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The Future of religion 433

TabLe 13.2 How Americans Identify with Religion

Religious Group Number of Members Percentage of U.S. Adults
Christian 243,060,000 77.8%
Protestant 165,000,000 53.0%
Evangelical churches 85,200,000 27.3%
Mainline churches 57,000,000 18.4%
Historic black churches 22,800,000 7.3%
Roman Catholic 68,400,000 21.7%
Mormon 6,200,000 1.9%
Orthodox: Greek, Russian 1,500,000 0.5%
Jehovah’s Witness 1,200,000 0.4%
Other Christian 760,000 0.3%
Other Religions 16,350,000 5.3%
Jewish 5,690,000 1.8%
Buddhist 3,570,000 1.2%
Muslim 2,770,000 0.9%
Hindu 1,790,000 0.6%
Other faiths 2,530,000 0.8%
(Unitarians, New Age, Native
American religions, Liberal)
No Identity with a Religion 50,980,000 16.3%
Nothing in particular 36,196,000 11.6%
Agnostic 8,667,000 2.7%
Atheist 6,118,000 1.9%
Don’t Know or Refused 1,863,000 0.6%

Sources: The Global Religious Landscape 2012:Table 12; Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches 2012.

on life, they ask, What is the purpose of it all? Why are we born? Is there an afterlife? If
so, where are we going? Out of these concerns arises this question: If there is a God,
what does God want of us in this life? Does God have a preference about how we
should live?
Science, including sociology, cannot answer such questions. By its very nature, science
cannot tell us about four main concerns that many people have: Read on MySocLab
Document: Religion and
1. The existence of God. About this, science has nothing to say. No test tube has either Spirituality Among Scientists
isolated God or refuted God’s existence.
2. The purpose of life. Although science can provide a definition of life and describe the
characteristics of living organisms, it has nothing to say about ultimate purpose.
3. An afterlife. Science can offer no information on this at all, for it has no tests to
prove or disprove a “hereafter.”
4. Morality. Science can demonstrate the consequences of behavior, but not the moral
superiority of one action compared with another. This means—to use an extreme
example—that science cannot even prove whether loving your family and neighbor
is superior to hurting and killing them.
There is no doubt that religion will last as long as humanity lasts, for what could
replace it? And if something did, and answered such questions, would it not be religion
under a different name?
To close this chapter, let’s try to glimpse the cutting edge of religious change.