njhartsh

I'm not sure if this is news to Infidels Forum denizens--apparently the survey I've just read has been out for a few months, and I haven't been around here in a while. Still, I wondered what Forum readers would think about the results. The results of the study I'm describing can be found on <a href="http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/key_findings.htm" target="_blank">the study's official site</a>.

As I learned yesterday, researchers at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) conducted a phone survey of adult Americans from February to June 2001. They asked respondents the question: "What is your religion, if any?" They then classified the answers they received into 65 categories, mainly to compare the responses to a similar study conducted in 1990.

One important attribute of the 2001 study is that it polled 50,281 households--a huge number (to my understanding) by public polling standards. As a result, the margin of error for the study is only +- 0.5%. (The 1990 study was even broader: it involved 113,723 respondents.)

The CUNY researchers went further with a still-large subset (17,000) of the households, asking whether respondents considered their personal outlook "secular," "religious," or "somewhat" one of the two; they also asked about church/synagogue/mosque/etc. membership, marital (and religious intermarriage) status, age, gender and race/ethnicity.

I find the results of the CUNY study both shocking and (as an atheist/humanist/Unitarian Universalist) very encouraging. Apparently a whopping 14.1% of the American public (over 29 million people!) consider themselves non-religious. This is more than double the number found in the 1990 study, which identified 13.1 million respondents (then 8.2% of the nation) professing "no religion." No other religious group saw such stupendous gains--in absolute terms, anyway. (For example, Buddhists more than doubled, too; but there were only 400,000 of them in 1990 to begin with.)

Among the 2001 non-religious survey respondents are just under a million self-described agnostics and almost that many self-described atheists. (The "humanist" and "secular" categories put together, meanwhile, number slightly over 100,000.) The answer I probably would have given personally--UU--accounts for another 629,000 secularist-friendly (I hope) Americans on the survey.

Meanwhile, Christianity has apparently taken a major hit in the past 12 years. The 1990 study found Christians constituted 86.2% of Americans; by 2001 that level had dropped to 76.5%. Most Christian denominations (including all of the five largest denominations and ten of the then-top twelve) lost percentage points between studies. A few (e.g., Baptists and Methodists) even have fewer members in absolute terms.

What do Infidels Forum readers think? Is this evidence of a secularizing trend in American society?

- Nathan

Arrowman

Is this evidence of a secularising trend? Yes, and no.

The same thing is happening in Australia and I suspect most western countries. I think there is a tendency for people who are raised in religion to continue to identify with that religion for survey and census purposes, long after they have ceased serious practice of that religion. That was certainly the case with me - I was raised in the Anglican church and blindly put "CofE" on survey and census forms for quite a while before I thought about it a bit and became more honest.

I think people feel uncomfortable about making anything other than a "socially acceptable" response in such circumstances, even when the survey is anonymous. You know how people can be.

So - yes, it is a "secularising trend" because more people feel comfortable with being honest about their (non-) beliefs. But no, it's not that the actual numbers of non-believers are growing; just that they're being more honest about it.

For that reason we can feel certain that the numbers of "Christians" are still overstated because not everyone has "come out".

Vorkosigan

The survey is bogus. The NORC, Gallup, Barna and other polls all peg nonbelief at 6-8%. I'm delighted by the publicity, but better conducted polls all give similar results. See the NORC 1998 data.

And this thread where I give it:
<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=45&t=000256" target="_blank">Survey discussed here</a>

Michael

[ March 11, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

IvanK

Gallup a better conducted poll on religion? I don't think so. Field studies show Gallup numbers overstating religious behaviors such as regular church attendance by a factor of 2.

Frankly, I don't care if it's bogus or not. And any way you look at it there are a lot more nonbelievers in this country than there are Jews. Where's our U.S. Senator? Where's our PAC?