Not only the
Catholic church faces lots of people who do not want to be active in their 'faith' or who perhaps still take part in certain traditional feasts, like child-baptism, first and second communion, but really do not believe in any God or would ever read the Bible.
In Belgium we still do have a very active Jewish community but everywhere in the world we also notice people who call themselves
Jew but have no interest in any god whatsoever.
In the
United States the number of nonreligious Jews is rising. When you would go around and ask passers by how active they are in their religion, you probably would find many who are not religious at all. According to a new survey of the
Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project more than one in five so called Jews, saying they are not affiliated with a religion.
The size of the U.S.
Jewish population has been a matter of lively
debate among academic experts for more than a decade. Because the Pew
Research survey involves a representative sample of Jews, rather than a
census of all American Jews, it cannot definitively answer the question.
However, data from the survey can be used to derive a rough estimate of
the size of the U.S. Jewish population. Perhaps even more valuably, the
survey illuminates the many different ways in which Americans
self-identify as Jewish or partially Jewish, and it therefore provides a
sense of how the size of the population varies depending on one’s
definition of who is a Jew.
If Jewish refers only to people whose religion is Jewish (Jews by
religion), then the survey indicates that the Jewish population
currently stands at about 1.8% of the total U.S. adult population, or
4.2 million people. If one includes secular or cultural Jews – those who
say they have no religion but who were raised Jewish or have a Jewish
parent and who still consider themselves Jewish
aside from
religion – then the estimate grows to 2.2% of American adults, or about
5.3 million. For the purposes of the analysis in this report, these two
groups make up the “net” Jewish population.
In
traditional Jewish law (halakha), Jewish identity is passed down
through matrilineal descent, and the survey finds that about 90% of Jews
by religion and 64% of Jews of no religion – a total of about 4.4
million U.S. adults – say they have a Jewish mother. Additionally, about
1.3 million people who are not classified as Jews in this report (49%
of non-Jews of Jewish background) say they have a Jewish mother. {
Since 1983, the Reform movement formally has embraced a more expansive
definition of who is a Jew, accepting children born of either a Jewish
father or a Jewish mother if the children are raised Jewish and engage
in public acts of Jewish identification, such as acquiring a Hebrew
name, studying Torah and having a bar or bat mitzvah. See the Reform
movement’s March 15, 1983, Resolution on Patrilineal Descent.}
Jewish
leaders say the new survey spotlights several unique obstacles for the
future of their faith. You can wonder when even among religious Jews, most of them say it's not necessary to believe in God
to be Jewish, and less than one in three say religion is very important
to their lives. Like in Catholicism and protestantism in the
Western World, the people living in a luxury world are more interested in material wealth than in spiritual richness.
Though
Greg Smith, director of religious surveys for the Pew Research Center says:
"The fact that many Jews tell us that religion is not particularly
important to them doesn't mean that being Jewish is not important to
them."
The long-term decline in the Jewish by religion share of the population
results partly from differences in the median age and fertility of Jews
compared with the public at large. As early as 1957, Jews by religion
were significantly older and had fewer children than the U.S. population
as a whole. At that time, the median age of Jews older than age 14 was
44.5 years, compared with 40.4 years among the population as a whole,
and Jewish women ages 15-44 had 1.2 children on average, compared with
1.7 children among this age group in the general public. {
The 1957 Current Population Survey results were published in Goldstein,
S. 1969. “Socioeconomic Differentials Among Religious Groups in the
United States.” American Journal of Sociology, volume 74, issue 6, pages
612-631, and Mueller, S. A., and Lane, A. V. 1972. “Tabulations from
the 1957 Current Population Survey on Religion: A Contribution to the
Demography of American Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, volume 11, issue 1, pages 76-98. Unfortunately, raw data from
the 1957 survey were destroyed, so it is not possible to reanalyze them
using the various age categories used in the new survey. In the 1957
survey, completed interviews were obtained for roughly 35,000
households.}
Today, Jews by religion still are considerably older than U.S. adults
as a whole, although they are similar to the general public in the
number of children ever born. (See discussion of median age and
fertility in the
Age and
Fertility sections in Chapter 2.)
Since 2000, the share of American adults who say their religion is
Jewish has generally ranged between 1.2% and 2% in national surveys.
The estimate from the new Pew Research survey that there are
approximately 5.3 million “net” Jewish adults and 1 million children who
are being raised exclusively as Jewish (or 1.3 million children being
raised at least partly Jewish) falls roughly in the middle of these
prior estimates – somewhat higher than
DellaPergola’s numbers, somewhat
lower than the Dashefsky-Sheskin figure and fairly close to the
Saxe-Tighe estimates.
The estimate that Jews by religion make up 1.8% of U.S. adults also
is consistent with the results of Pew Research surveys over the past
five years and close to the findings of other recent national surveys
(such as Gallup polls and the General Social Surveys conducted by the
independent research organization NORC at the
University of Chicago)
that use similar, close-ended questions about religious affiliation. {
A close-ended question provides the respondent with a list of possible
responses to choose from. Pew Research’s typical wording is: “What is
your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic,
Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim,
Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in
particular.” Other studies, such as the National Jewish Population
Surveys (NJPS) and American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS) have
used open-ended questions about religious affiliation – offering no
specific response options – and the results therefore are not directly
comparable. Open-ended questions about religious affiliation tend to
find smaller numbers of Jews by religion. See, for example, Schulman, M.
A., chair. NJPS 2000-2001 Review Committee. 2003. “National Jewish
Population Survey 2000-2001: Study Review Memo;” and Tighe, E., Saxe,
L., and Livert, D. 2006. “Research synthesis of national survey
estimates of the U.S. Jewish population,” presented at the 61st Annual
Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.}
In aggregated Pew Research polling, the Jewish by religion share of the
population has ranged in recent years between 1.5% (in 2009) and 1.9%
(in 2010). GSS estimates have ranged from 1.5% (in 2012) to 1.7% (in
2008). Combining its own surveys conducted since 2008, Pew Research
finds that a weighted average of 1.7% of U.S. adults identify as Jews by
religion, while the GSS and Gallup find 1.6% identifying as Jews by
religion.
According to the survey, a full
16 percent of Orthodox Jews “attend non-Jewish religious services at least a few times a year.” The proportion is
identical
for Modern Orthodox Jews and what the survey describes as
“ultra-Orthodox Jews” — 15 percent for both sub-groups. Shockingly,
that’s slightly
higher than the proportions of Reform Jews (15
percent) and non-denominational Jews (12%) who report attending
non-Jewish religious services with similar frequency.
Jane Eisner, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, said she is
not surprised that the study found relatively low interest in Jewish
religious beliefs.
"We are a people very much defined by what we do, rather than what we believe," she said.
But Eisner said she is concerned that millennials are less likely to
donate to Jewish charities, care strongly about Israel or belong to
Jewish groups.
"It's great that these non-religious Jews feel pride in being
Jewish," Eisner said. "What worries me is their tenuous ties to the
community."
