A survey showing a sharp decline in the number of Christians in the United States also reveals a surprising opposite trend: nearly half of everyone raised with no religion has since become religious.
The
Daily Beast notes the
Pew Research Center study finds that "9 percent of American adults say they were raised with no religious affiliation, and almost half of them [4.3 percent of all U.S. adults] now identify with some religion."
The reasons vary, but the biggest factor may be marriage, the Daily Beast reports.
Hospital chaplain Margaret Fox began searching for a religion while studying law at Yale, the Daily Beast reports.
"My contracts professor tried to convince us to study hard. He told us to think of ourselves as Captain Ahab, and the law as our whale," Fox told the Daily Beast. "But I didn't feel like Ahab. I felt like Jonah, that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, and I felt stuck inside."
Pitzer College professor Phil Zuckerman, however, told the Daily Beast that the Pew survey results don't jibe with previous studies, including one from Aberdeen University in Scotland that found just 5 percent of those raised without religion become religious.
Yet, he told the website, "the vast majority of people who switch religions, it's because of a girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife."
"We tend to think of religion as an inner phenomenon that has to do with people's souls and hearts and minds," he told the website. "In fact, it often has to do with who you're sleeping with."
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