WASHINGTON (ABP) – A new Gallup poll shows that, while personal measures of religious sentiment have remained fairly high among Americans, their membership in houses of worship continues a long decline and they increasingly believe that religion is losing influence in the country at large.
(Courtesy Gallup Organization)
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The survey results, released Dec. 29, show that 70 percent of respondents now believe faith is losing its influence in American life, while 25 percent believe religion is becoming more influential. That is only second to the 75 percent of respondents who registered pessimism about the influence of faith when asked the same question in 1970 — and tied with 2009’s figure for the second-highest percentage in the 53-year history of Gallup asking the question.
It’s also a dramatic departure from responses to the same question from just six years ago, when nearly equal numbers believed faith was gaining and losing influence in the United States.
“Americans' views of the influence of religion in the U.S. have fluctuated substantially in the years since 1957, when Gallup first asked this question,” said a summary of the statistics.
While significant majorities of Americans believed religion was gaining in influence in the late 1950s, those figures had reversed themselves by the end of the turbulent '60s. The relative percentages on each side of the question stablized at a near-even split in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But by the early 1990s, a large majority again believed that secularism was ascendant in the country. In 2001, those who believed faith was gaining in influence again were in the majority, and the numbers stayed fairly even until 2005.
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But the poll also showed that a significant majority of Americans — 54 percent — said religious faith remained “very important” in their own lives. Another 26 percent said faith was “fairly important” to them, while a fifth of respondents said faith was “not very important” to them.
Those percentages have remained relatively stable since the late 1970s.
But self-reported membership in a church or synagogue reached a record low of 61 percent (a tie with responses to the 2007 and 2008 surveys), while 38 percent of respondents said they did not belong to such a house of worship.
The stats reflected the continuation of a fairly steady decline in church membership since the early 1950s. Gallup has been asking Americans since 1937 if they belong to a church or synagogue, and self-reported church membership reached its peak in 1947, with 76 percent of respondents answering affirmitavely.
“Gallup's trends reflecting more personal views of religion do not show the same patterns of fluctuation as the broader questions about American society,” the report summary said. “What trends there are provide a somewhat mixed message. While almost all measures show that Americans were more religious in the 1940s and 1950s than in recent decades, Americans appear to be as personally religious now as they were in the late 1970s and 1980s. Church and synagogue membership, on the other hand, has drifted downward in a more steady fashion.”
The survey, of 2,048 adults contacted by telephone in May and December, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points at a confidence level of 95 percent.
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.