From the American Religious Identification Survey: "the proportion of the population that can be classified as Christian has declined from eighty-six in 1990 to seventy-seven percent in 2001"
Other key findings about changes from 1990:
"although the number of adults who classify themselves in non-Christian religious groups has increased from about 5.8 million to about 7.7 million, the proportion of non-Christians has increased only by a very small amount - from 3.3 % to about 3.7 %;
"the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight percent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001;
" there has also been a substantial increase in the number of adults who refused to reply to the question about their religious preference, from about four million or two percent in 1990 to more than eleven million or over five percent in 2001.
"This report summarizes a ten-year follow-up study of religious identification among American adults, undertaken for the first time in 1990. Carried out under the auspices of The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) was the most extensive survey of religious identification in the later half of 20th-century America. That study, like the current follow-up, was undertaken because the U.S. Census does not produce a religious profile of the American population. Yet, the religious categories into which a population sorts itself is surely no less important than some of the other social-demographic categories that are enumerated by the decennial census. "
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"The Alban Weekly is launching a four-part series on managing your congregational public image. With all that's going on inside congregations—from printing worship bulletins to creating the newsletter to maintaining a web site, finding time to communicate effectively with the world outside can be difficult. Yet more and more congregations are feeling pressured to do so. How does one do that well, especially when resources (time, money, know how) are in short supply?"
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The Living Church Magazine reports in its July 10, 2005 issue that the estimated average Sunday attendance in the Episcopal Church was down by 3.2 percent.
According to the article, this represents "19,268 fewer people attending each week among the 5,222 churches" who had submitted their 2004 parochial reports.
The magazine based its reporting on a presentation by Charles Fulton, national condev officer, to the June meeting of Executive Council. The magazine reports that "the decline does not appear to be primarily linked to fallout from the actions of the 2003 General Convention, but rather a society that is distancing itself from institutional religion."
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