America and religion

A study of the American religious landscape was released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The study is said to be the most comprehensive such examination of the country in at least a half century. It finds that the United States is in the midst of a period of unprecedented religious fluidity, in which 44 percent of American adults have left the denomination of their childhood for another denomination, another faith, or no faith at all.

"Americans are not only changing jobs, changing locations, changing spouses, but they're also changing religions on a regular basis," said a director of the Pew Forum. "We have nearly half the American public telling us they're something different today than they were as a child, and that's a staggering number. It's such a dynamic religious marketplace and very competitive."
That ugly word again.

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"The United States, founded by dissident Protestants seeking religious freedom, is on the verge of becoming a nation in which Protestants are a minority. A growing fraction of Americans identify themselves as unaffiliated with any religious tradition, and a small but increasingly significant number say they are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox Christian. And a flood of overwhelmingly Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, is helping to offset a high dropout rate among US-born Catholics".

See : http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/26/us_religious_identity_is_rapidly_changing/
and : http://religions.pewforum.org/.