But the new Pew study found increasing signs of secularism. ...

“Secular groups have become increas-ingly organized to counter bias against them and keep religion out of public life through lawsuits and lobbying lawmakers. ...

“The growth of ‘nones’ has political sig-nificance as well. People with no religion tend to vote Democratic, just as white evan-gelicals tend to vote Republican. The Pew study found a slight drop — about 1 percent — in the evangelical share of the popula-tion, which now comprises a quarter of Americans. ...

“Latinos identify as Catholic overall. One-quarter of evangelicals and 14 percent of mainline Protestants are racial minori-ties.” <www.goo.gl/Wkp1xW>

The GetReligion blog response of May 13 highlights Pew findings such as: “There are more religiously unaffiliated Americans (23 percent) than Catholics (21 percent) and

mainline Protestants (15 percent). ‘That’s a striking and important note,’ [Greg Smith, Pew associate director of research] said. ...

“Thirteen percent of Americans were raised Catholic but are no longer Catholic, compared with just 2 percent of Americans who are converts to Catholicism.

“That means that there are more than six former Catholics for every convert to Catholicism,” Smith said. “There’s no other group in the survey that has that ratio of loss due to religious switching.” ...

“Pew estimates there are about 5 million fewer mainline Protestants than there were in 2007. About 10 percent of the U.S. popu-lation say they were raised in the mainline Protestant tradition, while 6 percent have converted to mainline Protestantism.

“Evangelical Protestants have experi-enced less decline, due to their net positive retention rate. For every person who has left evangelical Protestantism after growing up, 1.2 have switched to join an evangelical denomination.”

GetReligion blogger Terry Mattingly cites LifeWay researcher Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today <www.goo.gl/64Ty0W>: “The big trends are clear, the nominals are becoming the nones, yet the convictional are remaining committed.

In other words, Americans whose Chris-tianity was nominal — in name only — are casting aside the name. They are now align-ing publicly with what they’ve actually not believed all along.

The percentage of convictional Chris-tians remains rather steady, but because the nominal Christians now are unaffiliated the overall percentage of self-identified Chris-tians is [in] decline. ... and I expect it to accelerate.” <www.goo.gl/BUIw0t>

CULTURE“Love in the Age of Like” by Aziz Ansari — the comedian who starred on NBC’s Parks and Recreation summarizes “the chang-ing state of love” in our culture for Time magazine <www.goo.gl/fa3JVX>. “The biggest changes have been brought by the (continued on next page)

APOLOGIAreport

culture (continued)

since the introduction of the birth control pill have we seen a tool as liberating for women as online dating. ...

“The Pill allowed women to metaphori-cally road-test the car. Online dating allows a woman to get an inspection before she bothers heading to the lot.

“Finding a potential spouse with a steady job is a high priority for 78% of women, according to research by Pew. ...

“In 2013, the dating site Are You Inter-ested released figures showing that a woman sending an online message to a man in her age range had an 18% likelihood of receiv-ing a response. A man, in the same scenario, had a 4% likelihood of receiving a response. The same site found that a man typically had to send 25 messages to different women to get a response. A woman had to send only five.” <www.goo.gl/Uu90xP>

The second related sidebar, “How to Find Love Online” by Christian Rudder (page 46), begins “Online dating is a cir-cus of self-deception.” He explains that “on OkCupid: we estimate that your words have about one-twelfth the impact of your pic-ture. Many newer apps have gotten rid of personal essays altogether.

“Religion is similarly irrelevant. How-ever central religious belief may be to our 15 million users’ personal lives, in online dating it is marginal. Religious-match ques-tions on OkCupid are often assigned the highest importance. But when you look at the data, religion is one of singledom’s self-imposed divides. ...

“Of course, OkCupid is a mainstream site, and niche sites like JDate and Chris-tianMingle will no doubt find that religion is a core value among their users. But for the

$2.4 billion online- dating industry, which has exploded in the past few years with the arrival of dozens of mobile apps. Throw in the fact that people now get married later in life than ever before, turning their early 20s into a relentless hunt for more roman-tic options than previous generations could have ever imagined, and you have a recipe for romance gone haywire. ...

“As of this writing, 38% of Americans who describe themselves as ‘single and looking’ have used an online-dating site. ... Almost a quarter of online daters find a spouse or long-term partner that way. ...

“Throughout all our interviews — and in research on the subject — this is a consistent finding: in online dating, women get a ton more attention than men.

“OkCupid founder Christian Rudder estimates, based on data from his own site, that photos drive 90% of the action in online dating. ...

“In relationships, there’s commitment and commitment, the kind that involves a license, usually some kind of religious bless-ing and a ceremony in which every one of your close friends and relatives watches you and your partner promise to stay together until one of you dies.

“In the U.S., marriage rates are at his-toric lows — the rate of marriages per 1,000 single women dropped almost 60% from 1970 to 2012. Americans are also joining the international trend of marrying later; for the first time in history, the typi-cal American now spends more years sin-gle than married.” Eric Klinenberg writes that “in many major cities, nearly half of all households have just one resident.” Adapted from the new book by Ansari and Klinenberg, Modern Romance.1 Time, Jun 15 ‘15, pp39-46.

Jo Piazza reports in “Why Online Dat-ing Is a Boon for Women” (one of the above article’s two sidebars, page 45) that “Not

rest of the country, other things are more important than where you spend your Sun-day mornings.” <www.goo.gl/bIXNXh>

Regarding the aforementioned “circus of self-deception,” late last year we noted [AR 19:45] the commercial promotion of infidelity online which included the Ashley Madison site. On July 20 the BBC News ran the story: “Ashley Madison infidelity site’s customer data stolen.” Surely, this was bad news for some. “Customer data has been stolen from Ashley Madison, a dating web-site for married people who wish to cheat on their spouse.

“The hackers said they had obtained information including ‘all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions.’ ...

“Ashley Madison told the BBC that it would allow people to delete their profile from the site for free with immediate effect.

“The company had previously charged $19 (£12) for a ‘full delete.’

“The hackers alleged that service was a ‘complete lie’ because some personal infor-mation was kept even after a customer had paid for it to be removed.” (One might begin here in a search for perpetrator motive.) The news item adds that “Ashley Madison says it operates in more than 50 countries and has 37 million users.... It promotes its ser-vice with the tagline, ‘Life is short, have an affair.’” <www.goo.gl/XL9UqV>

souRCes: monographs

Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg (Penguin, 2015, hardcover, 288 pages) <www.goo.gl/ZmZmvF>

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