Shifting religious landscape and the role of faith institutions
Welcome to the 14th edition of North Carolina Religion Roundup: U.S. religion trends, aid from faith groups, the history of Durham Jewish unionizing, and more.
Happy Friday! Thanks for reading the 14th edition of North Carolina Religion Roundup, a newsletter that highlights major religion news and trends in the Triangle and greater NC.
I’m a reporter covering community colleges, postsecondary access, and faith at EducationNC, and a M.Div. student at Duke Divinity School. As always, I’d love any thoughts or feedback regarding parts of the roundup you particularly like, and/or anything you’d like to see in the future. Plus, I’d love it if you’d share this newsletter with a friend.
In Story to Follow, I briefly take a look at shifting U.S. religion trends represented in the Pew Research Center’s new data, and what those trends might mean moving forward.
In a Nutshell, I highlight some NC religion stories to keep an eye on.
And in What I’m Reading, I include a fascinating look by Facing South at Durham Jewish cigarette rollers’ unionizing efforts.
Story to Follow:
If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population by 2070, according to Pew Research data published this week. The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%. Pew Research Center modeled several hypothetical scenarios describing how the U.S. religious landscape might change over the next 50 years.
If no one in America changes their religion after 2020, Pew projects 54% of the country will be Christian.
If movement “into and out of Christianity” remains stable at recent rates, 46% will be Christian. Those rates are 31% of Christians becoming religiously unaffiliated before turning 30, and 21% of unaffiliated people becoming Christian.
If disaffiliation rises with limits — the switching rate capped to prevent the share of Christians who leave the faith from rising above 50% — Pew projects 39% of the country will be Christian.
If disaffiliation rises and no cap is imposed on switching rates, Pew projects 35% of the country will be Christian. From the Pew study:
However, these are not the only possibilities, and they are not meant as predictions of what will happen. Rather, this study presents formal demographic projections of what could happen under a few illustrative scenarios based on trends revealed by decades of survey data from Pew Research Center and the long-running General Social Survey.
All the projections start from the current religious composition of the U.S. population, taking account of religious differences by age and sex. Then, they factor in birth rates and migration patterns. Most importantly, they incorporate varying rates of religious switching – movement into and out of broad categories of religious identity – to model what the U.S. religious landscape would look like if switching stayed at its recent pace, continued to speed up (as it has been doing since the 1990s), or suddenly halted.
Notably, if “switching” trends continue, by 2070, “religious nones” will approach majority by 2070 — up from the current 30%. Also of note, under each of the four scenarios, people of non-Christian religions would grow to represent 12%-13% of the population – doubling their present share. Pew attributes this to the future of migration rather than religious switching.
“None of these hypothetical scenarios is certain to unfold exactly as modeled, but collectively they demonstrate how much impact switching could have on the overall population’s religious composition within a few decades,” the Pew report says. “This report focuses on Christians and the religiously unaffiliated, the two most common, very broad religious identities in the United States today. People with all other religious affiliations are combined into an umbrella category that includes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and a diverse array of smaller groups that together make up about 6% of the U.S. population. … Because data on religious switching and intergenerational transmission is less reliable for groups with small sample sizes in surveys, non-Christian groups are not shown separately in this report.”
RNS Writer Bob Smietana, author of “Reorganized Religion,” shared reflections about the study on Twitter.
It’s true that many churches (and other places of worship) play an important role in their community. While some churches and Christians have certainly had negative impacts in their communities, churches — the Black church especially, as I’ve covered in previous newsletters — have historically led mutual aid, voting, health, and disaster relief efforts in their communities. As the U.S. religious landscape has shifted, churches have generally shifted more to partner roles — working to support organizations like the Red Cross, local health agencies, school districts and others. But as Covid reminded us, faith institutions still have unique access and credibility in many communities.
In North Carolina, about 77% of adults identify as Christians, according to the Pew Research Study’s Religious Landscape Study. Religious North Carolinians of non-Christian faiths make up 3% of the state; 1% are Jewish and less than 1% are Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. Fifteen percent identify with no religion in particular, 3% are agnostic and 2% are atheist.
With more than 10.5 million people living in North Carolina, according to the Census, even 1% of the population is more than 105,500 people. 77% is more than 8,000,000. That’s a lot of people — some of whom consistently contribute to faith-based community volunteer efforts. To be sure, there are plenty of secular organizations and government resources in addition to faith organizations. Still, as Smietana points out in his Twitter thread, many of those organizations partner with faith groups — work that will need to be replaced, in order to reach people often missed by other institutions but connected through church. Other faith-based aid/relief groups definitely exist, but Christian groups remain the largest due to demographics — even under Pew’s 2070 projections.
This is a story to follow, in part because as Pew repeatedly cautions, we can’t know exactly how trends will go — or why they will change — until we actually see the data in real time. Pew doesn’t offer explanations for the “switching” trends either. And dramatic potential events like war, economic depression, or climate crisis can’t be accounted for in Pew’s predications. Regardless, as the state and country likely continue to become both more secular and more religiously diverse, we should pay attention to the myriad ways the shifting landscape is sure to play out in our communities.
Here’s a small sampling of how NC faith groups serve as community resources, many examples shared in previous editions:
Reconstructing Judaism “cultivates, provokes and inspires a deeply rooted, boldly relevant and co-created Judaism that provides individuals and communities with tools to lead lives of meaning and joy,” including advocacy for justice, sustainability, and dignity
Rev. Suzanne Parker Miller of Pastors for North Carolina Children discusses the Leandro plan and mobilizing the faith community to advocate for our public schools
Wake Forest University School of Divinity fights the HIV epidemic in the South through the Gilead COMPASS Faith Coordinating Center, which is part of a $100 million, multipronged effort to bring down HIV infection rates and destigmatize the disease throughout the American South
Jewish for Good, a Durham nonprofit at the Levin JCC, offers a food pantry, support groups, memory programs, and more to hundreds of people across three counties, in person, over the phone, and online.
L’Arche North Carolina is “a community of belonging for people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities.” The faith-based organization plans to establish its first home in 2022 in the Triangle. L’Arche was founded in the Roman Catholic Tradition, but is open to people of any faith and people with no religious affiliation.
The Muslim American Society Raleigh Chapter has an outreach committee to offer: inter-Religious and public education; relief and volunteer activities to fight poverty, hunger, call for affordable housing. “The vision of this organization is to channel the Muslim community’s contribution to the welfare of the society at large (regardless of faith, non-Muslims and Muslims).”
And finally, faith groups’ efforts to increase vaccinations: the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry work to vaccinate farmworkers in Dunn, the Islamic Association of Raleigh’s free clinic with Wake County DHHS and YouTube Q&A on vaccines, Greensboro’s Temple Emanuel “strongly encouraging” congregants to get vaccinated in an update on its website, and Black and Latino churches leading faith vaccination efforts in Chatham
In a Nutshell:
Pastor spent 8 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. NC finally admits mistake, by the News & Observer. In 1993, police arrested Darron Carmon, a 19-year-old pastor’s son and college student with a clean record. He was sentenced to prison based on one clerk’s testimony, despite producing an alibi witness. Almost three decades later — after getting out early for good behavior and becoming pastor of two churches, the state finally admitted its mistake and vacated his conviction. (Pastor Carmon will hold a public media conference at the Pitt County Courthouse in Greenville at 1 p.m. on Saturday.)
First Humanist Chaplain in North Carolina Prison, from Humanist.com. Elisa Rosoff is the first Humanist-endorsed chaplain to work inside a NC prison — Arise Collective in Raleigh, formerly known as Interfaith Prison Ministry for Women. Humanism is “a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good,” according to the American Humanist Association. “We are all worthy of love, respect, and compassion, regardless of our personal beliefs about how the world works,” Newman said.
Chaudhry Halal Meats marks 26 years in business, putting family and community first,from the Chatham News + Record. Chaudhry Halal Meats services independent, local farmers in Chatham County. Owner Abdul Chaudhry — who immigrated from Pakistan in 1979 — established one of the first halal meat slaughterhouses in the state, providing a much-needed service to Muslims across the Triangle. Chaudhry also founded and financed the construction of the only mosque in Siler City, the Ibrahim Muslim Community Center.
Google workers in Durham protest company’s cloud partnership with Israel, from the N&O. The protest last week took place outside Google’s downtown Durham office building, consisting of around 30 Google employees and local anti-Zionist advocates. About a dozen pro-Israel counter-protesters also on site. The rally was part of a broader No Tech for Apartheid movement aiming to get Google and Amazon Web Services to cancel the $1.2 billion technology agreement the companies made in 2021 to supply Israel with artificial intelligence and computing services. Nationally, the No Tech for Apartheid rallies were coordinated by the Muslim advocacy group MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group that supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
From shoeboxes to war zones: How Samaritan’s Purse became a $1 billion humanitarian aid powerhouse, from Religion News Service. This RNS story examines the growth of one of the largest US nonprofits through a Wilkesboro warehouse, where Samaritan’s Purse employees load semi trailers full of supplies for the people of Ukraine. The Christian relief organization estimates it has helped 5.5 million Ukrainians with medicine, food and water. The organization’s 160,000-square-foot warehouse in North Wilkesboro employs 385 people.
Parents lash out at school board after claims of religious discrimination circulate, by the Chatham News + Record. Community members spoke out after they claimed a student at Bonlee School was bullied by a teacher because of her love for the Bible. The father said the incident caused him him to remove his daughter from Chatham County Schools and enroll her at Faith Christian Academy. He added that the board of education is “destroying” CCS. District officials said they were not able to get the family to discuss the event in person.
A $12,000 Haircut: Occupational licensing requirements are keeping a Syrian refugee from his chosen profession, from the Dispatch. Five months after moving to North Carolina, Syrian refugee Amar is trying to work through the state’s occupational licensing requirements to work as a barber. According to a 2018 brief from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, NC’s occupational licensing requirements are the fifth most stringent such requirements in the country. Amar is receiving support from World Relief, a Christian agency that helped processed his family’s case, while he waits for progress on barber licensure.
‘We only need one to live,’ from the Christian Chronicle. Desperate to save a beloved older member, a New Bern church ran an ad seeking a kidney donor. When the ad ran, Melissa McFerrin, 30, lived in Searcy, Ark. — roughly 1,000 miles west of New Bern. She decided to look into the process and answer the ad.
In 1881, James Buchanan "Buck" Duke ventured into cigarette making, unusual in the South. Cigarettes first became popular in Europe in the 1830s, Facing South reports, with factories opening to make them in New York City in 1864. Many factories turned to cheap labor from Jewish immigrants. Because rolling cigarettes required skills North Carolinians didn’t have, Buck Duke sought Jewish rollers in New York to move to his new Durham cigarette factory. There was little historical precedent for union organizing in Durham's tobacco factories, the piece says, but that didn’t stop the Jewish rollers — many of whom witnessed or took part in European revolutionary movements. Their hiring led to “an oft-forgotten chapter of Durham's history: a brief interlude in which leftist Jewish cigarette rollers came from New York, worked, organized, and were fired — and then, in most cases, left.” From the piece:
In "Sisterhood Denied," Janiewski observes that the Jewish cigarette rollers' organizing efforts drew attention to and prompted public debate about practices within Duke's factory, such as extreme shop rules, child labor, and the physical whipping of child workers. That mattered, because by 1890 over 13% of Duke's tobacco workers were children. Though Congress outlawed child labor with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the law excluded agricultural labor. Consequently, the tobacco farming industry still has a problem with the use of child labor today, much of it involving immigrants.
Moses Gladstein and his family. In 1881, James Buchanan "Buck" Duke went to New York City and hired Gladstein to find other striking Jewish immigrant cigarette rollers for his factory in North Carolina. Duke was sure the workers would not be able to organize a union in Durham, but he was proven wrong. (Photo courtesy of Jewish Heritage North Carolina.)
When Duke pushed them out of their jobs in Durham, most of the Jewish cigarette rollers headed back north, as Rogoff details in "Homelands." But some stayed in Durham or moved to other communities in the South. Many became merchants. Those who remained in Durham helped organize the city's first formal Jewish congregation, Durham Hebrew Congregation, in the late 1880s in a rented hall on Main Street. After World War I, the congregation built a large cathedral-style synagogue downtown, Beth El Synagogue.
This fascinating piece not only documents the history of Jewish unionizing efforts in North Carolina, but also how what happened after impacted the state’s landscape. I highly recommend giving it a read!
That's it for this week's edition of North Carolina Religion Roundup. Thanks for reading. Until next time. And in the meantime, I gladly welcome any tips, feedback or news you think I haven’t included but should in future editions. — Hannah
