Shifts Along the American Religious-Secular Spectrum

This paper examines three dimensions of American religion--belonging, behavior and belief--by creating a single, unified scale of religiosity and testing it with the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and the General Social Survey (GSS). It shows that certain combinations of those three variables are far more common than others, and demonstrates changes over time in the percentage of people belonging to each cluster, with a trend toward diminishing religiosity. The paper identifies socio-demographic and geographic factors that are associated with the religiosity cluster to which a person belongs. The paper examines the ability of the new scale to predict how people will answer questions on contentious societal issues, using belief in evolution as a case study. The most religious definitely reject human evolution while the most secular definitely believe in it

Religious, Spiritual and Secular: The emergence of three distinct worldviews among American college students

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION SURVEY. A Report based on the ARIS 2013 National College Student Surve

ARIS 2013 National College Student Survey

Young adult Americans have been identified as the population most responsible for recent changes in the nation’s religious identification and patterns of religiosity. In order to better understand this trend the ARIS 2013 College Student Survey focuses on the student component of the millennial generation