Elements of Eastern faiths and New Age thinking have been widely adopted by 65 percent of U.S. adults, including many who call themselves Protestants and Catholics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released this week.

Syncretism — mashing up contradictory beliefs like Catholic rocker Madonna's devotion to a Kabbalah-light version of Jewish mysticism — appears on the rise.

And, according to the survey's other major finding, devotion to one clear faith is fading. Of the 72 percent of Americans who attend religious services at least once a year (excluding holidays, weddings and funerals), 35 percent say they attend in multiple places, often hop-scotching across denominations.

They are like President Obama, who currently has no home church. He has worshipped at a Baptist church, an Episcopal one, and the nondenominational chapel at Camp David.

"Mixing and matching practices and beliefs is as much the norm as it is the exception," Pew's Alan Cooperman said. "Are they grazing, sampling, just curious? We really don't know."

Even so, said Pew researcher Greg Smith, "these findings all point toward a spiritual and religious openness — not necessarily a lack of seriousness."

Among the findings:

• 26 percent of those who attend religious services say they do so at more than one place occasionally, and another 9 percent roam regularly from their home church.

• 28 percent of people who attend church at least weekly say they visit multiple churches outside their own tradition.

• 59 percent of less frequent church attendees say they attend worship at multiple places.

The survey of 2,003 adults conducted in August has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. It measures Protestants, Catholics and the unaffiliated; there were not enough people of other faiths surveyed for analysis.

"For an extremely long time, most of us thought belonging or membership or home church was monogamous, even if it was serial monogamy, because we all know about church-switching," says sociologist of religion Scott Thumma, a professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Hartford, Conn. "Today, the individual rarely finds all their spiritual needs met in one congregation or one religion."

In the 1980s, Albert Mohler and Julia Jarvis were in graduate school together at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

Today, Mohler is president of the seminary and a leading voice for Baptist orthodoxy. He sees a "rampant confusion" about faith revealed in the findings.

"This is a failure of the pulpit as much as of the pew to be clear about what is and is not compatible with Christianity and belief in salvation only through Christ," Mohler says.

Pew says two in three adults believe in or cite an experience with at least one supernatural phenomenon, including: 26 percent find "spiritual energy" in physical things; 25 percent believe in astrology; 24 percent say people will be reborn in this world again and again; and 23 percent say yoga is a "spiritual practice."

Mohler calls these "the au courant confusions," attachments to the latest fashionable free-floating beliefs.

His former classmate giggles at that. She's an ordained minister in the progressive United Church of Christ and leads the Interfaith Family Project, which meets for worship at a Silver Spring, Md., high school.

Jarvis, of Takoma Park, Md., also studies with Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and finds a spiritual dimension in yoga.

"I don't do astrology, but my mother, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and was a staunch Baptist all her life, looked at her horoscope daily and totally believed it," Jarvis says.

"People have always mixed religions, either in ignorance or willfully," says Stephen Prothero, director of the Graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University.

Despite the late Pope John Paul II's warnings to explicitly avoid Buddhist and Hindu practices, Prothero says, "American Catholics are so used to not caring what the official church tells them on birth control, divorce, premarital sex and other points that they don't think they are un-Catholic when they believe and do what they please."

Prothero sees a similar trend among Protestants, a "resistance to being told what to think."

Pew's Cooperman notes that the new survey is measuring a phenomenon that may have been going on for decades. Also, it does not clearly establish how much is due to interfaith relationships.

A new study from Inter faithFamily.com, which encourages Jewish-Christian couples to raise their children as Jews, looks specifically at the Christmas /Hanukkah season. The findings are not scientific but give an indication that in intermarried couples rearing their children as Jews, most will celebrate Hanukkah at home. Less than 48 percent will celebrate Christmas.

Pew specifically excludes the major holidays and life-cycle events to focus on ordinary worship practices. Its report says the findings on interfaith couples are "complex," in part because people in mixed marriages attend worship less frequently than those with a same-faith spouse.

The faith-mixing trend has been building; other surveys in the past two years have touched on the swirling paths of believers.

Despite Americans' overwhelming allegiance to someone they call God (92 percent), in Pew's 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 70 percent said "many religions can lead to eternal life," and 68 percent said "there's more than one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion."

In short, we believe our own experiences are authentic, and no "authority" can say otherwise.

That's a very "Eastern" notion, says Jim Todhunter of Bethesda, Md. Retired after three decades leading United Church of Christ congregations, he has studied in a Hindu ashram in India and practices Zen meditation and Christian contemplative prayer.