Feature: Americans Increasingly Choose "No Religion" by Sid Groeneman and Gary A. Tobin

The recent presidential campaign has spotlighted the political vitality of the religiously committed, especially conservative Christians, but little notice has attended an increasingly evident counter-trend: the growth in non-identifiers, who deny affiliation with organized religion. Compared to readings from polls taken ten to fifteen years ago—most of which pegged the number of non-identifiers in the high single digits—an RDD national survey with a large sample of 10,204 shows that the number of American adults refusing to place themselves in any denominational category has increased dramatically during this brief period. Barring an unexpected reversal, and especially if the trend persists, the implications of this shift may be felt for generations to come in politics, philanthropy, and other areas of civic life.

The findings come from the 2001-02 Heritage and Religious Identification (HARI) survey, sponsored by the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish & Community Research, a nonpartisan think tank that conducts policy research on ethnicity and religion.

Altogether, 16 percent of American adults, or 34 million people, decline to choose a church or denomination when asked to name their religion. That is, nearly one in every six respondents to the HARI survey answered "none" or "no religion"or labeled themselves secular, humanist, ethical-culturalist, agnostic, or atheist. The largest proportion by far responded "no religion," "none," or "secular." The other categories of non-identifier response (humanist, ethical-culture, atheist, agnostic) totaled less than 5 percent. These non-identifiers made up the third largest religion-defined group in the country, trailing only Catholics (24 percent) and Baptists (17 percent), as shown in Figure 1.

Who are the non-identifiers? How are they distributed demographically and geographically? Is it correct to label them as unmistakably "secular"? What are the reasons behind the decline in religious identity, and why might it matter?

Not surprisingly, the effects of exposure (and non-exposure) to a religious tradition early in life tends to persist into adulthood. Among Americans in the HARI survey who had any religious upbringing in childhood, 89 percent reported having a current religious identity (not necessarily the same as the one with which they grew up). Among their counterparts with no religious background as children, 73 percent continued to have no religious identity as adults.

More interesting was the contrast between persons raised as children in more than one religion and those raised in only one. As shown in Figure 2, members of the former group—representing 2 percent of the current adult population—were more than twice as likely (26 percent versus 11 percent) as those having a singular religious upbringing to be non-identifiers. This is consistent with the widely held belief that children in mixed-marriage families—where the parents do not share a common religious tradition—have weakened religious identities.