#nominals

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New Learnt: Nominals

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When your face is your butt and your butt is your face #arttoy #designertoys #nominals #wip #diy #gradient

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matching for our syntax exam. #nominals #sentencemodifier #warhorsetuesday #doublehorsepic (at Hardee's)

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Meet the 'Nominals' who are drifting from Judaism and Christianity

Cathy Lynn Grossman, Religion News Service, Oct 1, 2013

They're rarely at worship services and indifferent to doctrine. And they're surprisingly fuzzy on Jesus.

These are the Jewish Americans sketched in a new Pew Research Center survey, 62 percent of whom said Jewishness is largely about culture or ancestry and just 15 percent who said it's about religious belief.

But it's not just Jews. It's a phenomenon among U.S. Christians, too.

Meet the "Nominals"--people who claim a religious identity but may live it in name only.

They're proud--but not practicing--Catholics. They're Protestants who don't think Jesus is essential to their salvation.

And they're Jews who say they belong to the tribe by way of ancestry or culture, not religion. Indeed, many miss the most fundamental divide between Judaism and Christianity: The Pew survey found 34 percent of Jews say it's OK to see Jesus as the Messiah and still call themselves Jewish.

"They are not saying Judaism can allow belief in Jesus. They are saying if you are born a Jew, reared as Jewish and convert to Christianity, I still consider you a Jew," said Alan Cooperman, deputy director of the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project, and a co-author of the Jewish study.

Catholic researchers see similar expressions of team loyalty melded with theological confusion.

Sacraments Today, a 2008 study by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, found most Catholics (77 percent) are proud to be Catholic but only 55 percent say they are practicing their faith.

Protestants, too, stray from core Christian teaching while clinging to the Christian label.

"'Survey Christians' are often people who feel guilty saying they are not as religious as their parents," said Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research. "They don't want to say 'atheist'--since that's way too far--but they are not really 'committed,' so they just say 'Christian' since it is the default category from their heritage."

That lack of doctrinal knowledge is especially apparent when researchers cut to the theological core: questions of salvation.

In a 2011 LifeWay survey of pastors and people who attend Protestant churches, one in four churchgoers (26 percent) agreed that "If a person is sincerely seeking God, he/she can obtain eternal life through religions other than Christianity."

This is also particularly true among the young. A separate LifeWay study of 1,200 young adults under age 30 found:

Nearly three in four (72 percent) call themselves "more spiritual than religious."

More than two in three say they rarely or never pray with others, attend worship services, or read the Bible or other sacred texts.

More than one in four (28 percent) said God is "just a concept," and four in 10 said the devil is merely a symbol.

Only half said that "Believing in Jesus Christ is the only way to get to heaven."

Thom Rainer, the president of LifeWay Christian Resources who cited the research in his book on these 18-to-29-year-old millennials, called the Nominals "mushy Christians."

"Most," he said, "are just indifferent."

Still, Nominals care enough to choose some kind of label to identify, however thinly, with a religious tradition. Put another way, Nominals are not synonymous with the "Nones," the one in five Americans who claim no religious identification.

In her studies on contemporary Christianity, author and scholar Phyllis Tickle sees it morphing from "inherited, hierarchical, location-based (churched) faith" toward forms that discard those strictures.

Believers today are still interested in a communal expression of faith. They just want a more "nimble" religion, she said. She's also optimistic, saying, "We are in pretty good shape as believers."

[thisincentive]

Nominals on Flickr.

[thisincentive]

Nominals on Flickr.