It is one of the biggest myths of our day to say the United States is a religiously diverse nation. It manifestly is not. But there is a lot of money, and ideological investment, at stake in pretending otherwise. Consider the following.
A Pew Research Center study on global religious diversity was released on April 4: with the exception of the Washington Times, not a single large-circulation newspaper in the nation ran a story on it.
The study found that “from a global perspective, the U.S. really is not at all that religiously diverse.” Indeed, “95% of the U.S. population is either Christian [78%] or religiously unaffiliated, while all other religions combined account for less than 5% of Americans. As a result, the U.S. ranks 68th out of 232 countries and territories.” Similarly, as a Gallup poll found, 95% of all Americans who identify with a religion are Christian.
The Pew study classified the U.S. as “moderate” in terms of religious diversity. With good reason: Jews are 1.8%, Buddhists are 1.2%, Muslims are .9%, Hindus are .6%, and folk religions are .2%. Moreover, the U.S. is less religiously diverse than such nations as Jamaica, Bermuda, France, Germany, Sweden, Tanzania, and Ethiopia.
The media blackout is not hard to explain: the data undercut the multicultural argument used by anti-Christian organizations. We are overwhelmingly Christian, and as such we should not flinch from acknowledging this verity whenever appropriate. Our roots are Judeo-Christian; they are not Hindu-Islamic.
