Is a sea change on the horizon?

[Angrboda]

America is finally losing its religion – and that’s a good thing!

Since 2007, the religious ‘nones’ (those who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”) have leapt in number by over 50% – an extra 19 million nonreligious Americans in 7 years. They now comprise some 23% of the population.

The Pew Survey is not alone. It comes on the back of a raft of similar surveys in recent years – even back in 2009, it was clear that there had been an upturn in the numbers of non-believers in the USA (although based on surveys far smaller than the Pew Survey). Earlier this year, an analysis of data from the ‘Monitoring the Future’ program showed how non-belief has risen dramatically among 8th, 10th and 12th graders.

Many of the non-religious in the Pew Survey are not diehard nonbelievers. You might think that, with a little effort, religious organisations could bring these folks back into the fold. But in fact this ‘fuzzy middle‘ is quite typical for the USA and is even larger in non-religious countries like the UK. What happens when a country loses religion is not that everyone become an atheist, but rather that most people, especially the less educated, simply stop caring.