Good news for nonbelievers: there seems to be more of us than we thought.
Well, sort of.
The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) is out, and the headlines surrounding it are focusing on religion's waning role and nonbelief's ascendance. Is there reality behind the hype?
ARIS's website notes the rise in those who claim no religion: The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.
The "Nones" (no stated religious preference, atheist, or agnostic) continue to grow, though at a much slower pace than in the 1990s, from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, to 15.0% in 2008.
No big recent jumps, in other words, though I think still meaningful, considering the huge sample size (54,461 -- larger than Pew's) and a tiny margin of error at less than half a percent.
But, as is made clear, "Nones," as they call them (not "nuns," har-har) are not necessarily atheists, just as with Pew's "unaffiliated." ARIS clarifies a bit:
Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).
Okay, well, 12 percent is still pretty good, right? It's better than the number I came up with based on a parsing of Pew's major survey, which put people for whom God is a non-issue at about 10 percent. So this is important.
But! Again, this does not tell us how many out-and-out atheists there are. For that, we delve into the details of the survey, on the direct question of belief. There, we find that 2.3 percent of respondents said "there is no such thing" as God. 4.3 percent said there is no way to know, which might qualify as functional atheism or perhaps hard agnosticism. 5.7 percent said they weren't sure, which makes them purely agnostic.
2.3 is a big step up from Pew's 1.6, and if we lump in the "no way to knows," we get a whopping 6.6 percent of Americans as nonbelievers for all intents and purposes! That surpasses ARIS's counting of Jews (1.2 percent) and Mormons (1.4), both of whom beat out atheists in Pew. (How's that for a blip!)
But!
This is a big but. Take another look at this chart. It tallies how people identify themselves, not how they feel about God belief. According to people's own self-identification, atheists actually muster a miserable 0.7 percent, beating the margin of error by a nose. (The LA Times' writeup doesn't even mention the word "atheist.") Agnostics only come to 0.9 percent, but it is the aforementioned word "None" that seems to rack up the points for the nonreligious as 15 percent.
So what on Earth are we to make of this? Are there fewer atheists than we thought or more? I think a better question is whether the news bodes well or ill, and the answer is a resounding "both."
USA Today notes (hat tip to Hemant) that the "nones" are bigger than every other religious group other than Baptists and Catholics. That's huge. It means religion as we have come to understand it really is beginning to erode as a norm. And the fact that 6.6 percent of Americans disavow a belief in God, while another 5.7 percent haven't committed, is also a big deal. There is more doubt than most people care to admit, and that is a very good thing.
But the dark cloud pushing its way over the silver lining is that so few people wish to be known as atheists. There is a 1.6-point deficit between those who say they don't believe in God and those who are willing to use the word atheist to describe themselves. And with such small numbers, it's difficult derive any solid conclusions, and it's easier for small errors to present themselves. I can only suspect that this is a result of the social stigma attached to the word, which either means we need a better one, or more atheists need to make themselves known and reduce social discomfort with the the term.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)