"Almost nine out of ten Americans say the terrorist attacks have had no lasting impact on their faith, though millions of adults (roughly half of the US adult population) claim to have turned to their faith to help them personally process the tragedies."

(Source:  George Barna, The Barna Update, September 3, 2002; e-mail from the Barna Research Group, Ltd., Ventura, California, www.barna.org.)

"National character does not change in a day. September 11 did not alter the American character, it merely revealed it. It allowed--it forced--the emergence of a bedrock America of courage, resolve, resourcefulness, and, above all, resilience. What the enemy did not know (nor at that time did we, fully) was that beneath the shallowness and the triviality, the outward normality of America in post-Cold War repose, lay the sleeping giant that Admiral Yamamoto knew he had awakened on December 7, 1941, and that Osama bin Laden had no inkling he had awakened on September 11, 2001."

(Source: Charles Krauthammer, "Year One," The Weekly Standard, Volume 7, Number 48 [September 9, 2002].)

The number of Americans who profess no religious preference has shot up in a way that Berkeley researchers call "startlingly rapid," and changes in family life appear to be an important part of the story.  In an article recently published in the American Sociological Review, a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, seek to explain why "the minority of American adults who claim no religious preference doubled from 7 percent in 1991, its level for almost 20 years, to an unprecedented 14 percent in 1998."  Their analysis highlights "delayed family formation of recent cohorts" as part of this astonishing new cultural pattern.

To be sure, the researchers do stress that "family life-cycle events" cannot fully account for the remarkable surge in religious disaffiliation.  Several political and cultural developments not tied to family life appear to have played a big part in driving up the percentage of Americans with no religious preference. Still, after parsing data from the General Social Survey, the Berkeley scholars conclude that "delayed marriage and parenthood also contributed to the increase."  Indeed, this retreat from wedlock and childbearing appears in the complex statistical model the Berkeley researchers finally end up with. These researchers calculate that fully "62 percent of the increase in the log-odd on having no religious preference is a result of sociodemographic changes," with the changes factored into their calculations being "more cohorts with a 1960s experience, more prevalent nonreligious origins, and delayed marriage and parenthood." 

Although many of the adults who now report no religious preference still pray, believe in God, and even describe themselves as "spiritual," their apparent turn away from institutional affiliation signals what the Berkeley researchers term "important changes in religion's role in the cultural milieu."

(Source: Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, "Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations," American Sociological Review 67 [2002]: 165-190.)