Mr. Lawler is commenting on the recent Pew study making headlines all over. He draws some lessons from the data and uses it all as an “I told you so” opportunity to plug his book, The Faithful Departed (and rightly so!).
Catholics still constitute the single largest religious denomination in the US, accounting for 23.9% of the adult population. (Evangelical churches, taken as a group, are home to 26.3% of the American people; but they are divided among the different Protestant denominations.) Baptists run a distant second, with 12.7%. If they qualified as a separate denomination, the Americans who have deserted the Catholic Church of their childhood would constitute the third-largest religious group in the country, with 10.1% of the population.
The Pew study, based on exhaustive polling, found that Americans switch their religious affiliations frequently. About 44% of adult Americans now belong to a church different from the one in which they were raised. The Religious Landscape Survey shows that mainline Protestant churches have suffered the most severe losses, and Protestants are now barely clinging to their majority status, with 51% of the population. The largest gains show up, ominously, in the “unaffiliated” category, which now accounts for 16% of America’s increasingly secularized people.
Lawler goes on to note that the survey counted as Catholics participants in the poll who do not practice the faith and/or do not believe in its teachings. The self-identified Catholics of the former category are bad Catholics; those of the latter are not Catholics. So, the total number leaving the Church is actually even higher than the study shows.
Now, if these defectors had been taught by their bishops, priests, religious instructors, and parents — loud and clear, and along with all the other fortifying doctrines of our Faith — that there is no salvation outside the Church, do you think they would leave in such numbers?
Phil isn’t the only one with an “I told you so” opportunity!
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