The Anne Rice defection: It's the tip of the religious iceberg

Novelist Anne Rice's surprise post earlier this month on Facebook — she announced she had quit Christianity "in the name of Christ" because she'd seen too much hypocrisy — brought cheers and smug smiles from critics of institutional faith, and criticism and soul-searching among believers.

But there's something more at play here than one of America's most famous Catholics — Rice re-embraced the faith of her youth in 1998 and published a memoir just two years ago, "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession" — walking away from the church.

Rice is merely one of millions of Americans who have opted out of organized religion in recent years, making the "unaffiliated" category of faith the fastest-growing "religion" in America, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The Pew report found that one in six American adults was not affiliated with any particular faith. That number jumped to 25 percent for people ages 18 to 29. Moreover, most mainline Protestant denominations have for years experienced a net loss in members, and about 25 percent of cradle Catholics have left their childhood faith, the study showed.

And in a 2008 study by Trinity College researchers, 27 percent of Americans said they do not expect a religious funeral.

American Christianity is not well, and there's evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize — or at least want to admit.

Pollsters — most notably evangelical George Barna — have reported repeatedly that they can find little measurable difference between the moral behavior of churchgoers and the rest of American society. Barna has found that born-again Christians are more likely to divorce (an act strongly condemned by Jesus) than atheists and agnostics, and are more likely to be racist than other Americans.

And while evangelical adolescents overwhelmingly say they believe in abstaining from premarital sex, they are more likely to be sexually active — and at an earlier age — than peers who are mainline Protestants, Mormons or Jews, according to University of Texas researcher Mark Regnerus.

On the bright side, Barna's surveys show evangelicals (defined by Barna as a subset of born-again Christians, which he sees as a broader group with more flexible beliefs) do pledge far more money to charity, though 76 percent of them fail to give 10 percent of their income to the church as prescribed by their faith. Various studies show American Christians as a whole give away a miserly 3 percent or so of their income to the church or charity.

"Every day, the church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change," Barna has said.