What's the official statistic for Atheists in the population?

[Alex K]

Hey guys. I've heard it's around 20%, but some sites say 6%, others say 1.7, etc. What's the official statistics for Atheists in the population as of late? Thanks a bunch.

You need to specify which country, since the board is international. In reunified Germany where I was born and currently live, there is something like a traditional church membership of families, skewing the numbers.

37% of the population specify to have no confession.

The association of protestant churches in Germany has 30% of the population as members (24 million). The roman catholic church has similar numbers of official members. The trend is downwards as people keep leaving the churches. These numbers were once higher, but were instantly reduced significantly when the largely confession-less "socialist" east joined in 1990. Non-mainstream churches do not have a huge following. The largest minority is, I guess, muslims, made up mostly of the three million people of Turkish descent and some from the Balkans, although there are plenty of "cultural muslims" among them.

Many people are member of these churches for social or traditional reasons (I was member until I turned 20, my dad is still registered catholic even though he despises the doctrine and is at best a deist). In any case, if you consider the numbers of people who are actually attending services on Sundays, things look differently. The number given by the Catholics is 2.6 million (probably including the christmas service), that's barely more than 10% of official members. Among the protestant denominations, things look even better: 900k people out of 24 million members attend services on ordinary Sundays. So all in all, my estimate would be that maybe 5% of people go to church on Sundays.

I'm not saying that the people not going are atheists, but you can bet that most of them don't believe in what an average American evangelical would classify as Christianity.