Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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A question that remains unanswered is, just how many Neo-Pagan adherents are there
Despite the attempts of several major research groups, and quite a few university
researchers, no reliable figures are yet available, mostly it seems, because Neo-Pagans are
not particularly willing to make their allegiance known. Not a few Christian alarmists
and various proponents of conspiracy theories have claimed the rise in Neo-Paganism and
various other non-Christian beliefs to be enormous, yet all their claims remain largely
unsubstantiated. If book sales and Website popularity were the gauge, one might
conclude the number of adherents to be vastly larger than official data. My own very unscientific
survey of Amazon.com book sales, found that New Age, Wicca, Pagan, and
other such book offerings, numbered into the tens of thousands. The popularized pseudo
New Age, Harry Potter books, have sold nearly 100 million copies of late, and a host of
other such books are nearly as popular.
Some adherents of New Age and Neo-Pagan spiritualities made their preferences
known during the extensive 2001 American Religious Identification Survey study,
showing the number of adherents has grown 240% since 1990 in the US, from 20,000 to
around 96,000. Adherents of Eastern religions have also grown considerably, 401,000 in
1990, to about 1,527,019 in 2004, a 170% increase. Hinduism has grown to 1,081,051
adherents, an increase of 237%. Native American religionists have grown to 145,363 in
2004, an increase of 119%. Baha’i has increased 200%, to 118,549 adherents, and
Sikhism 338% to about 81,000 adherents (Keysar, 2001). The data does not reveal how
many of these adherents are immigrants, as opposed to converts. The data also does not
tell us how many who publicly claim adherence to a major religion -- 75-80% in the US
still claim to be Christian -- are also thoroughly interested in other religions, eclectically
blending them as postmoderns are so apt to do While some study may eventually reveal
the answer to the first, I doubt the second can be answered, simply because (a) people do
not want to make these personal preferences known, and (b), because so very many
people are thoroughly confused about the whole matter of religion.
In Australia, the 1996 government census showed that adherence to Roman
Catholicism remained about steady at 27% (or 4.8 million) of the population. Adherence
to Anglicanism, by comparison, declined from 31% in 1971, to 21.8% in 1996. Christian
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa