Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1991                   TAG: 9104100281
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

POLL ON RELIGION AFFIRMS BELIEF, SHATTERS MYTHS/ STEREOTYPES OF ETHNIC GROUPS

Most Americans of Irish ancestry are Protestant.

Unitarians are more likely to be divorced than are members of other religious groups.

And despite all the attention given to what devotees call the New Age - a spiritual movement that combines mysticism, psychology and holistic healing - the number of adherents, 28,000, is practically insignificant.

These findings are from an opinion poll on religious affiliation that surveyed 113,000 people around the nation, the largest and most comprehensive effort to draw a portrait of religion in America.

The survey, commissioned by the Graduate School of the City University of New York, confirms that the country is broadly religious and widely diverse, with more than nine in 10 Americans identifying with one of a myriad of denominations, from Presbyterian to Rastafarian.

The survey also shows regional and racial variations. For example, people in the Western states are almost twice as likely to have no religion than people in the rest of the country. The 17 percent of Oregon respondents who said they had no religious affiliation were the largest such group of any state.

The survey found that while 86.5 percent of Americans, or 214 million people, are Christians, they identify in dozens of groups. Roman Catholics make up the largest of these, with 26 percent of the nation's population, followed by Baptists, Methodists and Lutherans. Jews are less than 2 percent of the population, and Muslims are 0.5 percent.

Even though these broad outlines were known before, Martin Marty, a religion scholar on the faculty at the University of Chicago, still considered it "astonishing that in a high-tech, highly affluent nation, we have 90 percent who identify" themselves as religious.

Several of the surprises in the poll shattered stereotypes about ethnic groups. For example, after finding that most Americans of Irish ancestry are not Catholic, the City University researchers speculated that this was because so many are descended from Protestants from Northern Ireland and others are the products of intermarriages.

The survey also found that most Asian-Americans and most Arab-Americans are Christian, rather than Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim. The authors explain that Christians from Arab and Asian countries are more likely to emigrate to the United States.

Finally, the survey looked at marriage in light of religious affiliation. People without a religious affiliation, it found, are least likely to marry.

But it found that the likelihood of being divorced is generally uniform across all religious groups. Roman Catholics, with 7.5 percent divorced, are only slightly lower than mainstream Protestants and Jews, with 8.7 percent divorced. The Greek Orthodox have the lowest level of divorce (4.4 percent) and the Unitarians the highest (18 percent).