I mentioned a few weeks ago that the Pew Forum released the results of a comprehensive survey they had done on religious faith in the U.S. Lots of people have been talking about it - at work, online... In particular, atheists seemed (understandably) pleased because their numbers had gone up substantially.

For my part, the report just gave hard numbers to back up what I already knew - lots of diversity and fluidity. Perhaps too much so. And then I moved on.

But Rev. David Gillespie did the hard work of actually wading through the numbers on the demographics of UUs (or thereabouts), and posted it on his blog. So who are UUs?

Assuming the numbers are accurate, here are some of the more surprising results:

51% of us are under the age of 50 and 16% of us are over 65.

I think the reason why the former stat surprises me is because that's not what I see when I go to General Assembly or district meetings.

almost 1/2 of us are not college graduates; while 30% have post-graduate degrees

Shocking. The former stat makes me wonder whether the numbers accurately reflect us.

Unfortunately, some things were not at all surprising:

without doubt, we are one of the whitest groups around (beat out I think by the Greek Orthodox) with a whopping 88% identifying as caucasian and only 2% as black (interestingly, 4% as Latino and 5% as mixed racial background).

I found it hard to believe there are twice as many Latino UUs as black UUs, so I went to the report. Yup, there it was. David forgot to mention, 2% Asian.

In terms of whiteness, we are beat out by Greek Orthodox at 95%, Jews at 95%, and Mainline Protestants at 91%. We are on par with the Mormons, who come in at 86%. Given that when I think Mormon, I think "white," that's not saying much for us.