From the Pew Foundation:
“ APRIL 27, 2009
Faith in Flux
Revised February 2011*
Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives.”
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The largest group of those are people who change from one protestant church to another. Religions other than Christianity aren’t even brought up in the report, maybe they are included in “unaffiliated”?
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My father was raised Jewish, became a Sufi after college, became a Buddhist in his forties and died as a Quaker. He never formally rejected any of these religions and he said that he never stopped being Jewish or Sufi, but he took each new religion very seriously. His twin brother became a Southern Baptist after serving in Vietnam.
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So you’re saying that they change their religious affiliation.
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If you consider different protestant churches as different religions.
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So you’re saying that they’re changing religious affiliations?
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The statement you originally responded to was “But I think it’s safe to say that most people who start out with one religion don’t easily convert to another.”
I do not think changing from one protestant church to another, or even from catholic to protestant, counts as converting to another religion. As the document you quoted from showed, there may be no deeper reason than that people move and join the nearest local church.
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So you’re saying that they change religious affiliations
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A few hundred years of Irish history would like to have a word.
(By the way, I think we’re drifting into off-topic territory)
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Fuck’s sake, that’s enough to make the Pope sweat about something apart from child abuse for a change.
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If only people in, say, 1618 would have known this. Could have saved central Europe a lot of bother.
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You do realize that protestant Sweden fought the war to a large extent financed by Catholic France? Religion was just an excuse for a traditional war about power.
Besides, times change. There was a time when even Islam was considered just a heretical sect of Christianity.
Sweden didn’t enter into it until 1630.
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Doesn’t mean that’s correct.
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That’s fightin’ talk around these parts.
Seriously. Irish history. Check it out.
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Or the entire European history of 16th and 17th centuries.
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I was fascinated to learn that, just before WW1, Dublin was majority Protestant.
IIRC, the song “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” is not so much about the War of Independence per se as about tensions between Catholic and Protestant Dubliners in its wake.
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