Many Americans identify with a particular religious group, but their actual “beliefs and behaviors” often “cut across” denominations, according to new research.
Those studying religious trends often divide people “into commonly understood categories,” whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or something else.
But a new report “takes the opposite approach,” identifying “cohesive groups of people with similar religious and spiritual characteristics, regardless of their religious affiliation.”
The report from the Pew Research Center “sorts Americans into seven groups” — including so-called “Sunday stalwarts” who are “religious traditionalists,” the “relaxed religious” who say “it’s not necessary to believe in God to be a moral person” and “the solidly secular” who have “virtually no religious beliefs.”
Those seven categories “unite people of different faiths” but also “divide people who have the same religious affiliation,” according to Pew.
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