What is the most popular religion in the US?

Is it one of the Protestant denominations, brought over from the Old Country with the pilgrims and pioneers? Catholicism, whose ranks in the US grow daily by the steady stream of devout believers coming from Latin America? Or is it perhaps Mormonism, the country’s truly unique religion born in America?

If you said yes to one of the above, try again. According to a study featured in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, a new book co-written by sociologists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, which asked a cross sample of 3,000 ordinary Americans to rank religions, the most popular faith in the US is Judaism.

“We asked everyone in the survey to say how they felt about Catholics and Evangelicals and Jews and Mormons and Muslims, and so we were able to calculate a popularity ranking, so to speak, of different religions,” Putnam told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. “Most surprisingly, the most popular religion in America are Jews among non-Jews, followed closely by Catholics. Fifty years ago, or 100 years ago, that almost certainly would not have been true.”

For the book, which was released in October, the authors set out to find how American religiosity affected democracy and inter-communal relations.

According to Putnam, a renowned Harvard University sociologist who in 2001 published the influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which presented his theory that America was losing its social capital, the new study confirmed that Americans were a deeply religious people – more so on average than in Iran, he said.

For instance, most Americans, around 90 percent, believe there is a heaven.

“Although somehow puzzlingly more Americans say they believe in heaven and not in life after death, so I’m not quite sure what they believe in,” Putnam said.

It also showed that while religion can be harmful in many instances to democracy, as evidenced in Belfast and Beirut and elsewhere, in America, rather uniquely, it has had some positive effects.

Back to the surprising findings regarding Jews. What has brought about the surprising popularity of this historically persecuted people who, even in America, had it rough when they began arriving en masse in the late 19th century?

Putnam, who converted to Judaism when he married his wife, a Jew from Chicago, said the American public may have learned the lessons of the injustices wrought upon the Chosen People in the past.

“There was a lot of anti-Semitism in America during the 1930s and 1940s,” he explained. “We know this from surveys from the time. It was not as high as Europe but a high level of anti-Semitism in America. If you look at the trend data year by year by the same measure that the Gallop poll has been doing, for 70 years now there was a very, very sharp drop in expressed anti-Semitism in 1946.

“Now, of course, you know why that happened. That was the revelation of the Holocaust, and the revelation of the Holocaust had the effect of completely delegitimizing anti-Semitism in America. It became much, much harder to say anti-Semitic things in public. I don’t mean to say people’s private beliefs changed instantly. But you can see in the data that younger Americans who came of age after that point in time were much less exposed to the virus of anti-Semitism because it was being suppressed, initially by political correctness, but it became hard to transmit that disease of anti-Semitism when you couldn’t talk about it publicly.

“So the next generation were less anti-Semitic and the process continued. So all the anti-Semitic stereotypes in America, the Shylocks and Christ-killers, all that kind of stuff disappeared from public culture and then private culture,” he said.

Putnam offers a piece of anecdotal evidence to illustrate just how positively Jews are allegedly viewed in the US at the moment. According to the professor, people signing up for dating websites who say they are Jewish are more sought after than others.

“If you say you are Jewish, you get more date offers than less,” he said. “Why is that?”

Could this trend be reversed? Could Jews somehow once again become the scapegoats of a governmental, economic or military debacle of some sort?

Putnam doesn’t think so. Despite the US recession of the past two years, when it was feared some might turn against Jews, with many senior bankers considered pivotal to the downturn being Jews, most Americans still have a benign opinion of Jews.

So can American Jews finally let out a collective sigh of relief and take pride in what they’ve accomplished? Asked if he felt proud of his findings, being a member of the tribe, Putnam gave a nuanced response.

“Not pride so much as satisfaction,” he said, “because I think that despite our problems, they are different than those our predecessors had 50 or 60 years ago, and I worry a little bit that if we continue to think that our worst problem is how non-Jews feel about us, that detracts from serious problems we as a community have.”