The number of Americans who claim to have no religious affiliation is the highest it has ever been since data on the subject started being collected in the 1930s, new research has found.
Sociologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University analyzed results from the General Social Survey and found that the number of people who do not consider themselves part of an organized religion has jumped dramatically in recent years.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the number of “nones” — those who said they were religiously unaffiliated — hovered around 5 percent, Claude Fischer, one of the researchers with UC Berkeley, told The Huffington Post. That number had risen to only 8 percent by 1990.
But since then, the number of people who don’t consider themselves part of a religion has increased to 20 percent.
“This was not happening really for decades, until around 1990 when it started to take off,” Fischer told HuffPost. “One thing striking is the trend in terms of renouncing religious affiliation you might say continues to move up at a regular pace, while there is hardly any perceptible trend in the percentage of people who express atheist or agnostic beliefs.”
However, it should be noted that the research looks at whether or not a person associates himself with a particular faith; it does not measure how spiritual a person considers himself to be.
Read more at HUFFINGTON POST
{Matzav.com Newscenter}
That last sentence is important. I have had many friends and co-workers who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” They mean that they believe in G-d, that they have a soul, that there is right and wrong, and so forth. They just don’t belong to any particular religion with specific dogmatic teaching. Most of them act in accordance with their beliefs, so they are acting like proper b’nai Noach. Unfortunately there are also a lot of unafiliated Jews, too. We should be working to bring them in, and it would help a lot if we were always as careful with ben adam l’chaveiroh as we are in getting the right kind of shmurah matzah.