How many atheists in us

See the detailed tables for complete trends in the religious composition of Hispanics based on both Pew Research Center political surveys and the NSL.

For complete information about trends in the religious composition and worship attendance habits of the U. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.

It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. For details about the methodology employed for the and Religious Landscape Studies, click here. If the next Religious Landscape Study is conducted using a self-administered mode of survey administration e.

This is because questions about religious identity, belief and practice can be sensitive, and some respondents may be reluctant to admit to interviewers that they are not religious. In the U. In other words, respondents may more honestly report low levels of religiosity in self-administered surveys, when no interviewer is present. When prompted by a survey question to report how often they attend religious services, respondents who say they attend every week may be indicating that they see themselves as the kind of people who regularly go to services, rather than that they never miss a week of church.

For a discussion of differences between self-reported attendance and actual attendance rates, see Brenner, Philip S. Overreporting of Church Attendance in the U. Most important has been the dramatic changes in the American family.

The past half century has dealt a series of body blows to American marriage. Read: The not-so-great reason divorce rates are declining. But just as stable families make stable congregations, family instability can destabilize the Church. Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations.

More Americans, especially college graduates in big metro areas, are putting off marriage and childbearing until their 30s, and are using their 20s to establish a career, date around, and enjoy being young and single in a city.

By the time they settle down, they have established a routine—work, brunch, gym, date, drink, football—that leaves little room for weekly Mass. The rise of the nones shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the religious identity that seems to be doing the best job at both retaining old members and attracting new ones is the newfangled American religion of Nothing Much at All. But the liberal politics of young people brings us to the first big reason to care about rising non-affiliation.

Although it would be wrong to call Democrats a secular party older black voters are highly religious and dependably vote Democratic , the left today has a higher share of religiously unaffiliated voters than anytime in modern history. At the same time, the average religiosity of white Christian Republicans has gone up, according to Robert P.

American politics is at risk of becoming a war of religiosity versus secularism by proxy, where both sides see the other as a catastrophic political force that must be destroyed at all costs. The deeper question is whether the sudden loss of religion has social consequences for Americans who opt out.

Secular Americans, who are familiar with the ways that traditional faiths have betrayed modern liberalism, may not have examined how organized religion has historically offered solutions to their modern existential anxieties.

Making friends as an adult without a weekly congregation is hard. Establishing a weekend routine to soothe Sunday-afternoon nerves is hard. Although belief in God is no panacea for these problems, religion is more than a theism.

It is a bundle: a theory of the world, a community, a social identity, a means of finding peace and purpose, and a weekly routine. Their politics is a religion. Their work is a religion. Their spin class is a church. In certain parts of the country, pressure to conform to prevailing religious practices and beliefs is strong.

A reporter with The Telegraph writing from rural Virginia, for example, found that for many atheists, being closeted makes a lot of sense. The fear of coming out shows up in polling too. A PRRI survey found that more than one-third of atheists reported hiding their religious identity or beliefs from friends and family members out of concerns that they would disapprove. But if atheists are hiding their identity and beliefs from close friends and family members, how many might also refuse to divulge this information to a stranger?

This is a potentially significant problem for pollsters trying to get an accurate read on the number of atheists in the U. It is well documented that survey respondents tend to overreport their participation in socially desirable behavior, such as voting or attending religious services.

But at least when it comes to religious behavior, the problem is not that people who occasionally attend are claiming to be in the pews every week, but that those who never attend often refuse to say so. Americans who do not believe in God might be exhibiting a similar reticence and thus go uncounted. Another challenge is that many questions about religious identity require respondents to select a single description from a list.

This method, followed by most polling firms including PRRI where I work as research director , does not allow Americans to identify simultaneously as Catholic and atheist.

Or Jewish and atheist. But there are Catholics, Jews and Muslims who do not believe in God — their connection to religion is largely cultural or based on their ethnic background. When PRRI ran an experiment in that asked about atheist identity in a standalone question that did not ask about affiliation with any other religious group, we found that 7 percent of the American public claimed to be atheist.