The number of religious ‘nones’ has soared, but not the number of atheists – and as social scientists, we wanted to know why
Christopher P. Scheitle receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. The research presented here was supported in part by the Explaining Atheism project at Queen's University Belfast.
Katie Corcoran receives or has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, Presbyterian Health Foundation, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, International Research Network for the Study of Belief and Science, and West Virginia University Humanities Center.
The number of individuals in the United States who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown dramatically in recent years, and “the nones” are now larger than any single religious group. According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5% of the U.S. population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is around 30% today.
At first glance, some might assume this means nearly 1 in 3 Americans are atheists, but that’s far from true. Indeed, only about 4% of U.S. adults identify as an atheist.
