Religious Trends in the USA

A new Harris Poll on religious belief in the USA has just been published.  It asks a good number of general questions about belief and some specifics, particularly with regard to Christianity.  It's an interesting, easy-to-read article about perhaps the most important cultural aspect in the USA.

I wrote a little post on religious trends, essentially saying that religion is moving from hierarchical systems to individual belief, that it has been doing so for some time, and that the fastest growing section was what I called "Spiritual but not religious" which I consider very useful nonsense.

This Harris poll is the most up-to-date, concrete evidence of what is happening with religious belief in the USA and it has the added advantage of showing the change in percentages over a ten year period so that we can extrapolate trends.

The summary of the report can be that basically people are getting less religious.  There are more Atheists, more people uncertain about the existence of God, less certainty over what God wants, a reduction in those who believe God acts on Earth.  The USA is becoming less religious.

That the USA is becoming less religious isn't a surprise to me the surprise to me is the rate of change, and what seems to be an increasing rate. In eight years the percentage of respondents who reported that they believed in God dropped by eight percentage points.  The number of Atheists (certain there is no God) more than doubled in ten years, from four to nine percent of the population.  These are huge demographic changes.  Interestingly the only group that expressed a belief in God that grew was the ones who said they were "somewhat certain there is a God", which would be the people I would peg in the spiritual but not religious area.

The reason that I think there will be an increase in the rate of the increase in disbelief is largely based on demographics, younger people believe at a substantially lower rate than older people.  The drops in rates of belief get larger between each age group, so the difference in rates of belief between 25 year olds and 40 year olds is greater than the difference between 40 year olds and 55 year olds.

Don't get me wrong, the USA is still a very religious country in comparison to other industrialized nations with two thirds of young people still believing in God (in some manner).  There is still one third of the population who think the Bible is entirely the Word of God.  About two thirds still believe in some form of magic (miracles, the soul, witchcraft etc..)

There are two ideas that I really want to get across.  The first is that if the change in belief happens over the next decade at the same rate as the last decade then the numbers of people in the USA who think there isn't, or probably isn't, a god will be about fifty percent, the same number as think that there is a god.  The second is that according to this poll less than one third of Americans think God controls what happens on the Earth.