{"id":806,"date":"2014-03-27T10:46:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-27T10:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/03\/the-decline-of-religion.html"},"modified":"2014-03-27T10:46:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-27T10:46:00","slug":"the-decline-of-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/03\/the-decline-of-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"The Decline of Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Of those aged 18 to 35, three in 10 say they are not affiliated with any religion, while only half are \u201cabsolutely certain\u201d a god exists. These are at or near the highest levels of religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the 25 years the\u00a0Pew Research Center<\/a>\u00a0has been polling on these topics.<\/span><\/div>\n
As encouraging as this data is for secular humanists, the actual numbers may be significantly higher, as columnist Tina Dupuy observes. \u201cWhen it comes to self-reporting religious devotion Americans cannot be trusted. We under-estimate our calories, over-state our height, under-report our weight and when it comes to piety\u2014we lie like a prayer rug.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Every piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the\u00a0American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)<\/a>\u00a0of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent.<\/span><\/div>\n
If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and \u201cnones\u201d equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. If that gives you reason to celebrate, consider this: by the year 2130, the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christian will equal a little more than 1 percent. To put that into perspective, today roughly 1 percent of the population is Muslim.<\/span><\/div>\n
The fastest growing religious faith in the United States is the group collectively labeled \u201cNones,\u201d who spurn organized religion in favor of non-defined skepticism about faith. About two-thirds of Nones say they are former believers. This is hugely significant. The trend is very much that Americans raised in Christian households are shunning the religion of their parents for any number of reasons: the advancement of human understanding; greater access to information; the scandals of the Catholic Church; and the over-zealousness of the Christian Right.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of those aged 18 to 35, three in 10 say they are not affiliated with any religion, while only half are \u201cabsolutely certain\u201d a god exists. These are at or near the highest levels of religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the 25 years the\u00a0Pew Research Center\u00a0has been polling on these topics. As encouraging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Decline of Religion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Of those aged 18 to 35, three in 10 say they are not affiliated with any religion, while only half are \u201cabsolutely certain\u201d a god exists. 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