The biggest religious group in the English-speaking world

I'm of the firm opinion that the more niggly the complaint about something, the more it shows that you don't disagree with anything substantial. That's true here.

So, anticipating the objection that he is ignoring the best of religion, Dawkins writes:

The melancholy truth is that decent, understated religion is numerically negligible. Most believers echo Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men. The world needs to face them, and my book does so.

I would like to know where he got his numbers from, and I'd like to see the evidence that they are, indeed, "negligible".

Where I live, in Australia, 68% of people claim to be some sort of Christian. Yet only 19% of people regularly (once a month or more) turn up to a Christian place of worship. That's almost half the population of the country who claim to follow some sort of Christian religion (whether or not they count as "believers" is a whole other question that I won't get into right now), but stay away from the organisation.

In the UK, nominalism is even stronger. Over 71% of people self-identify as Christian, but only 6.3% turn up on Sunday. (Note: This figure does ignore denominations and churches which have experienced increased numbers mid-week, but it's still the right order of magnitude.) That's way more than half.

In the US, attendance is higher; one slightly biassed source that I have says 44%. However, even in this case, Robertson, Falwell and Haggard are not in the majority. Approximately 85% of people self-identify as some kind of Christian, but fewer than 20% are in the Robertson/Falwell/Haggard groups: Baptist and new-wave Evangelical. Twice that number are Roman Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopalian. When's the last time you met a Methodist who had any time for Pat Robertson?

Moreover, in all three countries, church membership is getting older.

I think that Richard Dawkins has misidentified the problem, here. The problem is not that fundamentalists are the majority of "believers", because they're not. The problem is that their leaders are disproportionally loud and influential. This is especially true in countries with non-compulsory voting, like the US. Fundamentalist leaders can mobilise voters better than others, and especially better than those denominations who are, for the most part, apolitical.

Yes, some of these fundamentalist denominations are growing faster than non-fundamentalist ones. But the one group that's growing even faster is the religious unchurched.

The religious unchurched is, I think, a fascinating phenomenon, especially in an age when there's an understandable fear of fundamentalism. It's something that could only happen in a postmodern age. And I'll be talking about it more later.

As an aside, the only defence of Dawkins' assertion that I've seen (and it wasn't from Dawkins himself) was that it says that the majority "echo", rather than following or emulating them. If this is true, then Dawkins was really arguing that almost all religious beliefs "echo" the worst elements.

He is on the record as asserting that more moderate believers "prop up" the system that supports Ted Haggard et al. I'm not sure what "system" he's referring to, but how could this possibly be true of apparent majority (in the English-speaking world, at least) of believers who have "dropped out" of institutions?