edoggsmooth

im doing a presentation on religion and i wanted to know how many, or what percentage, of americans are atheists. anyone have figures and sources?

thanks in advance.

-ed

Oxidizing Material

About 10%

uhcord

14.1% adhere to no religion
<a href="http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/studies_index.htm" target="_blank">http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/studies_index.htm</A>

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.

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/inquisitive79/aris.html" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/inquisitive79/aris.html</A>

[ September 29, 2002: Message edited by: vonmeth ]</p>

Alonzo Fyfe

Why does it matter?

If the report is merely to present some facts and figures, then these facts and figures are as good as any other.

However, I have too often encountered these statistics argued in a context of determining which policies is right or wrong. As if justice for an individual depends on how many others "like him" he can claim in society.

Justice does not depend on the census.

To say otherwise would be like arguing that discrimination against blacks would have been permissible, until their population rose above some magic number where just discrimination becomes unjust because it is impacting just too darn many people.

Just as negro slavery would have been wrong even if there was just one black person to enslave, many of the injustices imposed on atheists would continue to be wrong even if there was just one atheist.

Like I said, I do not know the use you have in mind for these statistics. But I would like to encourage you against using these numbers in any way that suggest that the rights of atheists depends in any way on how many there are.

[ September 30, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

Buffman

Not to rain on your presentation parade, but Alonzo Fyfe's words are filled with wisdom on this issue. They deserve a place in any presentation that might be attempting to use simple population opinion statistics to justify a moral/ethical position. Good luck on your presentation.

Vorkosigan

Go Alonzo!

You can get some idea of how many there are from several sources. The NORC survey is one place you can find data, just google NORC and atheism and data should show up, or NORC and religion. Barna, Gallup and other places are good ones. Generally they peg the AAF contingent at 6-8% rising about 1% a decade. The 14% figure cited above is absurdly high, IMHO.

Here's a NORC report on televangelism scandals from 1978-88:
<a href="http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/rnd1998/reports/s-reports/soc34.htm" target="_blank">NORC report</a>

From that report, the no religion preference:

3/1972 5.2%
3/1973 6.4%
3/1974 6.8%
3/1975 7.6%
3/1976 7.6%
3/1977 6.1%
3/1978 7.8%
3/1980 7.2%
3/1982 7.3%
3/1983 7.3%
3/1984 7.3%
3/1985 7.1%
3/1986 6.7%
3/1987 7.1%
3/1988 8.0%
3/1989 7.8%
3/1990 8.0%

NORC is widely considered the best social survey around, thorough and conservative.

Michael

Tom Sawyer

I can't find the link I saw this on, but the 14% is the number of people who said 'No Religion'. That was comprosed of people who said they were Atheist, Agnostic, Secular and one or two others as well as just not giving an explanation of why they said no religion.

The number who explicitly classified themselves as atheist as about 0.4%, or a little over 900,000 people.

I found the link, here it is:

<a href="http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/key_findings.htm" target="_blank">Religious Identification Survey</a>

[ September 30, 2002: Message edited by: peteyh ]</p>

Shake

The figures mentioned above are far more accurate than what I'm about to show, but I've gotta show this because it's interesting in its own. Check out:<a href="http://www.democratandchronicle.com/news/0927story2_news.shtml" target="_blank">this article</a> from my local paper this past weekend! I particularly found this interesting: because of the converse: 49% do not feel affilitated w/ a particular group. Now, of course this is in part due to those who attend non-denominational services. But I thought it was worthy to note. I feel that alienation from ANY organized religion CAN be a big step towards rejection of religious belief. It was for me!

On the down side, I was scared to see that the Catholics outnumbered the next largest group by a 10:1 margin! I'll never understand how good Americans would allow themselves to fall under the rule of a foreign dictator like the pope. To me, Catholicism is simply un-American, and I don't think I'll ever understand why so many Americans are Catholic. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

4th Generation Atheist

I suspect family tradition and cohesiveness is the reason for a lot of people's Catholicism. I know a number of Catholics who seem practially secular in their "real" approach to life, even those who attend services at-least weekly, like they're nominally supposed to. There are also a number who join with conservative fundies in condemning secularism, and they seem to me to be anti-American in the anti-personal freedom sense, but of course this is found in a number of religions. The more liberal type might make you wonder why they're doing it, but that's when it seems that they mostly like a sense of continuity with what they personally grew up with.

Splat

I agree with Alonzo that the numbers are unimportant in regards to civil rights and policy. But 10-14% of Americans means somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 million people (extrapolation from the census, so that includes minors and babies, but it's still something like 20-30 million adults). That's irrlelvant to the judicial branch, but not the other two.