GROWING up Catholic in the 1980s, I attended a number of Boston-area churches, each a snapshot of a religious community in flux: an African-American parish that had once been Baptist, a historically Irish parish making room for immigrants from Vietnam, a suburban parish whose acoustic guitar hymns made it virtually indistinguishable from Protestant churches down the road. At other times, my family worshiped with conservative Anglicans, liberal Congregationalists and assorted charismatics. After I left home for college, when a favorite professor led Shabbat services at the campus Hillel, I attended those, too. Later, I dabbled in Buddhism, got married in a Presbyterian church and wrote a dissertation on Yiddish literature at a Jesuit university.

What does that make me, religiously speaking? One answer might be “American.” To live in a country as pluralistic as the United States is inevitably to be influenced by a grab bag of beliefs. “Thou shalt reconsider assumptions you held as a child and remain open to new ideas” might as well be the first commandment of our national faith.

Yet according to a major study on “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” released last week by the Pew Research Center, my eclectic spiritual formation has also made me an unwitting member of the “nones.” In this and other recent surveys, we who check no single box when it comes to religion are considered part of an “unaffiliated” population whose resistance to such classification has become a tidy category all its own.

The rise of the religiously unaffiliated, by Pew’s accounting, has been so swift (up more than six percentage points of the total population in seven years), and the simultaneous decline among members of Catholic and Protestant churches so severe (down about the same when combined), that coverage of the survey has largely presented the religious lives of Americans as numbers on a score card. As USA Today put it, “Christians drop, ‘nones’ soar.”