The memetic war, if you will, between faith and reason is always shifting paradigms, which can be disconcerting for people who are used to seeing everything in black and whites. It's difficult to interpret simple numbers without a deeper view of the situation.
On the first level, it would seem that religion has benefitted temporarily from 9-11. By some estimates, attendance at services increased by 25%. Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who said religion was very important to them increased from 57% in May 2001 to 64% after the attack.
This is expected, as religion is one of these categories of ideologies that preys on human weakness : the two main conversion times are either during childhood, where one is vulnerable from gullibility, and after deaths or other catastrophies, where religion preys on one's fear of death, loneliness, and sense of community.
The religious high fell fairly rapidly. According to Barna Research, in September of 2002, attendance at services were back to normal, and so was prayer and Sunday school attendance. Belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing God dropped from 72% pre-attack to 68% afterward, and other signs of religious belief were stable.
The word of the day in religion is diversification, at least in the United States. A recent study published in the American Sociological Review (Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, May 2002) shows that while the number of non-religious has doubled during the nineties, this doubling is due to the alienation caused by the Christian right. While the percentage of "no religious preference" rose from 7% to 14% during that decade, the majority of the people included in this rise still hold religious beliefs.
"One of the points we're trying to make is that most people who have no church still are likely to say things like 'God is real. Heaven and hell are real. Me and my kids will go there when we're dead", Hout said.
As the Gallup International Millenium Survey has also demonstrated (and as I detailed in my article "The Gallup International Millenium Survey"), approximately half of religious people do not consider "God" as a personal being.
Thus we end up with the most peculiar situation of a rise in professed religious people who are not religious, and a rise in professed non-religious people who are religious ! The upshot of this is that we should expect the argument "my faith is a relationship with God/Jesus/whatever" to become fashionable. It also seems likely that deism will see a revival of sorts, if the current fashion of pseudo-scientific god-of-the-gapsing continues.
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