There’s good news for freethinkers in the form of a just-released survey.
According to the latest Pew Religious Landscape Survey, 29 percent of American adults have no religious affiliation, continuing to be the largest segment of the U.S. population by religious identification. Among adults ages 18 to 24, a whopping 43 percent have no religion.
Pew framed the results of the 35,000-person survey as showing that the decline of U.S. Christians has “stabilized” at 62 percent after dropping from 78 percent in 2007.
“But the huge revelation,” says Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor, “is that the Pew study finds the largest number to date of atheists, agnostics and ‘nothing in particulars.’ And there are more of us than Catholics (at 19 percent) or evangelical Protestants (at 23 percent) or any single Christian denomination.”
Of those with no religious affiliation, 5 percent identify as atheists, 6 percent as agnostics and the rest as “nothing in particular.” However, Gaylor notes that the study shows that 17 percent of adult Americans are atheists by definition, if not by label, as only 83 percent of respondents overall believe in “God or a universal spirit.”
This is the third in a trio of significant surveys by Pew over the past 17 years, which surveyed 35,000 randomly sampled respondents nationwide. Its first Religious Landscape Survey in 2007 found that 78 percent of U.S. adults were some sort of Christian, which declined to 71 percent in 2014 at the time of the second survey.
If Protestants are lumped together, they comprise 40 percent of the population. However, only 33 percent of those surveyed indicate they attend religious services monthly.
The number of U.S. adults identifying with a religion other than Christianity has grown to 7 percent: 1.7 percent Jewish, 1.2 percent Muslim, 1 percent Buddhist and 0.9 percent Hindu. Other non-Christian religions comprise 2.2 percent.
The survey found that 86 percent believe “people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body,” and 79 percent believe in “something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it.” These findings, too, may reflect confusion over definitions, such as the meaning of “spiritual,” which technically means something supernatural.
However, the study clearly shows that younger Americans remain far less religious than older adults. Those 18 to 24 are less likely to identify as Christian, pray daily or attend religious services.
One reason for the growth of Nones among younger Americans could be that the study found they are less likely than older adults to have been raised in a religious household. But there is also a movement away from religion by those raised with religion. More than a third of U.S. adults have switched religions since childhood, which Pew said leads to net gains for the unaffiliated and net losses for Christianity. The Pew report says the “stickiness” of a religious upbringing seems to be on the decline, while the “stickiness” of a nonreligious upbringing appears to be rising.
Breaking the Nones down by race, 22 percent of Black adults have no religious affiliation (up from 18 percent seven years ago), 33 percent of Asian Americans, 27 percent of Hispanic adults (up from 20 percent in 2017) and 31 percent of white adults (compared with 24 percent in 2017).
Secular strongholds include Portland and Seattle, where 44 percent have no religion; Boston and San Diego, where 40 percent are unaffiliated; Columbus, Ohio, and Denver at 39 percent; and Baltimore and Austin at 36 percent.
This is indeed something to cheer about.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters of nontheism. With nearly 42,000 members, FFRF advocates for freethinkers’ rights across the globe. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
