From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bee: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 04/19/2015 Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2015 07:09:10 +0000 DEAR FRIEND The End of White Christian America is Approaching [image: Inline image 1] In the on-line news magazine Altemet, Brooklyn writer and journalist Amanda Mancotte recently wrote *— The end of white Christian America is nigh: Why the country's youth are abandoning religious conservatism -* As White Christians are now a minority in 19 states and America's growing racial diversity only tells part of the story. New data from the American Values Atlas shows that while Caucasians continue to be the majority in all but 4 states in the country, white Christians are the minority in a whopping 19 states. And, nationwide, Americans who identify as Protestant are now in the minority for the first time ever, clocking in at a mere 47 percent of Americans and falling. The most obvious reason for this change is growing racial diversity. Most Americans still identify as Christian, but *"Christian"* is a group that is less white and less Protestant than it has been at any time in history. The massive growth in Hispanic Catholics, in particular, has been a major factor in this shift in the ethnic and religious identity of this country. White Catholics used to outnumber Hispanic Catholics 3 to 1 in the 2000s, but now it's only by a 2 to 1 margin. But another major reason religious diversity is outpacing the growth of racial/ethnic diversity is largely due to the explosive growth in non-belief among Americans. One in five Americans now identifies as religiously unaffiliated. In 13 states, the *"nones"* are the largest religious group. Non-religious people now equal Catholics in number, and their proportion is likely to grow dramatically, as young people are by far the most non-religious group in the country. This isn't some kind of side effect of their youth, either.