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More U.S. Latinos shift, drift outside Roman Catholic Church According to the survey:
report on the “Shifting Reli- gious Identity of Latinos” reads very much like a biography of
Fernando Alcantar. Like six in 10 Hispanic Roman
Catholics in the U.S., he was born in Mexico, where “you are Catholic as much as you are Mexican. You like jalapenos and worship the Virgin of Guadalupe,” he said. But once he moved to Califor-
nia after high school, his faith jour- ney diverged—and derailed. Today, Alcantar, 36, calls himself a humanist. The Pew Research Center report
released in May is subtitled: “Nearly One in Four Latinos are former Catholics.” Hispanics are still a pillar of
American Roman Catholicism— fully a third of the U.S. church today. And their share is climbing with the overall growth of the Hispanic population. More than half (55 percent) of
the nation’s estimated 19.6 mil- lion Hispanics identify as Roman Catholic, according to the report, which uses “Hispanic” and “Latino” interchangeably. That’s 12 percentage points below
2010, however, when 67 percent of Latinos surveyed said they were Roman Catholic, the survey found.
Surprises everywhere “Everyone was surprised in some way by the findings, the first time the size of the decline in Hispanic Catholics has been measured in depth,” said Pew research associate Jessica Hamar Martínez. “If both (immigration and shift-
ing) trends continue, a day could come when a majority of Catholics in the United States will be Hispanic, even though the majority of Hispan- ics might no longer be Catholic,” the survey said.
• Nearly one in three Hispanics (32 percent) said they no longer belong to the major religious tradition in which they were raised (not includ- ing changes among Protestant denominations). • 18 percent of Hispanics today claim no religious identity, up from 10 per- cent in 2010. “I think people were expecting the growth in evangelicals among former Catholics but the rise of the unaffiliated was unexpected,” said senior researcher Cary Funk. • 22 percent of Hispanics now say they are Protestant. This includes 16 percent who call themselves evangel- ical, up from 12 percent in 2010. • The movement out of the Roman Catholic Church is led by the young and middle-aged. Only 45 percent of Hispanics under age 30 are Roman Catholic. That sounds familiar to Alcantar
of El Centro, Calif. He left Roman Catholicism at 18 and Christianity altogether by the time he was 32. Two of his three siblings are agnostic; only one sister remains Roman Catholic. Among ex-Roman Catholics who
turned to another faith, Pew found many have turned to the enthusiastic worship of Pentecostal and charis-
matic or “renewalist” faiths that cel- ebrate gifts of the Spirit such as divine healing, receiving direct revelation from God and “a strong sense of God’s direct, often miraculous, role in everyday life.”
Multiple reasons Most ex-Roman Catholics told Pew they either “drifted away” (55 per- cent) or just stopped believing in the teachings of their childhood faith (52 percent). “There’s rarely, if ever, a sin- gle reason,” Funk said. Timothy Matovina, a University
of Notre Dame (Ind.) theology pro- fessor who is familiar with the new survey, is skeptical that the out-the- door trend can be reversed, par- ticularly for millennials. “Among all young people, it’s a challenge to keep them in a religion,” said Matovina, executive director of the Institute for Latino Studies. “Can we stem the tide among Hispanics? I doubt it. Can we stem the tide among non-Hispan- ics? I doubt it. It’s not only Catholics who are struggling. Everybody is struggling.” For more information, go to www.
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