Hartford, Conn., Mar 17, 2010 / 04:23 am
A new study of Hispanics shows they comprise an increasingly large percentage of the Catholic Church in the United States. While immigrant influx has helped keep the American Catholic population stable, the more immigrants assimilate into American society the less likely they are to identify as Catholic.
Hispanics also mirror a larger national trend towards non-identification with religion.
The results come from the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 (ARIS) and were reported in a recent press release from Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. The report was titled “U.S. Latino Religious Identification 1990-2008: Growth, Diversity & Transformation.”
“Over the past 18 years, there are probably few phenomena that have changed America and American religion more than the growth of the Latino population,” commented Juhem Navarro-Rivera, a research fellow at Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC), who conducted the ARIS survey.