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New Research: Religious Left May Soon Outnumber Religious Right

According to Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service, the number of religious conservatives in this country is shrinking, and the number of religious progressives is growing. He gets his data from the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Brookings Institute, who recently discovered in a new research effort that 23 percent of 18- to 33-year-olds are religious progressives, 17 percent are religious conservatives, and 22 percent are nonreligious. By contrast, only 12 percent of 66- to 88-year-olds are religious progressives, while about half are religious conservatives.

“The influence of the religious left has already been felt in immigration and marriage equality debates, and that influence can only be expected to grow,” wrote Merritt. Merritt believes that these numbers point to a majority switch, but researchers have their own questions about how this will occur. 

“Religious progressives face three hurdles to morphing into a true movement,” wrote Robert Jones of PRRI. “They are more ethnically diverse than conservatives, so they have fewer natural affinities than their counterparts on the right. They are also more geographically dispersed across America. Conservatives, on the other hand, are heavily concentrated in the South and Midwest, which makes for easier mobilizing. And finally, progressives are more religiously diffuse, which is to say that religion is only one of many influences shaping the way progressives think and behave.”