Mr. Mom more prevalent; Amish fastest growing U.S. religios group; Number of Christians in U.K. down; Southern Baptists See Membership Decline for Fifth Straight Year

Mr. Mom More Prevalent. More fathers are becoming their children’s primary caregiver. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 32 percent of fathers who have a wife in the workforce took care of their kids at least one day a week in 2010. That’s up from 26 percent in 2002. CNN Money reported: “Of those with kids under the age of 5, 20 percent of dads in 2010 were the primary caretaker.” One of the reasons for the increase is the recession. “It’s a combination of mothers going to work and fathers being out of work as a result of the recession,” said Lynda Laughlin, a family demographer at the Census Bureau. Another reason for the increase in fathers as primary caregivers is the closing of the wage gap between the genders. CNN Money: “In 2008, 26 percent of women living in dual-income households had annual earnings that were at least 10 percentage points higher than their spouse.”

Amish Fastest Growing U.S. Religious Group. What’s the fastest growing religion in America? Evangelical Christians? No, not any more. Mormons or Muslims? Good guesses, but wrong. According to a new census by researchers from Ohio State University, the answer to that question is: The Amish. The study, released July 27 at the Rural Sociological Society, says nearly 250,000 Amish now live in the U.S. and Canada, and the Amish double their population every 22 years. Why the growth? Because Amish families have many children. Some branches, such as the Old Order or “Wenger” Amish, average eight children per family. Another key component: Amish parents raise their children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” In other words, when the children reach adulthood, they mostly remain within the faith. So where do the Amish live? Ohio has 60,000 Amish residents. Pennsylvania has 59,000 and Indiana has 45,000.

Number of Christians in U.K. Down. A trend toward increasing secularization continues in Europe. The most recent example: United Kingdom census data show the U.K. now has 33.2 million people who claim to be Christian. That number is down from 37.3 million in 2001 — a drop of four million, or almost 7 percent. More than 25 per cent of people (about 15 million people) said they had no faith, up from 14.8 per cent a decade earlier, while the proportion of Muslims rose from 3.0 per cent to 4.8 per cent (about 3 million people). The third most popular religion was Hinduism, with 1.5 per cent of the population, while 0.8 per cent were Sikhs and 0.5 per cent Jewish. The weirdest finding from the survey: about 180,000 people claimed to be followers of the Jedi religion featured in the movie “Star Wars.” But even that number’s down. In the 2001 survey, 400,000 Brits aspired to the Force.

Southern Baptists See Membership Decline for Fifth Straight Year. Membership numbers for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, reflect the increasing secularization of the U.S., too. Although the SBC saw slight increases in baptisms and the number of congregations in 2011, its overall membership dropped for the fifth straight year, to just under 16 million. Duke Divinity School professor Curtis Freeman says the SBC’s traditional commitment to evangelism had forestalled the numerical freefall experienced by mainline denominations, but that growth in any church is simply becoming more difficult. “The tide is going a different way,” Freeman said. “[America is] increasingly becoming a secular culture, not a Christian culture.”

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