| No Faith In Numbers By Conrad Goeringer This article can be found in the November 2001 Vol 40, No.9 print of “American Atheist Newsletter.” pp. 4-5 There is a shift taking place in the American cultural landscape. One of the most comprehensive studies regarding religious belief and affiliation indicates that the number of Americans who say they have “No Religion” has risen substantially over the last decade. The American Religious Identification Survey was conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and follows up on similar 1990 study. The poll utilizes a sample of over 50,000 randomly selected respondents. The primary question was: “What is your religion, if any?” * For Atheists, the most significant results are found in the growth of that category of Americans professing no religious beliefs. The 1990 study revealed that 8%, or 14.3 million persons were in this cohort. The new ARIS count reveals that the nonbeliever population has now grown to 29.4 million, roughly 14.1% of the population. Further questions broke this category within the “No Religion” group down further. In 1990, based on the answers provided in that study, about 1,186,000 Americans fell under the category of “Humanists” and slightly more than 13 million simply describing themselves as persons of “no religion.” The ARIS count, though, included new categories. In the 2001 study, 902,000 Americans would openly identify themselves as “Atheist” with 991,000 in the “Agnostic” category. “Humanist” describes 49,000, while “Secular” covers another 53,000. About 27.5 million are covered with the “No Religion” label. * The total “No Religion” segment of the population, about 14.1% or 29.4 million Americans, is larger than all but two Christian religious denominations -- Roman Catholic and Baptist. The ARIS census measured only denominational identification, not rates of church attendance. A number of surveys have claimed that about 40% of those identified as churchgoers attend services with any regulartiy, and that figure has been challenged as unreliably high. * The number of those estimated to be in the “Atheist” category far exceed the denominational enrollment for groups like the Seventh-Day Adventists (668,000); Assemblies of God (660,000); Christian Science (214,000) or the Congregational/United Church of Christ (559,000). * The ARIS census was conducted by Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Mayer and Ariela Keysar. The investigators, in their introduction, quote from anthropologist Diana Eck (A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: Harper, 2001), who observed “We the people of the United States now form the most profusely religious nation on earth.” The ARIS investigators noted: “Often lost amidst the mesmerizing tapestry of faith groups that comprise the American population is also a vast and growing population of those without faith. They adhere to no creed nor choose to affiliate with any religious community. These are the seculars, the unchurched, the people who profess no faith in any religion.” While observing the “widely held perception” that Americans have become more religious and fundamentalist -- a trend underscored by the surging “Born again” movement -- “the present survey has detected a wide and possibly growing swath of secularism among Americans.” * One debate within America’s nonbeliever segment has been the question of ethnicity and “Jewish Atheists.” ARIS projected a total of approximately 5.3 million adults in the American Jewish population, with 1.08 million who are “adherents of no religion,” with another 1.36 million embracing a religion other than Judaism. Within the Hispanic population, 57% identified themselves as Roman Catholic, wiht 22% leaning toward a Protestant denomination and 5% giving some other identification. Fully 12% of Latinos indicated that they “have no religion.” * Within the “No Religion” category of nearly 30 million Americans, 75% were identified as White, 8% black, 5% Asian and 11% Hispanic. * That “wide swath” of secularism was measured by ARIS in the Question: “When it comes to your outlook, do you regard yourself as . . .” Thirty-eight percent responded with “Somewhat religious,” while another 37% answered “Religious.” Ten-percent gave their answer as “Secular,” with another 6% as “Somewhat secular.” Nine percent were in the “Don’t Know” or “Refused” (to answer) category. Secularism, of course, does not automatically equate with Atheism, but it does give insight to how Americans view the precarious relationship between government and religion. There were slight percentage differences between men and women (41% and 36% respectively) in the “Somewhat religious” cohort, and where 12% of men identified their view as “Secular,” 8% of women did so. |
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