The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) was released Monday, March 9, 2009, and it reveals tectonic shifts in the religious terrain that can provide a bounty of stories for religion reporters in every region of the country. ARIS 2008 follows previous large-scale identification surveys in 1990 and 2001, and thus offers a rare comparative snapshot of religious trends in the United States.

The report is available at a Web site of the Program on Public Values at Trinity College, which conducted the survey. Or go straight to a link to the 26-page summary report in a pdf file.

This edition of ReligionLink provides an overview of the findings and resources to help journalists prepare stories on the many developments unearthed in the study.

Among the findings:

• The percentage of Americans claiming no religion (called “nones”) continues to rise, going from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001 and now 15 percent. But the big news may be that New England, sanctuary to the Puritans who helped birth the United States and bequeathed its religious legacy, has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religiously affiliated section of the country.
• Atheists may have lots of best sellers in the bookstores, but the number of true nonbelievers remains relatively small: About 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. On the other hand, the overall number of avowed atheists has grown sharply from 900,000 to 1.6 million since 2001.
• The percentage of Americans who are Christian is edging downward, to 76 percent of the population. (The decline from 1990 to the 2001 survey was far steeper, 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent.) But a look behind the numbers shows that most of the decline is due to the ongoing erosion in mainline Protestantism and that evangelical or nondenominational Protestantism is filling the vacuum.
• The East Coast Catholicism that was once the lodestar of the church in the United States is continuing to lose demographic heft to the Southwest, to the extent that California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than does New England.
• The Jewish community remains relatively stable when identified by ethnicity alone, but the number identifying as religiously Jewish declined somewhat. Meanwhile, the Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .6 percent in 2008.

The report

ARIS 2008 was conducted by researchers at the Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The survey materials are available on a special Web site. ARIS 2008 is the third in a series of large-scale surveys of U.S. adults in the 48 contiguous states. ARIS 2008 uses the same methodology as the 1990 and 2001 surveys. It questioned 54,461 adults in either English or Spanish and has a margin of error of less than 0.5 percentage point. According to researchers, “it provides the only complete portrait of how contemporary Americans identify themselves religiously, and how that self-identification has changed over the past generation.”

The authors

• The lead researchers on the 2008 ARIS are Barry Kosmin, director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College and principal investigator of the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, and Ariela Keysar, an associate research professor in public policy and law at Trinity College and study director of the 2001 ARIS. Contact Kosmin at 860-297-2388, Barry.Kosmin@trincoll.edu. Contact Keysar at 201-784-5724, Ariela.Keysar@trincoll.edu.
• Mark Silk is director of the Program on Public Values and the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is also co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States. Contact 860-297-2352, Mark.Silk@trincoll.edu.

Story ideas

The ReligionLink archives have myriad resources for fleshing out the ARIS findings into news stories. Here are a few possibilities:

Nones and such: The “nones” are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union, according to Keysar. Just who these nones are and what they may — or may not — believe is a source of widespread interest given the lively debate over secularism and religion in American society. See a ReligionLink edition on nones, plus an edition on the rise of atheism and unbelief.

Evangelical pre-eminence: “A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States,” Silk says. ReligionLink has several editions devoted to evangelicalism in America.

Catholic shift: “The decline of Catholicism in the Northeast is nothing short of stunning,” says Kosmin. “Thanks to immigration and natural increase among Latinos, California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than New England.” ReligionLink has a number of editions related to Catholicism. See a 2008 edition published at the time of the pope’s visit to the United States and one on Catholics and politics. Also relevant to the new survey is RL’s guide to Hispanics and religion in the United States.

Mormons’ stability: The ARIS report shows that the number of Mormons increased enough to maintain their slice of the religious population, at 1.4 percent. See RL’s 2008 edition on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, updated during the campaign of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who continues to be an influential leader in the Republican Party.

Judaism’s endurance: According to the ARIS researchers, “Those who identify religiously as Jews continue to decline numerically, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2008 — 1.2 percent of the population.” But they add that measured by those who identify as Jews “by ethnicity alone,” the Jewish population has remained stable. RL has several editions on the Jewish community, most notably a comprehensive source guide on the faith as well as a 2007 edition on the renewal in Orthodox Judaism.

Growth of Islam: The Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .6 percent in 2008. RL has a number of Islam-related editions, including a 2008 source guide, “Covering Islam 101.”

Eastern peak?: ARIS 2008 shows that the number of adherents of Eastern religions, which more than doubled in the 1990s, has declined slightly. The study’s authors also note that “Asian Americans are substantially more likely to indicate no religious identity than other racial or ethnic groups.” See RL’s source guide to Asian-Americans and religion. RL has an edition on Buddhism that tracked its rapid growth in previous decades, and a guide to Hindu experts and organizations.

New Religious Movements: The report finds that adherents of New Religious Movements, such as Wiccans and self-described pagans, are growing faster than in the ’90s. See an RL edition on the mainstreaming of Wicca and paganism.