Deep Thoughts: America Growing More Secular

Sunday, November 23, 2008

America Growing More Secular

The Freedom From Religion Foundation reports on CUNY’s American Religious Identification Survey which shows that America is growing more secular. 16% of American’s describe themselves as secular or somewhat secular. Christians are the biggest losers with a 8% drop.

I recently read an article which asserted Wicca was the fastest growing religion The numbers would suggest otherwise. It looks like Islam (in terms of total new people who self identified) is the winner. Unless they are interpreting the number as percent of growth, in which case Wicca win hands down.

Technorati tags: Secularism, Atheism

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benjdm · 855 weeks ago

There's even more interesting and more recent polling data from Harris polls:

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/inde...
"Important difference between online surveys and surveys conducted by telephone interviewers

Over the last few years, several different surveys have found that more people admit to potentially embarrassing beliefs or behaviors when answering online surveys (without interviewers) than admit to these behaviors when talking to interviewers in telephone surveys. They are also three times more likely to say that their sexual orientation is gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. Researchers call this unwillingness to give honest answers to some questions in telephone surveys a "social desirability bias."

It is therefore no surprise that in this online survey, more people say they are not absolutely certain there is a God than have given similar replies in other surveys conducted by telephone...

Are believers declining?

Three years ago, in an identical survey, 79 percent of adults said they believed in God and 66 percent said they were absolutely certain that there is a God. In this new survey, those numbers have declined to 73 percent and 58 percent respectively."

Hopefully they'll re-do the identical poll again in 2009.

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