Atheism - News
"Nones" (That's Most of Us) Are Up to 15% In U.S.
From the Brights newsletter - April 2009
Mainline religion appears to be losing ground. Some rather dramatic shifts are detailed in the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 (ARIS), released this past month. Online, www.usatoday.com handily summarizes several changes.
USA Today's reporter, Cathy Lynn Grossman: "When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers. The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers - or falling off the faith map completely."
ARIS co-researcher Barry Kosmin: "Don't blame secularism for driving up the percentage of Americans who say they have no religion ... These people aren't secularized. They're not thinking about religion and rejecting it; they're not thinking about it at all ... More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself."
Faith Survey
Non believers up 11%. - 01/04/09
Results from the latest American faith survey. Non believers up 11%. - 01/04/09