This time I won’t digest the whole thing for you, as the title of the newly released Pew Survey, called “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,” tells the tale (full pdf here). But they try to leaven the “bad” news with some other findings:
Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious services all have declined modestly in recent years.
But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.
Here are a few graphs and tables showing that “nones” are increasing:
And the percentage of “nones” who are atheists and agnostics, as opposed to simply believing in God but not having formal church affiliation, is growing—from 22% to 33% over seven years:
From the survey:
Declining Religiosity. At the same time, the share of the population with low levels of observance (e.g., those who seldom or never pray or go to religious services, and who say religion is unimportant in their lives) has, itself, grown. And the percentage of American adults who are highly observant – at least as measured by traditional indicators, such as their certainty of belief in God, frequency of prayer, self-reported rates of attendance at worship services and self-assessments of the importance of religion in their lives – has declined.
As I predicted (this isn’t rocket science), America is inexorably, but slowly, becoming increasingly secular. More good news is that attitudes towards gays have changed: acceptance of homosexuality has increased across both believers and secularists—another inexorable trend showing “the better angels of our nature.”
Finally, those of you who want to see the religious breakdown of American Democrats versus Republicans, here it is. God bless those secular Democrats! And look at the difference in the proportion of evangelical Protestants between the parties. This is why the GOP is so gaga for Ben Carson, and why all the Republicans fight to outdo each other in goddiness during their debates:
All good.
I’ll bet that the stats are even higher for nones due to many in the closet who for various reasons are leery of fessing up to agnostic-atheism.
Actually most (something like 75%) of self-identified nones will claim a belief in god or souls or spirits on other PEW survey questions. Which tells me two things:
1. Nones /= atheists, though it includes them.
2. Probably not many closeted atheists claiming they are in a religious faith on these surveys, because answering ‘none’ does not imply atheism and the respondents have the ability to make that clear via other questions.
I would guess that the faithiness of the religious groups is somewhat exaggerated, because I believe its been shown via other surveys that when people are asked how many times they go to church and questions like that, they tend to exaggerate the numbers. However even that bias may be disappearing, because PEW’s results are perfectly consistent with the commonsense hypothesis that the least church-going members are the people ‘leaving the fold’ to become nones.
Ah, checking the latest survey I see the number of nones believing in God has dropped from a former 70% to 60%. Still a majority; still demonstrates that someone unwilling to profess atheism out of fear could safely identify as a none and be thought religious.
Any ideas what the 2% of Atheists who are absolutely certain that God exists are thinking? (at least it is down from 8% since 2007).
(page 48 of pdf)
2% of this cohort either didn’t understand the question, answered incorrectly, or has a nonstandard definition of what it means to be atheist.
Frankly I’m kind of amazed that only 2% of respondents answered nonsensically. You could probably ask “what year is it” in a survey and get a higher percent of incorrect responses.
Yes — or the atheists are using a nonstandard definition of “God” or playing around with what it means to say “God exists.” Maybe they’ve been reading sophisticated theology.
They are probably thinking “I wonder what the word ‘atheist’ means”.
yes, I am a theist. You said a theist, right? Yup, that’s me.
eagerly awaiting to see npr and pbs trying to give these numbers a pro-religion spin, or at least pretending they don’t really mean religion is declining in the us.
This might be a preview. I have no idea what ‘Inquistr’ is, but their spin was “…yes, but don’t worry, these are spiritual atheists!”
So I’m guessing pro-religion left groups like NPR will do something similar; emphasize the results on page 89-91 and try to subtly imply that all these people calling themselves atheist are secretly spiritual, so no cause for alarm, everyone move along now.
I think the standard response is that the public is increasingly disenchanted with the churches, groups, and organizations, all of whom have poor understandings of what God really is. In other words, people are becoming less religious because they are thirsting for God.
Looking good, and getting better.
A good trend which I hope and think will continue.
The US is catching up with the rest of the developed world. I’m not being snarky. I’ve just always found the level of religiosity interesting in a country founded on secular values, while those of us who don’t have that benefit are so often much more secular.
It’s like for some of us having a state owned broadcaster makes our TV etc more balanced politically rather than less so.
The constitution was founded on secular values, but the (white) population base arose from several waves of people fleeing Europe because they were too religiously kooky to fit in. Puritans, Anabaptists, Calvinists, etc. To this day, US culture has a pretty sizable puritan streak in it; consider our attitudes towards public nudity, sex, bad language, our attempt at prohibition, etc.
Good point. And, of course, the Puritan thing has been painted as fleeing religious persecution when the real problem was they weren’t being allowed to force their beliefs on a more tolerant population.
Perhaps when societies rebel against (or maybe just mistrust) authority in non-secular societies the target authority is both government and religious institutions. In a secular society religions are insulated from this and people get drawn to religion as the only trusted institutions available to them.
This may be dumb.
That’s not a silly idea. I think it’s worth exploring actually. If religion is seen as part of government, you’re going to rebel against both. It could be that in the US that, as you said, religion is seen as a group in opposition to authority, which gives it a sort of status it doesn’t have for us. Street cred maybe?
Much of the reason for this religion marriage to anti-govt. is due to the flip that took place in the 60s when the entire southern, democrats switched to republican. What started out as a single issue became many.
Correspondingly, I think if PCCE will go back and review his posts along these lines, he’ll see that his outlook has become more optimistic since the website has started.
I know I have become more optimistic since I started reading here.
Conrad Hackett mentioned the Religious Congruence Fallacy to explain why for example atheists can believe in God – yeah, I don’t get it either, but FYI:
http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/7981/Rain_Dances_Posted_Version.pdf?sequence=1
People are weird.
So if 33% of the unaffiliated do not believe in god, does that mean roughly 7-8% of Americans are now atheists (even if they don’t use the word)? That’s a remarkable jump in the last few years.
Imagine how high the number would be if it weren’t for all those strident new atheists alienating everyone! 😉
My thoughts exactly. I suggest we all stop criticizing religion and sit back and watch atheism naturally grow, as God intended.
Seriously, there is an interesting correlation between the appearance of new atheist books, websites and personalities, and the increase in the number of atheists in the USA. But that can’t be right…
Yes, David Silverman’s upcoming book Fighting God is going to try to make the argument that what he calls “firebrand atheism” is statistically linked to the rise in atheism. Maybe — but I’m not sure I trust his data or ability to analyze it. Still, I’ll read the book and see what he does.
I relish the next twenty years of Xmas in America. To a see a transition from mangers to mistletoe and Johnny Walker.
We are going to steal back the solstice after two thousand years.
More like after a couple of hundred. Christmas wasn’t actually a big Christian holiday in the US until the mid-1800s. Celebrating it was actually outlawed in the earlier New England colonies. If you ever hear some religibot spouting off about how Christmas/saying “Merry Christmas” is an American tradition, feel free to laugh at them. The colonists who landed on Plymouth came, in some small part, because they thought celebrating Christmas (among other things) was abominably sinful.
Once there are enough secular people celebrating Christmas as a non-religious holiday, the Religious Right’s attempt to “take back” Christmas by making “Merry Christmas” the default is going to backfire spectacularly. Nothing takes the Christ out of Christmas like mainstreaming.
Yet, despite this good news, Republicans keep winning elections, such as yesterday in the governor’s race in Kentucky where a far right Tea Partier won (Kim Davis must be ecstatic) and the repeal of the LGBT civil rights law in Houston, Texas. This tells me that the younger generation continues to be apathetic while the faithful continue to vote in high numbers. It may take another 10 to 20 years before the older generations pass from the scene and the more secular younger generations take control. This assumes, of course, that the country has not turned into a theocracy by then.
Fear is motivating. The most dogmatically religious are terrified.
I read about this Kentucky debacle. The new governor said he was going to repeal Kentucky’s health care exchange and throw hundreds of thousands of people (mostly poor) off health insurance. It’s the Christian thing to do don’t ya know.
Politics have very powerful consequences. I wish more people would realize this, but we live in a time of political apathy and ignorance. The zealots vote based on fear (fear of LGBTs, fear of minorities, fear of losing their guns, fear of the gov’mint) and disregard important issues like foreign policy, education, the economy and the liberty/well-being of all Americans.
The good news of this poll does little to improve my optimism of America’s future.
Kentucky? Ken Ham must be ecstatic as well. I read the voter turnout was around 30%. I’m genuinely shocked by that percentage. More than 70% didn’t bother to show up! That’s ridiculous.
When I saw the 14% GOP “Unaffiliated” the first word that leapt to my mind was “bankers”.
Reblogged this on Nina's Soap Bubble Box and commented:
Statistics Canada, the Federal Department, identified the jump from 8% to 16% none or no particular religion – they did a bizarre conclusion and claimed that people get religious when they are older to explain the sudden increase in young adult groups of far less religion than previous generations had at the same age range.
so then after marriage equality became the law of the land – they then dropped the religion question entirely.
Which was curious to me, since, I had been part of a Federal Human Rights Complaint against the department to count queers that they were against dropping the religion question (which no legislation is based on and they collected as a courtesy to the churches) and add the sexual orientation one, from which government legislation would be altered by. that old claim of somehow we’re not a large enough group to give rights to cost effectively, but somehow we are large enough to undo society.
http://dykewriter.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/canada-census-and-queers/
http://dykewriter.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/canada-census-and-queers/
hallelujah!
…and amen to that brothers and sisters!
Is this study not including independents – only those in the two parties? If so they are leaving a lot of people out, actually the most important group when determining who wins in the national elections. Maybe these are the leaning? If they are, I would like to see the number of Independents that are leaning by percentage to republican and democrat.
Some musing on this sort of thing. In the early-mid 90s, some Canadian sociologists of religion predicted that Canada would become more *polarized* – with increased religious fundamentalism *as well as* more “nones” and the like. Has anyone (a) seen evidence bearing on this case? It is about the time that one should take a look and (b) I wonder if the same thing has happened in the US. Strength of belief and (especially) “fundamentalist” beliefs are not captured by the “do you go” exactly.