26th Mar 2006
Oh you lapsed Catholics….
There are so many of you. Like all of my friends and companions (other than my dog, who is a Unitarian Universalist, like her mother).*
And you’re not going back to church, are you? Mais non! You were Catholic and now you are, as we say in the field of religious demographic research, “unchurched.”
Research from the Barna Institute suggests that 3 out of 10 unchurched people are former Catholics, which is the largest sub-group of any denomination.
Just to put this into perspective, there are just as many unchurched folks in the U.S. as there are baby boomers. And we know how many baby boomers there are (77 million!). And if my math is correct, if 3 out of 10 of the unchurched are formerly Catholic, that makes about 23 Million lapsed Catholics in the United States.
Mon Dieu! You are a religion unto yourselves.
*Please understand that at least half of my religious heritage is from the Lapsed Catholic side of the family, which became Episcopal after an unpleasant dealing with a priest 80 years ago, and then later Unitarian Universalist, and now is thoroughly and completely unchurched. The other side of the family is lapsed Greek Orthodox and now is in academia, a religion unto itself.
