American Religious Diversity and Dialogue

The diversity of American religious belief is a complicated matter. About 78.4 % of Americans are Christian, 16.1 % are unaffiliated, and 4.7 % belong to non-Christian faiths such as Judaism (1.7%), Islam (.6%) and Buddhism (.7%) (Pew Forum, 2008). At first glance, it would appear that the American religious landscape is remarkably homogenous. The Pew Forum cautions against assuming homogeneity within a religious group however. For instance, “Christians ” are made up of Catholics and hundreds of denominations of Protestants. While an umbrella group such as “Christians ” undeniably shares certain theological and ideological underpinnings, one should be careful in describing them as if they were unified. There is not only prejudice between groups but also within groups. In any case, the distribution of religious adherence in America is not representative of the rest of the world, and this fact figures into the prevalence of prejudicial feelings. Currently, there are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims globally compared to around 2.18 billion Christians (Pew Forum, 2011a; Pew Forum, 2011b). This distribution is a far cry from the.6 % of Americans wh