America is giving up on political parties and organized religion. Thanks, millennials. [View all]

[applegrove]

America is giving up on political parties and organized religion. Thanks, millennials.

By Philip Bump at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/05/12/america-is-getting-less-religious-as-it-gives-up-on-political-parties-thanks-millennials/

"SNIP..............


A survey from Pew Research that offers national detail on global religious trends shows that Americans are increasingly identifying themselves as religiously unaffiliated. Since 2007, the number of Americans who don't identify with a religious tradition rose from 16.1 to 22.8 percent -- the biggest change of any group that Pew studied.

The group most likely to identify as unaffiliated? Millennials -- those born after 1980. (Pew's definition of the generations is used below for consistency, but we remind you that the definitions are subjective. They also break out older and younger millennials; the figures are similar enough for the chart below that we just used the former category.)

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The same pattern holds.

There's overlap between the two, as well. In April, Pew found that white evangelical Protestants had grown increasingly Republican, with 68 percent identifying as or leaning Republican. That's a group that fell one percentage point, making up just over a quarter of the population in the new religion survey. The unaffiliated are a slightly smaller segment of the population -- and skew much more heavily Democratic. Sixty-one percent identified or leaned toward the party.

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