E/CN.4/1999/58/Add.1 page 11 II. TOLERANCE AND NON-DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RELIGION OR BELIEF A. Religions and beliefs: the present picture 29. The Special Rapporteur was unable to obtain official statistics for religions and beliefs because, as the State Department representatives explained, the authorities do not compile such statistics, in accordance with the principle of the separation of religion and the State. He therefore had to turn to various non-official sources, such as the World Almanac (1997) (see annex) and Harvard University's Pluralism Project. 30. The study entitled “The Religious Landscape of the United States”, which is to be found in the March 1997 issue of US Society and Values, the electronic review of the United States Information Agency, contains an analysis of the Pluralism Project which yields the following figures: (a) 163 million Americans (63 per cent) identify themselves as affiliated with a specific religious denomination; (b) Roman Catholicism is the single largest religious denomination with some 60 million adherents; (c) American Protestant Churches have a total of some 94 million members of some 220 individual denominations. The Universal Almanac 1997 groups the denominations into 26 major families with memberships of 100,000 or more, but also notes that there are thousands of self-identified groups of believers; (d) There are more than 300,000 local congregations in the United States; (e) There are more than 530,000 members of the clergy; (f) Some 3.8 million people identify themselves as Jews, with an additional 2 million defining themselves as primarily culturally or ethnically Jewish; (g) There are an estimated 3.5-3.8 million Muslims; Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States; (h) In terms of personal religious identification, the most rapidly growing group in the United States is atheists/agnostics (currently about 8 million). 31. It is noteworthy that these sources of information make no mention of the traditional beliefs of Native Americans (manifested in particular by their sacred tie to the earth), as distinct from the affiliation of part of this group with the Christian religion. According to Freedom of Religion and Belief: World Report by J. Sheen and K. Boyle (ed.) (June 1997), 47,000 Americans profess to belong to an indigenous American religious faith; approximately 46 per cent of Native Americans are Protestants and 21 per cent are Roman Catholics. Also not included are very small minorities in the domain of religion or belief.