According to the latest tracking poll from Pew Research, the number of Americans who claim no religion continued to climb throughout 2020 and 2021:
The number of atheists and agnostics has stayed steady for the past five years, but the number of people who claim "nothing in particular" has gone up five points since 2016. The religious world is ending not with a bang, but a whimper.
Could this have something to do with the fact that religious services have been impacted by lockdowns? Without a weekly pep talk, people drift away from their organized faith community? Or, perhaps part of why people belong to churches is the regular social interaction, and if that goes away, why bother?
The trendline from 2009 is pretty constant, so I don't think Covid had anything to do with this.
As a personal anecdote, the young adults in our household used to all observe Lent every year even if they didn't attend church regularly, it was just a habit. Covid broke a lot of habits and they don't even mention Lent any longer. Nor does anyone mention Christmas eve services, or Easter. My guess would be that we aren't unique - a lot of people just do things out of habit and when the habits changed, so did their commitment.
But as others have noted, the redefining of "religious" by the far right has driven away a lot of people who don't want the association.
This reminds me to renew my membership in the Flying Spaghetti Monster cult. Thanks.
If only all those Texas cheer leaders knew they should actually be thanking the FSM for making the cheer leading squad. Likewise, all those anti-vaxxers dying because they didn't ask their prayer warriors to pray to the FSM.
Yeah, religious affiliation may be declining -- but the power of christianists in the GOP increases daily. And we should be very afraid of that, given that there's no such thing as a just and righteous god to save us from the theocons.
This does seem to read as the growth of Christian Lite, ie, like those people recorded before 1/6 kicked off, complaining about US morality but don't attend any churches.
THIS!!!
The religious right lost their morality a while ago, then picked up abortion so they could claim others a killing babies and thus be holier than thou. It wasn't about abortion, but a means to an end. Forget about Bob Jones University. Forget about priests being sued.
And yet their numbers still go down. But they can't let that golden calf go, so...
Maybe born again type Christians who aren’t Trumpians who were driven out of their churches as heretics.
Ah, but Kevin - don't you see, in your own chart - the downfall of western civilization! Christianity down 20%! And them "other" religions up 20% and those godless no-relgion types up 80%...
While you can clearly identify trends over years by this type of polling and yes religiosity has declined as measured by self reporting over the last few decades , it is going to far to come to any clear conclusions for such a short period of time like one year during the pandemic.
Simple sampling error can make it possible a small one year change can be attributable just to sampling error and nothing real . Same sort of issue when people overstate a one point bump or decline in approval ratings.
While the polling decline shown here for ONE YEAR re pandemic makes it more likely than not there was a real change, that comes with a huge degree of uncertainty..
Look at the bumps up in Christianity in 12 to 13 and 16 to 17. Are those real are just sampling fluctuations disguising temporarily a continuing decline? I bet the latter.
With a social change like the pandemic, possible it increased religion but just sampling error caused a blip decline.
Or also possible affected by sampling bias as in who is willing to respond to polls . In last few years , due to issues unrelated to pandemic, is it not true that getting more conservative trump voters to respond to polls has become more difficult? And they would tend to be more religious Christians.
In political polls , that definitely threw off many polls and produced results too optimistic for democrats. But good political pollsters ( i.e. those who are not trying to bias them to democrats) will try to find some way to weight or adjust to account for that , although may not succeed. For polls like this, I wonder whether they even consider the issue
.and could be reported Christianity shows a decline simply because Christians are not responding to the poll as much?
The problem is the horrible response rates for polls today makes them somewhat unreliable for anything where there could be a disproprtionate response rate ( which is just about everything) .
And my best guess about how the pandemic might affect religiosity.
Maybe a short term decline due to one factor cited above as ot interests attendance at religious services.
But longer term , I bet it increases it. A major driving force for religion is coping with facing the prospect of mortality. Anything that makes people face their own mortality will increase religion.
Of course , maybe that only slows but does not reverse the long term decline.
At the risk of myself reading too much into one year, note that there is a decline in non Christian religiosity last year, which is not the normal trend. And I think the interruption of religious attendance due to covid will have a greater affect on non Christian religions vs. Christians in a still predominantly Christian society .
And final thing to note re polls like this, and I do continually make this point on many polls .
The poll does NOT report of religiosity itself, even discounting sampling errors and biases.
It reports self identified religiosity and that is a different thing. And possible the poll, even long term, is only showing changes in what people are saying and what they actually believe may not have changed at all.
In reality, 78% of Americans were not really Christians on 2007 and 63% today likeiy an overstatement too. Many were Christians in name only and did not really believe at least fully . But , given the predominance of Christianity and the social expectations, easy to just say they identify as a Christian. But that social pressure had greatly lessened today . And , in some areas and social circles, there is more pressure to NOT identify as a Christian.
In 2007 , an agnostic who really is basically non religious but is not sure and does respect Christianity and still celebrate it traditionally ( describes me) would have been more likely to " identify " as a Christian in polls but today more would identify as not religious. And this is especially true on the political left . While in reality, what they actually believe is unchanged.
I question how much these polls show true change in beliefs and how much is just people more accurately self identifying ( at least on net).
Estimates vary for very clearcut reasons, but the percentage of the population that was Christian when Constantine's immediate successors made it the State religion range from 10 to 25% percent. Within a century, everyone was.
Revolutionaries - which does describe the current neo-fundamental Evangelical movement - never need widespread popularity, just opportunity and access to the levers of power.
Are you agreeing with the point I made ?
Because I would say it is highly unlikely that in one hundred years, Christianity went from 10 % or so ( not sure where you get up to 25% in 300 as that is high) to maybe 90% in 400 bases solely on actual religious conversion. What happened was that Christianity went from a minority religion where that 10% went from almost all true believers ( as no reason to say you are Christian when you are not) to one where 90% say they are Christian but many of them are not really believers but just going along with society and the state incentives. It went from hard to be a Christian to hard to not be.
In the USA twenty years ago, in majority of usa there was still some social pressure to be a Christian and more pressure to be at least some sort of religious believer . Very few places limited maybe to academic circles and maybe very socialist areas was there more pressure to be an agnostic or atheist.
Today, although I would say most of the USA still has some social pressure to be religious , it is lessened. And maybe less than 50% has any social pressure to be Christian. While the areas that there is more pressure to not be religious, while a clear minority, are no longer insignificant.
And your final point re revolutionary religious movements just needing access to power and not widespread popularity is contradicted by the example of early Christianity. In A.D. 300, it was still almost all a religion of slaves, lower working class and women , although it had just started getting some intellectuals and a few of the upper class. But where there was real power , where the emporer would need support , such as the senate, had almost no Christians in 300. The meme that Constantine professed Christianity because Christians were powerful makes no sense given the situation at the time.
And note, back in A.D. 300, there really was no concept yet of conversion through missionary work, maybe to some extent because aggresive attempts at conversion were dangerous. Pretty much conversions happened through normal social contact and examples of living life. And because paganism was weak and ripe for replacement by a somewhat more substantial religion ( and there were rivals to Christianity in thar regard ).
Maybe people are finally tiring of the centuries-old grift.
*Religion* - the legal way to steal your money .