Our culture is shifting beneath us like loose and sliding sand. The United States is going to be a different place 50 years from now.

From immigration to the gap between the rich and poor, modern technology and the Internet, America is being reordered on a massive scale.

And no demographic in this country has undergone such rapid and radical change as religion.

A recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that one in three Americans under age 30 identified themselves as having no affiliation with a formal or organized faith.

And while traditionalists and religious leaders across America are in a panic, this change may not be for the worse.

The change hasn’t been restricted to us millennials either. The same study found that overall, one in five American adults from every age group refused to be counted among any of the established religions.

“The change is occurring among both men and women, those with college educations and those without, within several income levels and in all regions of the U.S.,” Carry Frank told the Religion News service, one of study’s lead researchers.

The implications are momentous.

In 1912, America was almost exclusively Protestant with a respectable Catholic minority and the infrequent Jew.

That American Protestantism influenced everything about our society: it frames every debate and social movement.

Segregation and civil rights, Roe v. Wade and the sexual revolution, and Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority — all of these things have been the product of a society Protestant at its heart.

These responses and responses-to-responses have been viewed and prosecuted through the lens of Martin Luther and Plymouth Rock, but now Protestants make up only 46 percent of Americans.

These changing demographics are no better demonstrated than by the current contenders in this year’s presidential election: Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Paul Ryan and Joe Biden.

Four Americans: one Mormon, two Catholics and Barack Hussein Obama — the only Protestant on stage.

The only old-school American Protestant running for a spot in the executive branch is black, descended from Muslims and grew up in Indonesia.

A radical shift in demographics indeed.

But before folks on the religious right start looking for their grenade launchers, and before atheists begin cackling pretentiously, they should keep in mind that these numbers don’t spell the end of American religion.

Despite the fact that more Americans than ever before have abandoned traditional church going, those same Americans have not discarded belief in God or a higher power.

Pew reports that more than 60 percent of this new generation of unaligned believers still claim to have faith in a creator or some spiritual force ordering their lives.

Twenty percent of these others pray every day, and another 50 percent seek “a deep connection with nature.”

This new generation isn’t going away either, and it’s becoming more and more influential as its members age and take their places in the workforce.

Pew researchers estimate that the others will be just as influential to the American left as traditionally religious voters have been for the right.

With 75 percent of others supporting abortion rights and homosexual marriage, the American landscape could be looking at a new silent majority as more traditional perspectives get pushed to the fringe.

Ironically, this move by the current generation toward a more Emersonian approach to faith has created a backlash of its own.

As the traditional American denominations lose adherents, older and more traditional faith communities have seen explosive growth.

Roman Catholicism is now the largest Christian denomination in America, and attendance at Greek Orthodox churches, Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques has gone up dramatically over the last several decades, according to former Dallas Morning News Religion columnist Rod Dreher.

In many ways these others are swapping one set of American traditions for another set of wholly American values — they’re leaving something old for something untried and unsettled.

These new pilgrims are seeking something they can form with their own hands and their own minds.

The others are exploring a New World of faith and staking out a claim to their freedom to shape their own beliefs.

What could be more American than that?