Atheists in america how many

In certain parts of the country, pressure to conform to prevailing religious practices and beliefs is strong. A reporter with The Telegraph writing from rural Virginia, for example, found that for many atheists, being closeted makes a lot of sense. The fear of coming out shows up in polling too.

A PRRI survey found that more than one-third of atheists reported hiding their religious identity or beliefs from friends and family members out of concerns that they would disapprove. But if atheists are hiding their identity and beliefs from close friends and family members, how many might also refuse to divulge this information to a stranger?

This is a potentially significant problem for pollsters trying to get an accurate read on the number of atheists in the U. It is well documented that survey respondents tend to overreport their participation in socially desirable behavior, such as voting or attending religious services. But at least when it comes to religious behavior, the problem is not that people who occasionally attend are claiming to be in the pews every week, but that those who never attend often refuse to say so.

Americans who do not believe in God might be exhibiting a similar reticence and thus go uncounted. Another challenge is that many questions about religious identity require respondents to select a single description from a list. This method, followed by most polling firms including PRRI where I work as research director , does not allow Americans to identify simultaneously as Catholic and atheist.

Or Jewish and atheist. But there are Catholics, Jews and Muslims who do not believe in God — their connection to religion is largely cultural or based on their ethnic background. When PRRI ran an experiment in that asked about atheist identity in a standalone question that did not ask about affiliation with any other religious group, we found that 7 percent of the American public claimed to be atheist.

Compare: parental status by religious group. Learn More: parent of children under 18 , Parents , Non-parents. Compare: belief in God by religious group. Learn More: belief in God , Do not believe in God. Compare: importance of religion by religious group. Learn More: importance of religion in one's life , Not too important , Not at all important.

Compare: religious attendance by religious group. Compare: frequency of prayer by religious group. Compare: attendance at prayer groups by religious group. Compare: frequency of meditation by religious group. Compare: frequency of feelings of spiritual wellbeing by religious group. Compare: frequency feeling a sense of wonder about the universe by religious group.

Compare: sources of guidance on right and wrong by religious group. Compare: belief in existence of standards for right and wrong by religious group.

Learn More: belief in absolute standards for right and wrong , There are clear standards for what is right and wrong , Right or wrong depends on the situation. Compare: frequency of reading scripture by religious group.

Compare: interpretation of scripture by religious group. Learn More: interpreting scripture , Not the word of God. Compare: belief in heaven by religious group. Learn More: belief in Heaven , Don't believe. It was striking, then, after the Revolutionary War, when the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI. But, while neither was a creedal Christian, both men were monotheists, and, like John Locke, their ideas about tolerance generally extended only to those who believed in a higher power.

It was another one of the revolutionaries who became a hero for the nonreligious. Both atheists and their critics often make a hopeless muddle of the category, sometimes because it is genuinely complicated to assess belief, but often for other reasons.

Some believers, meanwhile, use atheism to discredit anyone with whom they do not agree. For atheists, at least, this definitional elasticity provided a kind of safety in numbers, however inflated: as their ranks grew, so did their willingness to make their controversial beliefs public.

William Lane Craig and Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham do today. With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday.

Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War. The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Even as courts were striking down blasphemy laws and recognizing the rights of nontheists to conscientious-objector status, legislators around the country were trying to promote Christianity in a way that did not violate the establishment clause.

They succeeded, albeit at a price: the courts upheld references to God in pledges, oaths, prayers, and anthems on the ground that they were not actually religious. Not surprisingly, neither believers nor nonbelievers believe this. Every such ruling is a Pyrrhic victory for the devout, for whom invocations of God are sacred, and no victory at all for atheists, for whom invocations of God, when sponsored by the state, are obvious attempts to promote religion.

Legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, in particular, persist, because nonbelievers are concerned about its prominence in the daily lives of schoolchildren. David Niose, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, is one of many who have suggested that atheists might even be a suspect class, the sort of minority who deserve special protections from the courts. But are atheists a suspect class, or just a skeptical one?

Unlike racial minorities, their condition is not immutable, but, like many religious minorities, they are subject to hostility and prejudice. Yet that capaciousness is appropriate, because it suggests, correctly, that there is no single atheistic world view.

Much of the animosity and opprobrium directed at nonbelievers in America comes from the suspicion that those who do not believe in God could not possibly believe in anything else, moral or otherwise. The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court for so long was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment. Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.

The strategy they champion, scientific ethics, has been tried before, with a notable lack of success.