The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey is available on the web in a variety of formats.
From the Summary:
An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details statistics on religion in America and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.
One of the key findings is that:
More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.
Another of its findings is that Most Mainline Protestants Say Society Should Accept Homosexuality.
Members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, two mainline Protestant denominations, are considering whether to allow the ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians as members of their clergy. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that majorities of both denominations say that homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society. Among mainline Protestants overall, 56% say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with only about one-in-four evangelical Protestants and four-in-ten members of historically black Protestant churches.
The chart is confusing because, among mainline denominations, it gives one bar for Episcopalians and a separate one for “Anglican Church.” Nowhere does it define the latter, but at one place on the site — http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations — if you click on Mainline and then on Anglican/Episcopal, it defines Anglican as “Church of England,” and gives a population figure of 1% for Episcopalians and 0.3% for “Anglicans (Church of England” in the US. One might be tempted to think that they mean the ACNA folks by “Anglican,” but the relative proportions are inflated from the actual number, and in any event,… Read more »
Can someone help me with one of the Pew survey’s most puzzling results? If the survey is of US religious attitudes, then the “Anglicans” included in the mainline Protestant group would not be Canadians, but members of the US group who broke away from the Episcopal Church because they could not abide +Gene Robinson’s consecration as a bishop. Yet almost as many of these “Anglicans” as Episcopalians say that society should accept homosexuality. That is very puzzling to me, at any rate.
I do not have a clue as to where the 0.3% came from tho this truly illustrates that one should not know what goes into either statistics or sausage. Light thought for the day.