Number of Americans with No Formal Religion Increasing, Survey Finds

Though the United States remains a strongly religious nation, the percentage of Americans saying they have no formal religious identity is growing, the authors of a recent survey have concluded.

A national survey of U.S. religious affiliation suggests the existence of a “wide and possibly growing swath of secularism” in the American population.

The American Religious Identification Survey 2001, released by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), also suggests that the proportion of Christians in the U.S. has dropped—from 86 percent in 1990, when the study was first conducted, to 77 percent in 2001.

The survey was based on random telephone interviews from February to June 2001 of more than 50,000 adults. Researchers estimated the responses to be representative of the entire U.S. adult population.

The study was released late in 2001 after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.—events that, by nearly all accounts, swelled the numbers of people attending religious services.

But Egon Mayer, one of the co-authors of the study, said September 11 had not permanently altered the U.S. religious landscape. Increased attendance at religious services immediately after the attacks did not change the basic religious affiliations that he and co-author Barry Kosmin studied, Mayer said.

“People didn’t attend church or synagogue just for religious reasons. They wanted to be around other people,” said Mayer. “People probably feel more religious, but whether they have changed behavior is another question.”

Another survey, conducted by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and released last month, confirmed part of Mayer’s contention.

In the Pew study, 78 percent of those surveyed in November 2001 said the influence of religion in the United States was growing—an increase over an earlier, March survey, in which only 37 percent of those questioned had felt the influence of religion on the rise.

And yet the November Pew survey found no evidence that religion was suddenly playing a larger role in Americans’ personal lives. The proportion of those surveyed post-11 September who said that religion was important in their own lives—61 percent—was virtually unchanged from what it had been in the March study.

Other findings of the CUNY American Religious Identification Survey for 2001, based on extrapolations:

Fifty-two percent of adults were Protestant, 24.5 percent were Catholic, and 14.1 percent adhered to no religion. Jews and Muslims remained relatively small groups in the U.S., the study concluded, Jews representing 1.3 percent of the population, and Muslims, 0.5 percent.
Some 33 million American adults—about 16 percent of the total adult population—had changed their religious identification at some point.
The groups making the largest gains since 1990 included Evangelical Christians, non-denominational Christians and those who professed no religion. The latter group accounted for the largest single increase since the previous, 1990 study. “One of the most striking 1990-2001 comparisons is the more than doubling of the adult population identifying with no religion, from 14.3 million (8 percent) in 1990 to the current 29.4 million (14.1 percent),” the study said.

Those who claimed no formal religious affiliation were not, however, atheists: only 0.4 percent of the people surveyed identified themselves as atheists.

Despite a strong sentiment in the United States that the country has undergone something of a “religious re-awakening” in recent years, the study concluded that the population’s large secular segment should not be ignored.

The finding was “completely consistent with similar secularizing trends in other Western, democratic societies,” the authors concluded. “The magnitude and role of this large secular segment of the American population is frequently ignored by scholars and politicians alike.”

Asked about what appeared to be a growing segment of Americans interested in spirituality but not organized religion, Mayer acknowledged that the survey did not account for such a group directly.

“The spiritual question throws a curve ball into this,” he said, adding that he hoped future surveys would incorporate a category for non-religious spirituality.

Mayer said the challenges of a religious survey were considerable, given the dynamic character of U.S. religious and spiritual practice. “The possibilities of how people think of themselves and identify themselves are endless,” he said. “People are pulled by longing, memory, family, even guilt.”