I dont want your opinion i want serious answers, how many people every year leave christianity?
Not just people who change faiths but those who becoem atheists and unaffiliated to.
What would the number be?
2007-11-29 11:39:14 · 38 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture ➔ Religion & Spirituality
I think the only place that you will get a real answer is in the national census.
Churches are hardly likely to take a record of all the people that have left them - it reflects bad on the particular church.
Your best bet is to find national census data, find out how many extra (or fewer) people have recorded themselves as 'atheist', 'agnostic' etc. over the past year, and take this away from the people in this category who joined the census one year ago..
Presto! The figure for how many people have changed faiths (or more specifically, lost their faith).
2007-11-29 11:48:24 · answer #1 · answered by Adam L 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
6
2007-11-29 11:42:36 · answer #2 · answered by Halfadan 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I don't know if you could get an honest number. The reason being, becoming an atheist isn't like becoming a member of a church. A person doesn't contact their parish, church, congregation, synagogue, or temple and say, "Hey, take me off the membership rolls, I'm an atheist now." It's much easier to take note of the number of people who leave atheism for God.
2007-11-29 11:48:13 · answer #3 · answered by DoneWithThisPlace 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I don't think there are any statistics on this. However, there is evidence that atheism is growing in this country. According to the 1990 census, 88.3% of all Americans identified themselves as some denomination of Christian. In 2001 that number had dropped to 79.8%.
During that same period, the number declaring themselves as No Religion/Agnostic/Atheist rose from 8.4% to 15%.
EDIT:
Here are some numbers. These are fairly rough since I wasn't able to find all this information in one place and some is based on estimates rather than actual numbers.
From 1990 to 2001, the US population increased by approximately 36.6 million people.
The number of Americans describing themselves as some for of Christian in 1990 was was about 219.6 million. In 2001 that number rose to 227.7 million.
The number of Americans describing themselves as No Religion/Agnostic/Athiest was 20.9 million in 1990. By 2001 that number rose to 42.8 million.
Between 1990 and 2001, the US population increased by about 14.7%, but the percentage describing themselves as not religious increased by about 105%.
I don't have the statistics, but clearly it's not the case that 60% of the new Americans were non-religious. In fact, given that much of our immigration comes from Mexico and points south where most people are Catholic, I think it's fair to say that most of that change came from people changing their religious affiliation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Religious_affiliation
2007-11-29 11:54:28 · answer #4 · answered by Justin H 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
this information has not been recorded but I did read somewhere this week that in the US 15% of people say they do not follow a religion and 20% of people 18-25 say they do not follow a religion. The article claimed this number is rising, but did not give specific numbers for each year
2007-11-29 11:48:35 · answer #5 · answered by Snarf 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It can't actually be put in a statistic, because when someone becomes an atheist, that doesn't get recorded anywhere. In my country for example 98% of the poppulation is christian orthodox, but that doesn't mean they are all believers, it only means they were baptized. All my atheist friends from my country were baptized, and when they become atheists they didn't record it anywhere :) The authorities can't really keep a track of that
2007-11-29 11:42:49 · answer #6 · answered by larissa 6 · 4⤊ 0⤋
37
2007-11-29 11:42:24 · answer #7 · answered by niceguyswlondon 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It may be ten or one hundred, or it may be balanced out by the number of new Christians coming into the faith.
The only number that's really important in your question is 1. And the one is you. Where do you stand?
cheers.
2007-11-29 11:44:35 · answer #8 · answered by Perplexed 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Apparently atheists (at around 1 million) constitute one-third of 1% of the US population. Many former Soviet countries are rapidly becoming higher percentage religious, and Europe has been stable for awhile.
My church (actually a group of them) has grown from 2000 to over 12,000 in three years, so there's something going (good) going on!
2007-11-29 12:06:51 · answer #9 · answered by Anna P 7 · 0⤊ 2⤋
How can anyone know the answer? If you read and listen to news, some of the faiths are growing at rapid rates.
2007-11-29 11:43:34 · answer #10 · answered by HappyCamper 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋