In Major Poll, U.S. Religious Identity Appears Very Slippery

America has always been a competitive religious marketplace, but a major survey released yesterday shows a country increasingly exploring different faith identities and ways of worship. More than 40 percent of respondents told pollsters that they had changed their religious affiliation since childhood.

Experts say the growth of religious minorities, American mobility and intermarriage are key factors in the churn documented in the Religious Landscape Survey, one of the largest such polls ever done, with 35,000 adults interviewed.

Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the survey confirms on a grand scale trends that demographers have noted for years: the slipping percentage of Protestants, now down to 51, and the rise of people who call themselves unaffiliated, now at 16 percent, up from similar surveys.

The survey also lays out, just weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's first papal visit to the United States, the Catholic Church's challenge here: no American faith group has lost more adherents. Among U.S. adults, about the same percentage -- 24 -- call themselves Catholic as in the past, but that statistic masks significant turnover. The percentage has held up primarily because of the huge number of recent Latino immigrants, who are largely Catholic, the survey found. Sixty-eight percent of people raised Catholic still identify with their childhood denomination, compared with 80 percent of Protestants and 76 percent of Jews.

Millions of dollars are being pumped into such research as religious institutions -- like hospitals, universities and social service organizations -- watch Americans increasingly dismiss the importance of denomination, long a key societal organizer. Old barometers of religiosity such as church membership are becoming less important as Americans craft a more bottom-up, individualized concept of faith. The new landscape has nondenominational megachurches, worship services in movie theaters, Episcopalians speaking in tongues and independent rabbinical schools.

"When it comes to religion, there is believing, belonging and behaving, and they don't always correlate," said Barry Kosmin, a co-author of the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which polled 50,000 people but asked fewer questions than the new Pew poll.

Pew's survey also includes a basic sketch of each state's religious profile. Compared with national percentages, Virginia has relatively more white evangelicals and fewer Catholics; Maryland and Washington have three times the percentage of black Protestants and Jews. The survey does not do a separate count for Northern Virginia and treats Maryland and Washington as one entity, because the District's sample size was small.