USA Today reports  the American Religious Identification Survey reports the number of people reporting they have no religion continues to increase in the United States. Fifteen percent of those replying said they had no religion.  In 2001 the number was 14.2 percent and 8.2 percent in 1990.  The decline includes Catholic and non-Catholic Christians.  Meanwhile the numbers of nontraditional religious groups, including us, now number 2.8 million calling themselves Wiccan, Pagan, or Spiritualist and appears to be growing rapidly.

The demonists in the ‘Christian’ right have been doing their job, hijacking the sacred and dragging it through the mud.  

It has happened before.  Today Europe is overwhelmingly secular.  In my view this is due to the centuries of abuse of power by ‘Christian’ churches and their leaders when ‘men of the cloth’ dominated the politics and rooted for the various sides of the bloody wars that devastated that continent.  In time, Europeans got wise.  The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants led to the Enlightenment, and World War One, with its enthusiastic support by religious leaders on both sides, did even greater damage to the faith of the average European.

The US has been unique in remaining exceptionally religious compared to other modern societies.  I suspect this was largely because we have had no large-scale religious wars, and historically religion has tended to play a back up role in state politics, and little in national.   Now the Religious’ Right has worked hard to push their ghastly conception of a deity down everyone’s throats, where all talk of love and charity has been drowned out by belches of bigotry and ignorance, hatred and greed.  Fortunately more people are repulsed by this business than are attracted.

But religion in the broadest sense is the only way to address the ultimate issues of human life.  The tools of modern science, powerful as they are, cannot take us across the gap between measuring ad predicting externals to understanding their significance, the inner realms of meaning and significance. The problem is in discovering forms of spirituality that can recognize modernity’s strengths while situating them within a larger context.  

Paganism is one such path, for we have no problem with science, are tolerant of spiritual differences, and address constructively many of the biggest political and cultural issues of our day. The numbers of nontraditional religious groups, including us, now number 2.8 million calling themselves Wiccan, Pagan, or Spiritualist, up to 1.4% from .8% since 1990, all without seeking converts.  Our biggest problem is a shortage of qualified teachers compared to the demand for them.

I believe there will be more of us in the next survey.