Religion Reloaded: Scenarios for Spirituality in the 21st Century [Iannaccone]
Laurence R. Iannaccone
Abstract: Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the past thirty to forty years have been a period of surprisingly slow change throughout America – slow relative to the century that came before, slow relative to changes in the less developed or formerly communist countries, and slow, I suspect, relative to the decades to come.
Religious change has been especially slow. Christianity remains the dominant American faith, Catholics remain the largest denomination, and surveyed rates of church attendance, church membership, belief in God, and self-reported religiosity remain largely unchanged since the 1960s. Established trends have continued – including growth in the share of people identifying with new religions, non-Christian religions, and no religion – but the magnitude of change has been less than expected in the 1960s and far less than predicted by proponents of “secularization” theory or “Dead of God” theology…
File: Iannaccone - Religion Reloaded.pdf [25.18KB]
Published 09/01/2003
Filed under: *iannaccone, attendance, future of religion, religiosity, secularization, spirituality