Abstract
The era where the American religious landscape could be accurately described by Will Herberg as Protestant, Catholic, Jew has given way to a period where denominational identity matters less and those claiming no religious preference represent between 15% and 23% of the population, depending on the survey [1–4]. Yet, these same surveys suggest that Americans also continue to report high levels of belief in God. Furthermore, few of those who have no formal affiliation can be accurately described as atheist or agnostic.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, the Gallup survey, which does not explicitly suggest ‘no religion’ to respondents as a possible answer, reports a significantly lower percentage of nones than other surveys do.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
One of the most difficult dilemmas for those interested in studying small religious groups is that the standard social scientific survey of religion relies on a sample of between 1500 and 3000 individuals. Assuming a random sampling procedure, this is generally sufficient for generating a sample that is representative for populations such as Protestants and Catholics. However, this often leaves us with only a handful of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and even fewer neopagans and shamans. One of the reasons for relying on these small samples is cost: surveys are often conducted based on survey minutes and each additional respondent and each additional question comes with a cost. However, simply increasing the sample size will not solve the problem for difficult to identify groups, particularly those who would need to be targeted through more than a single screening question. One new technique being used to generate random samples of hidden populations is respondent driven sampling. This could prove useful in this case because loose networks appear to be important here, perhaps even more important than organizations
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MacGregor, C.A. (2022). Metaphysical Religion and Spirituality: A Measured Approach. In: Silk, M., White, C. (eds) The Future of Metaphysical Religion in America. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79903-8_1
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