Thoughts on America no longer having a Protestant (ideological) majority

Recently, I read about a new poll whose headline caught my eye immediately: Protestants no longer a majority of Americans, study finds. It turns out that a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that Protestants have fallen to only 48% of the American public while people without a religious affiliation or do not have a faith have risen from 15% to 20% since 2007. The percentage of people who are unaffiliated rises to 32 in the 18-29-years-old bracket and it is growing every day.

To me this is good news (for reasons which should become clear in due course) but apparently it’s (at least) a little disturbing to the author of the article in the LA Times, Teresa Watanabe (and possibly her editor) who wrote: “Protestants, whose ideals of hard work, individualism and democratic governance have fundamentally shaped the national character, no longer make up a majority of Americans for the first time in history…”

In this polarized world where news media outlets seem to be incapable of reporting the news without telling people what they should think about it, it’s hardly surprising to find rhetoric of this kind seeping its way into our discourse. That being said, ignorance is still ignorance and I feel that an ignorant statement should be pointed out; especially when it’s slipped into the discourse in such an insulting and either underhanded or willfully ignorant way.

While Protestants have made up a majority of this country’s population for most of its history, to say that hard work and individualism are exclusively Protestant ideals would be a travesty of the truth. Ideals of hard work and individualism are ideals shared by all people regardless of their faith or lack thereof. All you need to do is ask a Catholic, a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu or an agnostic/atheist to tell you where the ideals of hard work and individualism come from and you’ll find that they are universal human ideals and very far from being unique to Protestantism. Because these ideals are enshrined in our laws in the USA, it makes us an attractive destination for the worlds oppressed and a beacon of emulation for other nations.