A few weeks ago, the Public Religion Research Institute released a report called the “2013 Hispanic Values Survey.”

A new graphic from PRRI released yesterday highlights the big changes: Fewer Catholics and more religiously unaffiliated Hispanics than ever before:

Kimberly Winston reached out to a Hispanic leader in the atheist community to see if the numbers lined up with what he was seeing:

That reflects the experience of David Tamayo, president and founder of Hispanic American Freethinkers, a national organization of nonbelievers of Latino origin… “I can count on one hand the number of Hispanic nones I know who were raised atheist or agnostic,” he said. “All of them were taken to church as children, were baptized. So I think the study reflects a lot of the reality of the nones.”

I imagine similar results would hold for just about any immigrant community. First Generation-ers (like myself) grew up in cultures where ethnicity and religious beliefs were intertwined. We’ve found ways to untangle the two and shed the part we can do without. I suspect the next generation will become even less religious than ours — how strange it will be when one’s ethnicity isn’t bound to a particular religious identity.



