I’m giving the good news to you first, as there’s bad news immediately to come. A Pew Survey released today, which polled more than 35,000 adults, shows that the proportion of Christians in America is dropping sharply, while the “unaffiliated” are taking their place. As the report notes,
The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men.
. . . However, generational replacement is by no means the only reason that religious “nones” are growing and Christians are declining. In addition, people in older generations are increasingly disavowing association with organized religion.
You can find a full pdf of the report here, but for the moment here’s all ye need to know (note that the reported changes are only over the last 7 years). The “unaffiliated” (note, not all of these are nonbelievers, for many are religionists who don’t claim church membership) rose 6.7%, The decrease in Christians breaks down as follows: Evangelical Protestants down 0.9%, Catholics down 3.1%, and mainline Protestant down 3.4%; that totals 7.4%. (Non-Christians, presumably largely Muslims, rose 1.2%). Now I’m not sure whether proportions or absolute numbers are what we should be looking at (more Christians means more mischief), for, after all, the population has grown, but the total number of Christians has still decreased as well. Read and rejoice:
More good news: both among the unaffiliated and in the population as a whole, the proportion of agnostics and atheists is increasing:
The religiously unaffiliated population – including all of its constituent subgroups – has grown rapidly as a share of the overall U.S. population. The share of self-identified atheists has nearly doubled in size since 2007, from 1.6% to 3.1%. Agnostics have grown from 2.4% to 4.0%. And those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” have swelled from 12.1% to 15.8% of the adult population since 2007. Overall, the religious “nones” have grown from 16.1% to 22.8% of the population in the past seven years. As the unaffiliated have grown, the internal composition of the religious “nones” has changed. Most unaffiliated people continue to describe themselves as having no particular religion (rather than as being atheists or agnostics), but the “nones” appear to be growing more secular. Atheists and agnostics now account for 31% of all religious “nones,
As you see, the proportion of nonbelievers, while still quite small, has nearly doubled in both the population at large and among the unaffiliated. That means that the nay-sayers can’t claim that the “nones” are still religious, just not affiliated with a label: 
Still more good news: the unaffiliated are getting younger and the Christians are getting older. As they find their way to Heaven (or to the Eternal Barbecue Below), the population will become more secular:
While many U.S. religious groups are aging, the unaffiliated are comparatively young – and getting younger, on average, over time. As a rising cohort of highly unaffiliated Millennials reaches adulthood, the median age of unaffiliated adults has dropped to 36, down from 38 in 2007 and far lower than the general (adult) population’s median age of 46.4 By contrast, the median age of mainline Protestant adults in the new survey is 52 (up from 50 in 2007), and the median age of Catholic adults is 49 (up from 45 seven years earlier).
The gender composition of believers versus “nones” (unaffiliated) is strikingly different, with more women in the former group. That’s been the case for some decades:
As in 2007, women continue to make up more than half of nearly every Christian group. Roughly two-thirds of Jehovah’s Witnesses are women, as are 59% of those who identify with the historically black Protestant tradition, 55% of those in both the evangelical and mainline Protestant traditions and 54% of Catholics and Mormons. Most religiously unaffiliated adults, by contrast, are men. Fully two-thirds of self-identified atheists are men, as are 62% of agnostics and 55% of those who identify religiously as “nothing in particular” and further say that religion is unimportant in their lives. Among those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” but say that religion is at least somewhat important in their lives, however, there are about as many women as men.
I hate to say “I told you so,” but Professor Ceiling Cat predicted this trend toward secularization several years ago. But it’s really a no-brainer: secularism is increasing all over the West, and traditional faiths look increasingly less credible. Christians are voting with their feet. And even though many of the “unaffiliated” are believers, refusing affiliation with a church is the first step on the road to unbelief. It also shows, at least to me, that the truth claims or religion can outweigh its social “benefits”, for there’s no need to leave a church (and not join another) if the church itself is meeting your needs for human fellowship. (I presume the “unaffiliated” are not simply joining megachurches that have ping-pong tables and babysitting, for then they’d be “affiliated.”)
Finally, the level of intermarriage between people of different faiths has increased tremendously: in 1960, only 19% of married people were of different faiths, but that figure has risen to 39% in the latest survey. I suspect, but am not sure, that mixed-faith marriages are more likely to breed unbelievers than same-faith marriages.
When you extrapolate this trend over time, you’ll see that in half a century there will be a substantial proportion of nonbelievers in the U.S. New York Times and New Yorker take note—you ignore this at your peril. Of course the trend is reversible; as Dan Dennett said in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, “Why the future of religion is bleak“:
Could anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion flourishes best.
Let us pray this won’t happen. But nobody can deny that over the past half century, religion has been on the run. Nobody, that is, except religiously obtuse people like Damon Linker, who, in a vicious response to Dennett in The Week, says this:
What Dennett doesn’t mention is that the Pew study also predicts that 66.4 percent of the country will call themselves Christians in 2050 — down from 78.3 percent in 2010. That’s a noteworthy drop. But it still has Christians, along with smaller religious groups (which make up 8.1 percent of the total), amounting to roughly three-quarters of the U.S. population.
Three quarters of the country amounts to a “bleak” future for religion?
This is the desperation move of a beleaguered and God-fearing man. Who ever said that the U.S. would become like Sweden overnight?
