The 'Nones' Take The Lead in USA

'Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion.

Survey: As many Americans claim no religion as there are evangelicals, Catholics - CNN.

The 'nones' are winning.

Within a few days of one another, we have two major opinion surveys by respected organisation, both showing a huge and growing movement away from religious belief, especially Christianity, towards having no religion. Last week we saw a 46% increase in no belief in the UK between 2011 and 2018 and now we hear that the largest single demographic in the USA is the 'none', who have overtaken the Catholics and evangelicals for the first time.

This latter survey was released last month but has only just found it way into the mainstream news media.

The 2018 GSS was just released and there's some big news. Those of "no religion" (23.1%) are statistically the same size as evangelicals (22.8%). There was also a small resurgence of mainline Protestants, while Catholics are down 3% in the last four years. pic.twitter.com/uiyDSe7M6f

— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) March 20, 2019

This meteoric rise in the nones in the USA began in the early 1990s and has seem a 266% increase since 1991. Although slightly ahead, statistically, there is nothing to choose between the three groups now, but at current rates of growth, the nones will be in a clear lead in four to six years time. Back in the early 1990s, nones were bottom of the list at about 7%. Now they are top at 23.1%.

Evangelicals have fallen from an early 1990s peak of 30% to just under 22.5% and Catholics have fallen 3% in four years to 23% as the sexual abuse scandal intensifies. 'Mainline' Protestant staged a small but statistically insignificant rally last year but are now at just 11%, their decline having been inexorable since the 1970s when they were the largest group, more than 10% ahead of evangelicals.

It is clear that the major shift in belief amongst Americans has come from across the board as all religious groups have declined since the 1970s. There may have been movement between them but the overall trend has been towards non-belief. There has also been a major change in demographics within some religious groups. For example, Catholics have become predominantly Hispanic as the lost of non-Hispanic Catholics to nones and evangelicals has been offset by Hispanic immigration.

From these figures it is clear that something significant began in the early 1990's and again in about 2004 when after plateauing for a few years, the nones again resumed a steep increase in numbers. It is not immediately clear what this is but Nick Fish, president of American Atheists believes the Internet is partly responsible, providing a place for non-believers to find each other and take courage from the fact that they are not alone. If so, this suggests a cohort of 'closet' nones now finding support when they 'come out'.

Another way to look at this correlation between growth in access to the Internet and the growth in nones is that fair-minded people are now being exposed to the dishonesty, hypocrisy, judgemental arrogance, ignorance and deliberate disinformation that religious groups use to proselytise and recruit, especially into the extreme fundamentalist cults.

And of course we have a new generation of Americans now exposed to the wealth of information and objective scientific and historical information the Internet has made available. As more and more people come over to the 'nones' the parochialism that sustains the myth that religious belief is essential to maintain a law-abiding society will be exposed as false. Any claim Christian denomination can make for their influence on public policies and interference in public life to be justified as representative of the majority will go and demands for increased secularisation of American politics will grow.

But on that latter point, despite this growth in rejection of organized religion, and despite Congress being the most diverse ever, as the Pew Research table on the right show, there is not a single openly Atheist Representative or Senator in Congress and Christians are vastly over-represented at over 88%. The Congressional Freethought caucus contains just 10 members. Never before has such a significant demographic group been so poorly represented. Excluding the largest demographic group from representation can only increase the distance between the people and their elected representatives and increase the mistrust of politicians.

The 'nones' are winning in the USA and, as other surveys have shown, 'none' as an expression of non-affiliation to any religious group is often a transitional position on the way to Atheism or Agnosticism, as any social benefits derived from affiliation is lost and religion become both less important and more available for scrutiny. Freed from group pressure, and feeling free to question and scrutinise, many people move quickly to open disbelief.

---

Tweet Link