Starter Faiths....

Why not, we have gone from "starter houses' to starter jobs, starter marriages...
What can I say, we are an aspirational society....
Always looking to trade up, and failing to recognize the pearl of great price, not acknowledging value, absent public approbation.
And, so commitment-phobic, that we are willing to scavenge for scraps rather that pledge to always and only dine at the Lamb's Wedding Feast.


http://religions.pewforum.org/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/us/25cnd-religion.html?sq=pew%20religion&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1204089232-0Mr/ZZYruxxTNf3faXJ6FA

More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.
For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United States Census does not track religious affiliation.
The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.”

All those poor wandering souls. But to say, as the published result of the pew survey had it, that "The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such," is misleading.
I would actually say that considerably more than 1/3 of those raised BY FAMILIES WHO FOR NOSTALIGIC AND ETHNIC REASONS INACCURATELY IDENTIFY THEMSELVES AS Catholic no longer identify themselves as such.
Pitifully few people are raised Catholic.
Which is just as sad a matter, but a very different one.
The catechetical failures of the Church during my lifetime are a tragedy of epic proportions, and it will be a long time before Benedict and his successors manage to turn this tub around.
But they will.
The Barque of Peter may spring leaks, but it shall not founder.
We have His word for it.