HARTFORD, Conn. – The Catholic population of the United States has shifted away from the Northeast and towards the Southwest, while secularity continues to grow in strength in all regions of the country, according to a new study conducted by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College. ‘The decline of Catholicism in the Northeast is nothing short of stunning,’ said Barry Kosmin, a principal investigator for the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). ‘Thanks to immigration and natural increase among Latinos, California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than New England.’ Conducted between February and November of last year, ARIS 2008 is the third in a landmark series of large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults in the 48 contiguous states conducted by Kosmin and Ariela Keysar. Employing the same research methodology as the 1990 and 2001 surveys, ARIS 2008 questioned 54,461 adults in either English or Spanish. With a margin of error of less than 0.5 percent, it provides the only complete portrait of how contemporary Americans identify themselves religiously, and how that self-identification has changed over the past generation. In broad terms, ARIS 2008 found a consolidation and strengthening of shifts signaled in the 2001 […]