Christianity, Catholicism lose number of faithful

The American Religious Identification Survey, released last week, shows a 10-percentage point decline in the past 18 years in the number of Wisconsinites who identify themselves as Catholic — 29 percent compared with 39 percent in 1990. Overall, the percentage of people who call themselves some type of Christian dropped in the state, too, all while the percentage of those claiming to have no religion increased from 6 percent to 15 percent, according to the Appleton Post-Crescent. Prof. Derek Jeffreys, Humanistic Studies, cautioned about such surveys. “The prediction business on this is very bad,” he said, recalling a thesis being pushed more than 20 years ago signaling that Christianity was on its way out. “The world is more secular, and that did not turn out to be true. Americans it seemed became more and more religious as the 1990s went on.” Read more.