Many Americans are shopping for a better spiritual fit

WASHINGTON — Just below the text there was a Google ad inviting me to take a quiz. "Christian? Jewish? Muslim? Atheist? See which religion is right for you."

Aside from the eccentricity of listing atheism as a religion, I couldn't help wondering what my grandparents would make of this religious matching service. For that matter, what would they make of the idea that you could choose your religion at all? To them, religion was part of your identity, if not your DNA. You were born into it, grew up in it and died with its prayers.

I noticed this ad because it was attached to the story of a new report on religion in America released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The researchers interviewed 35,000 Americans. Their figures show that Protestants now comprise a bare majority — 51 percent — of the population, and that the fastest growing group is the 16 percent now self-described as "unaffiliated."

But what is most fascinating is that 44 percent of Americans have left the religious traditions in which they grew up. They left the religion of their parents with the frequency that they left their old neighborhood.

In my grandparents' day, Americans were divided among the big three religions, sort of like TV networks: Catholic, Protestant and Jew. Now they have fragmented across a spectrum more like cable TV with satellite radio thrown in. The researchers describe a "vibrant marketplace where individuals pick and choose religions that meet their needs." They surf their options.

"We are shopping for everything else, why wouldn't we shop for religion?" asks religion professor Donald Miller of the University of Southern California. Pew's John Green adds, "It's not surprising that we have a marketplace in religious or spiritual ideas." What's qualitatively different these days, he says, is that we have much more religious diversity. "We have more places to move from and more places to move to."

I realize that for many Americans the idea of shopping for eternal truths is still jarring. Even contradictory. The movement from one 'tradition' to another may even suggest a kind of promiscuity — a faithless pursuit of faith.

Yet the idea of religion as a personal choice seems thoroughly American — as American as religious tolerance. And increasingly these two ideas may be related.