SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
For the first time "No Religion" has topped a survey of Americans' religious identity, according to a new analysis by a political scientist. The non-religious edged out Catholics and evangelicals in the long-running General Social Survey.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1% of Americans now claim no religion.
Catholics came in at 23.0%, and evangelicals were at 22.5%.
The three groups remain within the margin of error of each other though, making it a statistical tie. Over 2,000 people were interviewed in person for the survey.
[...] "We are seeing the rise of a generation of Americans who are hungry for facts and curious about the world," she says.
-- submitted from IRC
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Survey: As Many Americans Claim No Religion as there are Evangelicals, Catholics
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 111 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Two is not equal to three, even for large values of two.
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Monday April 15 2019, @01:29AM (13 children)
That is a fairly odd way of counting and dividing things into groups. The CNN headline (There are now as many Americans who claim no religion as there are evangelicals and Catholics, a survey finds) was even worse, it made it sound like the no religion group was equal in size to Christians -- which just isn't true.
As far as I know Evangelicals are Christians and it's a form of Protestantism, yet the survey make them into a class of their own. What makes it even more odd is how they keep downsizing it even further, if one follows the link to the guy that made it all he apparently splits all religion into Evangelicals, Catholics, No religion, Mainline (Protestantism), Black Protestants, Other faiths and Jews. So apparently if you are a Black Protestant you are not worthy of hanging out with the other protestants but if you are a black catholic that is just Catholicism? Really? OK. Perhaps all the "No Religion" people are not the same group either but a combination of little groups of different type of non believers. But who knows, the important thing here is apparently to peddle the message of that No Religion is just as valid or large as Christianity. Which it turns out was completely not true.
Even from his data we can see that Protestantism is about 44%, Catholics are 23%; ie Christianity is at about 67% which is quite a bit more then No Religion at 23%. Apparently Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam make up only about 6% or so combined and Jews are around 2%.
A generation? More like a fraction of a generation, there might be an age group where they are actually more even but overall they are not. Just like you can find with more age groups and something such as political affiliations etc. But if one just divides and stuff I'm sure the "No Religion" group is much larger then say Left Handed Red Headed Catholics to. I just have to adjust my data a bit and I'll prove that in a jiffy. Here I thought that Dawkins and his (non-denomination) followers was all about science and logic and not picking goals and adjusting the numbers until they fit some expected outcome or theory.
If one follows the other link in the CNN article over to Pew and their comparison of Congressmen they also there in the table mention the % of the population. Those numbers are fairly close (+-5% or so) on the Christians that come in at about 71%, Jews still at 2%, No Religion at 23% but Hindu, Buddhists and Muslims only make up about 3% in their data. So if anything he has just found that group (since it's apparently just one giant group of god lovers combined) are showing a massive growth potentially doubling their numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @01:50AM (5 children)
What you wrote is correct, for now. But looking at the chart in TFA, it appears that No Religion has been growing at about 6% or 7% every 10 years, starting in the early 1990s. No sign of that red curve changing slope for the last ~15 years. If the trend extrapolates for another 10 years, No Religion will be about 30% by 2028. This is pretty remarkable given that this fraction was ~stable at 5%-7% for the first 20 years of this survey -- 1970-1990.
The big gains seem to come from the group labeled Mainline Protestant, with smaller losses by Evangelical and Catholic.
This looks like good news to me, I'm the resident post-theological AC, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201102/being-post-theological [psychologytoday.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 15 2019, @02:03AM (2 children)
It's clearly growing quite fast and if that continues they could become an important bloc. But possibly not, I somehow doubt that they are a coherent and unified group. For all we know it could contain everything from atheists (god deniers) to agnostics (spiritual seekers) and possibly people that believe in something not-mainstream possibly of some kind of pagan or new-age ideas/nature.
But mostly I find how he divided the groups oddly disturbing, all the other groups can be split into minor groups to but he chooses to only do it for Protestantism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @03:13PM
i never quite understood why people that do not believe in organized religion, or the choices a voting poll about organized religion have presented, always need to be neatly identified into some group.
just call them the Other and fear them like most organized religous groups tell people to do, if saving their condemed souls isn't working, you're supposed to burn them at the stake.
i guess I understand now that I wrote about it. if you can't neatly identify them, which witch do you burn? i guess some reglious types choose to burn all the heretics instead of just the obvious ones; willful ignorance works with extremes, too.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 15 2019, @03:55PM
Which of course means that hopeful atheists who see the growth of "None" and extrapolate it to the future in terms like "grown by X%" may be very disappointed. Firstly, it will be a logistic curve, not an exponential one (they start off looking identical, which is why people confuse them), and secondly, the space into which it's growing may only be a small subset of the whole - the Mainliners presently. Of course, when there's enough traction (acknowledgement that they exist in numbers by the tv and other media, and by politicians), new subsets may begin to crack, but if so, that would be a separate wave. And of course, there's nothing so say the switchers might not be switched to something else, like new ageism, if culture pushes things back that way.
Let's wait and see.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 15 2019, @02:36AM (1 child)
I addressed this a bit in another reply, but I think some of this trend (perhaps most of it) has to do with more people being more honest and actually admitting they aren't affiliated, rather than claiming to be a "member" of some church they haven't attended in years or only go along with their mom two days per year or whatever. (Note that in polls the number of people who identified as "not very religious" or "not religious" or those who claimed little attendance at religious services trended up more quickly and earlier.)
Also, as I noted elsewhere, be very careful interpreting "No Religion" here -- I wasn't able to find the wording of the question for this poll quickly, but in most such polls, it's about affiliation. The number of people actually claiming to be atheist/agnostic is always a LOT smaller than the numbers discussed here. The recent polls I could find in the past couple years say that 85-90% of Americans still say they believe in God, even though (as TFA notes) a not insignificant proportion of that number must be identifying as "No Religion" in these polls.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 15 2019, @04:00PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday April 15 2019, @02:10AM (1 child)
CNN is in a TOTAL MELTDOWN because their ratings are tanking since election and their credibility will soon be gone. Their organization's terrible. They are fake news!!!!
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @02:22AM
Why do you hate America?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 15 2019, @02:24AM
Agreed, but it's pretty standard for these religion polls in the U.S. For historical reasons, Catholics tended to be segregated in their own group, for example, and the polls generally have kept the question the same for the past several decades to keep data collection consistent.
I agree the headline is misleading. I also would argue that the timing of this is interesting -- often around Easter season, there tend to be headlines both for and against Christianity every year.
And there's nothing really new here. Here are Gallup results [gallup.com] from 2017, which show basically a tie among Catholics, Evangelicals, and "none." Here are Pew results [pewforum.org] that show the same. Here's an ABC poll [go.com] from last year with basically the exact same argument as TFA here. And here's one talking about the rise of the atheists [scientificamerican.com] published -- again, I'm sure not coincidentally -- on Easter Sunday 2018.
It's pretty much an annual tradition in the news media for someone to promote the rise of atheism around Easter. (For the record, although I tend not to talk much about my own beliefs, I've been a skeptic since I was in middle school. However, I also note the annual opportunism of non-Christians in the media around Easter.)
So no, there's not much to discuss here. The numbers have been trending the same for quite a few years. The fact that one poll finally registers that those with no affiliation are a "bigger" (though statistically insignificantly bigger) group than the arbitrary divisions of Christians in these polls... well, it's just an excuse to publish another headline.
Also, I question the meaningfulness of these numbers. The numbers of Americans identifying as "non-religious" or "not very religious at all" or "don't attend religious services/church" have trended up a LOT faster than those who claim "no religious affiliation." I think there are many people who are loathe to admit to being non-religious, since in many communities, religion is still the default. I suspect many of these recent polls how people simply being a little more honest, rather than pretending to remain with some vestigial church affiliation even though they haven't gone in years.
Lastly, note that most of these surveys are NOT about "no religion" -- they're about no religious affiliation, which is a significant difference. Those admitting to be atheist or agnostic still are a small minority of these "no religious affiliation numbers," as the Pew survey I linked above notes, generally in the 5-7% for both atheist and agnostic together.
So, I'm not sure this is necessarily a cause for celebration among skeptics. Polls consistently reveal very high numbers of Americans believe in religious things (like angels, the virgin birth of Jesus, an afterlife, etc.) even if they don't identify as being very religious. I don't have time to find the link right now, but I remember reading a couple years ago about a poll that showed only ~70% of Americans identifying as Christian (and >30% saying they aren't very religious at all), but something like 85% of Americans saying they believed in the virgin birth of Jesus. Yeah, ponder that for a second.
Not to mention all the other weird crap Americans admit to believing in in polls... supernatural phenomena, etc. The number in TFA is probably most meaningful to those concerned about local churches dwindling in members and closing because of non-attendance. I don't know that American society is overall becoming more skeptical in a scientific sense or stopping believing in weird crap.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday April 15 2019, @02:13PM (2 children)
It is wishful thinking and serves as an apt example of how people use statistics to lie. Atheists and anti-Christian haters of every variety would like to paint a rosy picture of their own prospects, and downplay those of Christians. It's propaganda.
The rest of us should pause, think about what they're claiming for 500 milliseconds, and throw it on the rapidly growing trash heap of more lies the mainstream media has told in the last
ten yearsyearweektwenty-four hours.Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @03:17PM
what difference does it make if no one believes? well I mean besides the end to religious atrocities and stuff
you make atheists seem bad, but there are no athiest priests molesting children. usually, its the weird trailor park guy, or a repressed conservative somwehere--repressed because of religion.
liberals that have weird tendencies tend to come to an agreement with other weird liberals and keep the kids and vulnerable populations out of it. they hardly make the news unless they are political donors or live near a school. but priests--there seem to be too bad ones to count. even ex pope benedict came out swinging saying women should wear burkas because too many women are making men horny by having been born after the 1950s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @08:58PM
Ah, yes, it's the evil atheists (?) doing propaganda again. Good thing religious people would never do that.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 15 2019, @03:53PM
One thing to bear in mind is that "Christians" as some sort of ecumenical umbrella isn't always an accurate depiction of things. The Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox are generally mostly cool with each other now, but that's definitely not always been the case historically speaking, and Christians have slaughtered each other in the name of religion (e.g. the Fourth Crusade, the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and even to some degree the Napoleonic Wars). One of the major practical reasons for the religious freedom aspects of the US's First Amendment was that it would have gotten really nasty had the founders had to choose between the Anglicans that dominated Virginia and other southern colonies, the Puritans that reigned supreme in Massachusetts and much of the rest of New England, and the Quakers who controlled Pennsylvania, all of which saw the other 2 as false religions.
Right now, the various Christian-types tend to see themselves as more-or-less unified. Give actual temporal political power to Christianity, and I can guarantee you that will change really really quickly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.