Religion Stats, Part III
So, the last thing I wanted to say about this religion survey is that I was interested to learn that 16% of the US population is unaffiliated/agnostic/atheist. Many of those people were unaffiliated, moreover, because they had left a religion. I think something I am slowly learning is that people leave religions, usually, because of bad personal experiences.
Sometimes those experiences have to do with the reaction they get when they question the religion's belief systems. But more often, it's experiences in which the religion doesn't live up to its own ideals, and people get hurt in the process. Not that everything is determined by our experiences, but it's a lot harder to know God when the people you meet who claim to speak for God don't actually embody God's love, beauty, and open forgiveness.
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which of course is made all the more difficult because we are all fallible humans who all have the capacity to make hurtful mistakes. It's hard to imagine a community where no one ever does anything hurtful or disappointing or where each individual embodies God's love and selflessness. Of course, there is a point at which abuse should certainly lead one to leave, but isn't part of the struggle of Christian community to find the Christ-like part of our neighbor, even when it's really difficult to do so?
Or were you going somewhere else with this post?:)
Right, this is absolutely true. I think I'm just trying to understand where people are coming from when they say "I'm suspicious of organized religion." I think what it usually means is a bad experience in the past.
The church is full of people who hurt each other. Ideally, church should be a place where you figure out how to forgive and heal those hurts. But sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn't. And I think sometimes people take it even harder because they expect church to be different or better than other organizations than it is.
In New Zealand, 40% of the population chooses "none" on religious surveys, with Anglican a distant 2nd at 17% of the population.
While NZ history has strong religious roots, they clearly have faded over the years. Not sure of the reason why, but the political process here is quite different, and we definitely feel more comfortable!
Of course, that's the same as throughout Europe (with the exception of Poland--though you could argue Poland's continued strong Catholic devotion is due in strong part to its communist past).
America has a strong tradition of people coming for religious freedom and through our own strange history, we have very strong religosity in America. Whereas, by contrast, in Europe where many states still have "official" religions (e.g., in Scandinavia, the Lutheran church receives state taxes), the people are overwhelmingly non-religious. Which, if you come from a religious perspective, is one of the really great reasons to keep America from adopting any kind of official religion, etc., etc. It turns people off from taking the free will decision.
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