Email a Friend

Digg

Most Americans in the United States still identify as Christian, but the religious landscape of this country is changing. Nearly half of us end up changing our affiliations at some point in time, according to the latest study from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Get the summary or download the complete report.

How does Americans' religious identity break down? The current makeup is illustrated in the chart to the right. 

Source: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Like most groups (racial/ethnic, disability, orientation, gender or otherwise), religious groups have substantial diversity within faiths. That means there's no one-size-fits-all approach to reaching religious consumer markets, investors, job seekers or employees.

Employers would do well to recognize this by integrating the new religious landscape within their work-force management strategy. Recent changes have erupted in a series of religion-based discrimination lawsuits and new questions about how to manage freedom of religion without infringing on civil rights in cases where Christian beliefs conflict with corporate values and policies protecting LGBTs from discrimination.  

Read the White Guy's take on the subject in Faith in the Workplace: LGBT Rights Vs. Religious Expression and his response to a follow-up reader question about whether one's religious beliefs could cost them a job in Christians Need Not Apply. Also check out the Nov./Dec. 2007 issue of DiversityInc magazine online now to learn all about it from experts in the field and get proven best practices from The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity^®.

Key Findings

Here are seven of the major questions explored in Pew's latest survey:

1. Who changes religion?

More than one quarter (28 percent) of Americans have changed the religion with which they were raised for another one or none at all. Add in switches to different affiliations or denominations and that number shoots to 44 percent. The most pronounced differences in loyalty to one's religion of birth are between racial/ethnic groups. Latinos and non-Latino Asians, for example, are most likely to keep the faiths upon which they were raised (65 percent and 63 percent, respectively), whereas only 55 percent of non-Latino whites and 46 percent of Pew respondents self-identifying as "mixed race/other" can say the same. Still, even racial/ethnic communities are fragmented; while Asians and Latinos are least likely to convert to another denomination within their religion, they're far more likely than Blacks to convert to another tradition--29 percent, 31 percent and 22 percent, respectively.     

2. Who doesn't identify with any religion? Who marries into other faiths?

More than one in 10 (16 percent) of adults say they don't currently subscribe to any particular religion, which is more than double the number who said they were not raised  subscribing to any particular religion. Also, 37 percent of married individuals wed a spouse of a different religious denomination. Which racial/ethnic groups are most likely to intermarry?

3. Who is most religious?

Blacks have the highest rate of religious affiliation of all racial/ethnic groups, and even 75 percent of those who say they don't subscribe to any particular faith say that they still consider spirituality an important part of their lives, compared with one-third of all unaffiliated people.

4. Which religious groups are most educated?

Nearly half of Hindus, one-third of Jews and 25 percent of Buddhists have post-graduate degrees, compared with about 10 percent of all U.S. adults. The first two groups report higher-than-average income.

5. How do young people identify?

How do young people identify religiously and what does this mean for the future? A quarter of Americans ages 18 to 29 say they don't identify with any religion, compared with only 8 percent of adults ages 70 and older. The latter age group is more likely to identify as Protestant (62 percent) than younger people (43 percent). At the same time, young Latinos account for about half of all Catholics ages 18 to 29 versus only one in eight Catholics ages 70 and older, which suggests the religion may see a resurgence as these young people age into adulthood and have families of their own that they raise Catholic.

6. Which religion has lost the most members?

Catholicism has suffered the most loss, with about one in three Americans who were raised Catholic no longer identifying as such. But Catholic converts combined with the impact of immigration have helped offset membership losses. For example, foreign-born Americans are nearly twice as likely to identify as Catholic (46 percent) than Protestant (24 percent), which is quickly losing its majority status among Christian denominations and now accounts for 51 percent of Americans subscribing to the Christian faith. Jehovah's witnesses have the lowest retention rate among all the various religious denominations and affiliations. 

7. What explains the changes?

Religions who are losing members aren't recruiting enough new ones to make up the gap. One place to look is the "unaffiliated population." About 4 percent of adults who were raised without any particular affiliation say that's changed as they've grown older. More than half of those who weren't raised with religion now identify with one, which is a key recruitment pool for faiths seeking to boost membership. Immigration also has played a major role in the changing U.S. religious landscape, with Latino immigrants off-setting some of the losses of Catholic members. Asian immigrants are more likely to subscribe to Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faiths, so the number of adherents to those religions will likely continue to increase.

What Does It Mean for Your Work Force?

What are the implications of all of these facts for your work-force management?

Discrimination lawsuits based on religion filed with the EEOC have skyrocketed in recent years. Although these types of charges only account for 3.4 percent of all filed with the EEOC in 2006, the number has increased 48.7 percent since 1997, according to EEOC enforcement statistics. Many of these are from Muslims, who have experienced increased exposure to hate crimes and discrimination in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Find out how you can leverage Muslim holidays to reach this 1.2-billion-person market.  

Above all, legal experts such as Gilbert F. Casellas, former EEOC chair, tell us that consistent communication and training are essential to keeping your business out of legal trouble and to leveraging the unique insights people from different religious groups and denominations have to better reach segments of your marketplace and engage your employees. Read Religion at Work: What's Legal and What's Not to find out how to avoid lawsuits. 

Some companies, such as Ford Motor Co., No. 5 on the Top 50, implement employee-resource groups based on religion to give members an open space to share experiences and develop ideas to augment corporate recruiting and marketing efforts. In some cases, implementation of these groups erupts in legal battles, but check out The Truth About Employee-Resource Groups from the July/Aug. 2007 issue of DiversityInc magazine for all you need to know.

Are employee-resource groups relevant to younger people? Read what the White Guy has to say.

More Diversity Studies >>