Abstract
All major religious groups in the United States face the challenge of rapidly rising numbers of Americans disaffiliating from religion. The American Jewish community, however, is relatively healthy. Drawing on analyses using the 2007 and 2014 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Studies, we find that, compared with many other religious groups, Jewish retention rates are high. Moreover, the percentage of U.S. adults who say their religion is Jewish has remained relatively stable in recent years. This paper further explores key similarities and differences between Jews and other U.S. religious groups, comparing rates of switching and retention, rates of intermarriage and other demographic characteristics (including fertility, age, education, income and race); religious beliefs and practices; and, finally, a few comparative political measures.
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Both the 2007 and 2014 datasets are freely available to researchers on the Center’s website, www.pewresearch.org
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As reported in “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” (Pew Research Center 2015), between 2007 and 2014 the estimated number of mainline Protestant adults fell from approximately 41.1 million to 36 million, while Catholics dropped from roughly 54.3 million to 50.9 million. Although the estimated number of evangelical Protestants increased by about 2 million since 2007 (based on the margin of error, it is possible that the number of evangelicals may have risen by as many as 5 million or remained essentially unchanged), the estimate for all Christian adults (combined) dropped by 8 percentage points, from about 178.1 million to 172.8 million.
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Perhaps coincidentally, 4.2 million is also the estimated number of adult Jews by religion derived from Pew Research Center’s survey of Jews (2013). However, the 2013 survey, which also provides a variety of other Jewish population estimates, should not be compared directly with the Religious Landscape Study’s estimates because these projects were designed with different sampling plans, interview languages, geographic coverage of the US Jewish population, and other methodological and definitional choices stemming from their different overarching goals.
- 5.
Protestants in the Religious Landscape Study were classified as members of one of three major Protestant traditions – the evangelical, mainline, and historically black Protestant traditions – based on the specific denomination with which they identify. For instance, respondents who identify with the Southern Baptist Convention are categorized as evangelical Protestants, those who identify with the American Baptist Churches USA are part of the mainline tradition, and those who identify with the National Baptist Convention are categorized as members of the historically black Protestant tradition. However, many Protestant respondents (38% in the 2014 study) offered a vague denominational identity. In these cases, respondents were sorted into one of the three Protestant traditions based on their race and/or their answer to a question that asked whether they consider themselves to be a “born-again or evangelical” Christian. Because the sorting of Protestant respondents into one of these three traditions is less precise than is the categorization of Jews, Catholics, Mormons and members of other faiths, comparisons of religious switching and intermarriage rates involving Protestant categories should be treated with caution. Full details on the Landscape Study’s approach to categorizing respondents are available in Pew Research Center’s report “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” (http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/appendix-b-classification-of-protestant-denominations/)
- 6.
For more detail, see Pew Research Center’s report, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/
- 7.
We use the somewhat unusual term “accession” here, rather than the more common term “conversion,” because we do not want to suggest that everyone who has switched religions necessarily has followed a formal conversion process. Respondents in the Religious Landscape Study were asked about their current religion and the religion in which they were raised. They were not asked whether they had “converted.”
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Of course, this ignores the fact that Jews often reside, attend schools and work in places with higher concentrations of Jews, thus raising the odds (Sheskin and Dashefsky 2017).
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For example, among Jews who got married in the 1980s, about four-in-ten have a non-Jewish spouse, while among those who have gotten married since 2000, 58% have a non-Jewish spouse; these figures are for the “net” Jewish population, which includes both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion. “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” p. 9 (Pew Research Center 2013).
- 10.
Buddhists are more likely than members of most other groups in the 2014 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) to indicate that they are in a mixed-faith relationship, with 61% saying their spouse has a religion other than Buddhism. However, Asian-American Buddhists may be underrepresented because the survey was conducted only in English and Spanish, not in Asian languages such as Japanese, Mandarin or Vietnamese. In the RLS, just 33% of Buddhists identify their race as Asian American. But Pew Research Center’s 2012 survey of Asian Americans (http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview/), conducted in English and seven Asian languages, found that roughly two-thirds of US Buddhists are Asian Americans, and that most married Asian-American Buddhists are married to a spouse who is also Buddhist. Thus, the 2014 RLS figure for intermarriage among Buddhists is likely much higher than it would have been had the survey been offered in Asian languages (and included more Asian-American Buddhists).
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Women tend to report slightly higher fertility rates than men, but the patterns here are largely unchanged when analysis is restricted to women.
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For complete details on how the index was constructed, see Pew Research Center’s analysis, “The most and least racially diverse US religious groups,” http://pewrsr.ch/1KtFGxx
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[On the other hand, when respondents in more than 20 local Jewish community studies (which include Jews by religion and Jews of no religion) were asked “How important is being Jewish in your life?” the median value for “very important” was 66%, with values ranging from 41% in San Francisco to 87% in Palm Springs. While not an apples-to-apples comparison, these figures suggest that many Jews may consider “being Jewish” very important to them, even if they do not consider “religion” to be very important in their lives. See Ira M. Sheskin, Comparisons of Jewish Communities: A Compendium of Tables and Bar Charts (New York: Berman Jewish DataBank and The Jewish Federations of North America, 2015) at www.jewishdatabank.org. –Eds.]
- 15.
For more detail, see Pew Research Center’s report, “A Portrait of American Orthodox Jews,” http://www.pewforum.org/2015/08/26/a-portrait-of-american-orthodox-jews/
- 16.
For a comprehensive analysis of trends in party identification in the US, including an assessment of data collected more recently than the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, see Pew Research Center’s 2015 report “A Deep Dive into Party Affiliation” located here: http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
References
Pew Research Center. 2008. 2007 US religious landscape survey. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
———. 2013. A portrait of Jewish Americans. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
———. 2015. America’s changing religious landscape. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Putnam, R., and D.E. Campbell. 2010. American Grace: How religion divides and unites us. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rebhun, U. 2016. Jews and the American religious landscape. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sheskin, I.M., and A. Dashefsky. 2017. United States Jewish population, 2016. In America Jewish year book 2016, ed. A. Dashefsky and I.M. Sheskin, vol. 116, 153–239. Dordrecht: Springer.
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Cooperman, A., Alper, B.A. (2018). The Jewish Place in America’s Religious Landscape. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2017. American Jewish Year Book, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70663-4_1
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