Evangelicals Winning!

It's enough to make me want to change sides, since my disposition is to root for the underdog, but in the recent Pew Foundation studies on the changes in religious ties, it looks like the Evangelicals are trouncing the Catholics in the competition for butts in pews. Clip follows:

Article published Feb 26, 2008
Catholic tradition fading in U.S.
Flocking to Pentecostal and evangelical churches..

By Julia Duin

WASHINGTON TIMES -- Evangelical Christianity has become the largest religious tradition in this country, supplanting Roman Catholicism, which is slowly bleeding members, according to a survey released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Evangelical Protestants outnumber Catholics by 26.3 percent (59 million) to 24 percent (54 million) of the population, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, a massive 45-question poll conducted last summer of more than 35,000 American adults.

"There is no question that the demographic balance has shifted in past few decades toward evangelical churches," said Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum. "They are now the mainline of American Protestantism."

The traditional mainline Protestant churches, which in 1957 constituted about 66 percent of the populace, now count just 18 percent as adherents.
Although one in three Americans are raised Roman Catholic, only one in four adults describe themselves as such, despite the huge numbers of immigrants swelling American churches, researchers said.

"Immigration is what is keeping them afloat," said John Green, a Pew senior fellow. "If everyone who was raised Catholic stayed Catholic, it'd be a third of the country."

Evangelical Catholics?

Interesting post/debate on the Ignatius Insight blog trying to figure out whether evangelical is a term that can be properly applied to Catholics? The writer argues: " If one thinks of Evangelicalism as a renewal movement that stresses personal conversion and spiritual development, evangelism, a high view of Scripture, and fidelity to Christian orthodoxy, then one can certainly be a Evangelical Catholic, as I believe I am. If the term “Evangelical” is broad enough to include high-church Anglicans, low-church anti-creedal Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, the Evangelical Free Church, Arminians, Calvinists, Disciples of Christ, Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, open theists, atemporal theists, social Trinitarians, substantial Trinitarians, nominalists, realists, eternal security supporters and opponents, temporal theists, dispensationalists, theonomists, church-state separationists, cessationists, non-cessationists, kenotic theorists, covenant theologians, paedo-Baptists, and Dooweyerdians, there should be room for an Evangelical Catholic."

Seems plausible, but on the other hand, it seems like another area where a word could quickly lose any useful meaning... "gentleman" springs to mind. So I suppose I'm saying I have no useful opinion on this. My first question would be in regard to the writer's initial premise: "If one thinks of Evangelicalism as..." Well, do they? Or as, only? That would be a big factor in whether the rest of the premise is worth exploring. I defer to the evangelical here ... Rick, your thoughts?