In a world with so much cause for doom and gloom, one of the persistent bright spots is the steady growth of the nonreligious, atheists and agnostics. Year by year and decade by decade, organized religion keeps losing strength, while nonbelievers are gaining. Where white Christians once commanded an absolute majority of the U.S. population, with political power to match, they’re now an aging, shrinking minority hanging on by their fingernails. It’s only America’s undemocratic system that’s allowed them to cling to power as long as they have.
The latest evidence of this comes from a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI for short. Between November and December of last year, they interviews 5,600 Americans to build a picture of religious change. The results broadly echo previous studies on the topic, and give more positive signs for what lies ahead.
Let’s start with the big-print headline finding: All American religious groups are either holding steady or losing membership. The nonreligious are the only major demographic category that’s growing.
Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).
As you can see from PRRI’s graphic of these findings, the nonreligious are now larger than any single religious group in America. We outnumber white evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics by a statistically significant margin:
The complication in many of these surveys is that they lump together “the nonreligious” – a catch-all category that includes people who may believe in God, but reject organized religion – with explicitly secular people. We may be similar politically and culturally, but not necessarily philosophically. However, this time, as PRRI notes, the latest wave of growth is coming specifically from atheists and agnostics:
While the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” is similar to a decade ago (16% in 2013 to 17% in 2023), the numbers of both atheists and agnostics have doubled since 2013 (from 2% to 4% and from 2% to 5%, respectively).
And, contrary to wishful-thinking apologists who claim that the nonreligious are just disaffected believers who’ll come back to church eventually, PRRI also found that most nonreligious Americans aren’t seeking to join a religion:
The vast majority of the religiously unaffiliated appear content to stay that way — only 9% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say the statement “I am looking for a religion that would be right for me” currently describes them very or somewhat well.
…In 2023, one in ten Americans (10%) report growing up without a religious identity, while 18% of Americans say they became unaffiliated after growing up in another religious tradition. In comparison, very few Americans who grew up without a religious identity joined another religion later in life (3%).
As for why people are leaving religion, there are several main reasons. The most common, in this year as in previous years, is that they simply stopped believing their religion’s teachings (67% of respondents). Hatred and discrimination against LGBTQ people (47%) and clergy abuse scandals (31%) are reliable runners-up.
However, two reasons appeared in the survey that I haven’t seen in previous years. One is people who said religion was bad for their mental health (32%). PRRI notes this answer was more common among LGBTQ Americans, but not exclusive to them.
This makes sense, even if your identity isn’t under attack. As many ex-believers will testify, leaving their religion was like a weight lifting off their shoulders. It’s a reprieve from the fear tactics of fundamentalism – the mindset of sin, shame, judgment, condemnation, and hell. For LGBTQ people, it’s confirmation that they’re not doomed to a loveless life of self-flagellation. For women, it’s freedom from the double standards of religious patriarchy. For all kinds of people, it’s the power to reject smothering expectations and the freedom to choose your own purpose.
The other interesting reason, which has also gained in prominence, are those who left because their church was too political (20%). This tracks with the ostentatious cruelty of white nationalist Christianity in America. Countless churches – mostly evangelical Protestant, but some Catholic as well – have taken a hard right turn in the last decade, becoming outposts of anti-democratic rage and enthusiastic support of fascism. It’s not surprising that people appalled by this are abandoning faith. If anything, I expected this number to be higher!
As religion shrinks and fades, the power base for Christian nationalism and other varieties of supremacist politics will decline along with it. The world will become more peaceful, more democratic and less polarized. In the fever of our current moment, that may seem an unlikely prospect. But that’s just because the human mind has an easier time imagining sudden, dramatic change. It’s harder to envision the cumulative effect of slow change over time – but that kind of change is just as real and at least as important for understanding the shape of the future.
What I see from that graphic is that atheists and agnostics are 9%, and that unaffiliated (nothing in particular) is 17%. That is, those people are neither agnostic, nor atheist.
White evangelical Protestants dropped 3%. I’m both surprised and not surprised by the evangelical Protestants; while they’ve been in a decades-long arms-race (documented on countless TLC and Discovery channel shows) to outbreed the rest of America, more of their young adults are abandoning the faith. Also surprised the Mormons are holding steady despite their over-the-top recruitment efforts.
I was also surprised to see the white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics are holding steady. I’m second-generation American and noticed the generation that emigrated from their home countries brought their religion with them. The first generation born here (the early Boomers) were taken to church by their parents as children, but it was obvious they only sent their kids to Sunday School and church afterwards to get a few hours of free babysitting. My generation realized that and none of us cousins have any affiliation for religion and none of us raised our children to go to church.
Anecdotally, around me the non-evangelical white Protestant churches are closing left and right, and merging with other same-denomination churches. The only churches that are growing are the mega-churches who might not claim they’re evangelical, but their websites make it clear they’re evangelical.
Also, a lot of those “church-going” folk don’t actually go to church, but instead just tell everyone that they do, in their version of virtue signaling. What was it, like 3% actually attend weekend services?
That’s a familiar story about immigrants. My immigrant great-grandparents led a church-centered life in their little rural community; my grandparents were insistent that church was required, but I might have seen them attend once in my childhood, and that was for a funeral; my parents never attended, but used church/sunday school as free daycare. And look how I turned out!
PZ, I only hope I turn out as great as you!
Glad to see someone else’s parents used religion for free daycare. I was lucky enough that I have no interesting or alarming stories to tell about the time I spent. Just intense boredom and the certainty that NOBODY wanted to be there–not the kids, not the staff.
While it’s good to see folks leaving religion because of the rampant hate and cruelty, this might be part of another cycle. There have been several so-called “Great Awakenings” in American history, starting in 1730,1790,1855, and the one that I, alas, lived through in the 1960s and 70s (the Jesus freaks, among others). There’s no guarantee that this ebb in organized religion will be permanent, no matter how much many of us may wish it so.
… they simply stopped believing their religion’s teachings (67% of respondents). Hatred and discrimination against LGBTQ people (47%) and clergy abuse scandals (31%) … people who said religion was bad for their mental health (32%) … those who left because their church was too political (20%) …
Obviously some belief-leavers cited more than one reason. Still, if we lump together all but the first group in that list as those-who-left-due-to-their-religions’-moral-failure(s), they clearly outnumber those who walked away over intellectual issues.
While it is commendable that more people are becoming non believers we need to be careful on assuming too much.
A significant number of non believers are sociopaths. Look at Trump and Reagan and Rupert Murdock. I would suggest to you that those men were non believers but know how to use belief to win support.
So non belief is not automatically a savior for civilization.
Well, fewer believers would have meant fewer people supporting sociopaths like the ones you mentioned. Which would, at least, have been a great benefit to civilization.
But so are a significant number of believers.
(People are people, of course)
Is that “So” supposed to indicate an inference from the previous claims?
(It ain’t so)
The US has gone through four religious-revival Great Awakenings – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening
First (c. 1730–1755), Second (c. 1790–1840), Third (c. 1855–1930), Fourth (c. 1960–1980) (?)
From Wikipedia (Fourth Great Awakening): The Fourth Great Awakening was a Christian awakening that some scholars – most notably economic historian Robert Fogel – say took place in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while others look at the era following World War II. The terminology is controversial, with some historians believing the religious changes that took place in the US during these years were not equivalent to those of the first three great awakenings. Thus, the idea of a Fourth Great Awakening itself has not been generally accepted.
Ipetrich: Part of the reason for that may be that religious people are a lot less proud of the latter “awakening” — and perhaps even more ashamed of it — than they were/are about previous “awakenings.” Most if not all of the fourth “awakening” was (and still is) a purely reactionary backlash against all of the progress the West hade made from the New Deal onward — from expanded regulation of business to unions to the crushing of fascism to the Civil Rights Movement, and much more. (Which, in fairness, may or may not make it that different from previous “awakenings.”) And since nearly all of this backlash movement has been proven dead wrong and downright evil, I can see why quite a few students of the history of religion might want downplay its significance.
I don’t know about the first and second Great Awakenings, but the third one had some religious progressivism: the Social Gospel – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel – about social reform and fighting injustice and bad conditions – though it seems to me to be yet another case of making Jesus Chris in one’s likeness.
There was some religious-left activism in the black civil-rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, though it was mainly the black churches that were involved, and many white supporters were secular or spiritual-but-not-religious, as Susan Jacoby has noted in her book “Freethinkers”.
But for the most part, the Fourth Great Awakening, to the extent that it existed, was a reactionary sort of movement.
Who’s Afraid of Faith-Based Charities? by Tom Flynn for the Center for Inquiry
https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2006/01/22160347/p12.pdf
He makes the important point that an important part in the decline of organized religion is the rise of alternatives, and he mentioned literacy, art, and charity. I wish to note some additional ones:
* Life transitions: births, marriages, and deaths (hatching, matching, and dispatching). Some people’s only connection with organized religion is with events like these, and many people now use secular alternatives.
* Spirituality: if people can be spiritual without any connection to some church, whatever they have in mind with being “spiritual”, then what’s the need of that church?