5 key findings about the changing U.S. religious landscape

1. Christians are declining, both as a share of the U.S. population and in total number.
2. Within Christianity, the biggest declines have been in the mainline Protestant tradition and among Catholics.
3. The decline of Christians in the U.S. has corresponded with the continued rise in the share of Americans with no religious affiliation (religious “nones”).
4. The major trends seen in American religion since 2007 – the decline of Christians and rise of the “nones” – have occurred in some form across many demographic groups.
5. The share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths, such as Islam and Hinduism, has grown modestly.

Nominals to Nones: 3 Key Takeaways From Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey

1. Convictional Christianity is rather steady.
2. There have been significant shifts within American Christianity.
3. Mainline Protestantism continues to hemorrhage.

Apologetics: Who Really Wrote the Gospels?

Here’s the explanation that seems to make the most sense: When churches received each Gospel, they also received information about that Gospel’s origins, telling them whose eyewitness testimony this Gospel represented. Because they received clear oral traditions when they received each book, when Christians began adding titles to these manuscripts, every congregation connected each Gospel to the same author.
Why?
They already knew where each Gospel came from. Nothing less can explain the early consistency of the titles.

English Proficiency on the Rise Among Latinos

These shifts coincide with the rise of U.S.-born Hispanics as a share of the nation’s Hispanic population, and the slowdown in immigration to the U.S. from Latin America. In 2013, U.S.-born Hispanics outnumbered foreign-born Hispanics by nearly two-to-one—35 million to 19 million—and made up a growing share (65%) of the nation’s Hispanic population. They are also much younger, with a median age of 19 years compared with 40 among immigrant Hispanics (Stepler and Brown, 2015). At the same time, immigration from Latin America, primarily Mexico, has slowed (Passel, Cohn and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2012), leading to fewer Spanish-speaking new immigrant arrivals and a more settled U.S. Hispanic immigrant population.

Lotteries: America’s $70 Billion Shame

Half a century ago, gambling was criminalized in every state except Nevada. As recently as 1980, just 14 states held lotteries. Today it’s 43. A political cynic might say lotteries are the perfect public policy: A tax disguised as a game without an organized lobby to oppose it. Corporate income taxes punish corporations, and companies respond with lobbyists. Personal income taxes and estate taxes hurt the rich, and rich families fund elections, so no need to elaborate on that problem. But lotteries disproportionately affect the poor, who vote at lower rates, donate less to campaign funds, and have inconstant representation on K Street and its equivalents in the states. So no surprise that, as recently as 2009, lotteries provided more revenue than state corporate-income taxes in 11 of the 43 states where they were legal, including Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.

Bad Hebrew = Free Advertising

If you have ever used automated translation software, you can already tell this is going to be bad.
But what they ended up with is actually even funnier than the standard, slightly ungrammatical or jumbled automated translation.
Somehow, they ended up copying the words “Babylon is the world’s leading dictionary and translation software” in Hebrew, and that’s what they gave the tattoo artist!