"What really seems to be happening is that Americans are making a declaration against “Religion” with a capital “R”... So for us, the changes are not about Americans’ faith and belief; it’s about the relationship of a chunk of Americans to organized religion." - Claude S. Fischer, Ph.D.
As debates intensify over what really is happening in American religion today - with respected studies showing rapid increases in the percentage of Americans self-identifying as "nones," or religiously unaffiliated - University of California at Berkeley Sociologist Claude Fischer discusses his own research suggesting that subverting religion to the culture wars comes at a price. While spiritual beliefs and practice remain relatively constant, affiliation with organized religion is what is rapidly declining, Dr. Fischer and co-writer Michael Hout, Ph.D., point out in their important paper, Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987–2012, published in the Journal Sociological Science in 2014.
To read the transcript, please click here: http://stateofbelief.com/?p=5713
