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Survey: As Many Americans Claim No Religion as there are Evangelicals, Catholics

posted by mrpg on Monday April 15 2019, @12:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the thank-you-jesus! dept.

"exec" writes:

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.

There are now as many Americans who claim no religion as there are evangelicals and Catholics, a survey finds

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 15 2019, @02:36AM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday April 15 2019, @02:36AM (#829601) Journal

    This is pretty remarkable given that this fraction was ~stable at 5%-7% for the first 20 years of this survey -- 1970-1990.

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 15 2019, @04:00PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday April 15 2019, @04:00PM (#829893) Homepage
    Very good points. On your final one, I think I recently saw a not-quite-fresh survey that showed that for those who identify as "no religion", about 2/3 of them say that they are "spiritual" or believe that there's something supernatural out there. Probably a Pew report, which in part was measuring atheism or paganism with country granularity. (And for the latter - we win! (By which I mean that Estonia came out with the highest level of Paganism of any country.))
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves