It's Thursday, March 27, 2025. I'm Albert Motler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

The Pew Research Center is out with a big report on switching in religion. Now, it's a global report, at least inclusive of much of the world,

but of course we're most interested in what's happening here in the United States. The headline

from the Pew Center itself says this, quote, around the world, many people are leaving their

childhood religions. The next subhead, quote, surveys in 36 countries find that Christianity and Buddhism

have the biggest losses from religious switching. All right. As we as Christians are

considering this, we understand that this really isn't big news, but it is interesting. It is a

material interest because we are looking at

individuals, understanding that every single one of those lives is important to us. We are looking

at trends, and we understand that this trend is not something that just developed. It's not something

that just arrived on the horizon, just showed up on the screen. This has been around for a long time.

And thus, when you look at the category of religious switching here, it's defined as, quote, a change between the religious group

in which a person says they were raised during their childhood and their religious identity now in

adulthood. We shouldn't be at all surprised that a lot of switching is going on. And in particular, in a country like the United States, in a society on both sides of the Atlantic, in the English-speaking world, in the larger American and European worlds, we understand that the process of secularization is now quite advanced.

It's been going on now for more than a couple of generations. It has been

accelerating because this is how social trends work. But we're also looking at two interesting

things. The Pew Center comes back and tells us the two religions that are suffering the most

from disaffiliation, that is, persons who said they were raised in, say, a Christian home, and they were raised in a

Christian identity, but now they have disaffiliated from Christianity. The fact that it's Christianity

and Buddhism in respective places in terms of concentration around the globe, the fact that

those two are singled out, that also tells us something, but it's not exactly the same thing.

So let's think about what we're talking about here. Number one, we're most interested in Christianity,

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