20 Percent of Americans Answer 'No Religion' in Survey

This is the same news every 6 months, because the trend for religious affiliation in the United States goes down since decades and now reached another record low in relation to when it began to be tracked in the 1930s, according to recent analysis of the newly released biannual General Social Survey.

The analyzed data on religious attitudes is part of this highly cited long-term survey of the US population, in the form of a representative poll conducted by NORC, an independent research institute at the University of Chicago.

Results of the survey—which looked at numerous issues, including attitudes about gun ownership and how tax dollars should be spent, and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation—are being released now and in coming weeks.

The researchers note that the share of a nationally representative group that reported no religious preference jumped from 8 percent in 1990 to now 20 percent.

“This continues a trend of Americans disavowing a specific religious affiliation that has accelerated greatly since 1990,” says lead author and sociologist Mike Hout of University of California, Berkeley.

Hout and UC Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer are authors of another General Social Survey study that stated the same results already in 2002. when they noted the ongoing rise in the number of “unchurched.”

Responses in the survey were to the question, “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?”

Some of the datamining results in the poll pertaining to religious affiliation and trends are the following:

•     Liberals are far more likely to claim “no religion” (40 percent) than conservatives (9 percent)
•     Men are more likely than women to claim “no religion” (24 percent of men versus 16 percent of women).
•     More whites claimed “no religion” (21 percent) compared to African Americans (17 percent) and Mexican Americans (14 percent).
•     More than one-third of 18-to-24-year-olds claimed “no religion” compared to just 7 percent of those 75 and older.
•     Residents of the Midwestern and Southern states were least likely to claim “no religion” compared to respondents in the Western, Mountain, and Northeastern states. But Midwesterners and Southerners are catching up, Hout says.
•     Educational differences among those claiming “no religion” are small compared to other demographic differences.
•     About one-third of Americans identify with a conservative Protestant denomination, one-quarter are Catholics (although 35 percent were raised Catholic), and 1.5 percent are Jewish.

The General Social Survey has been tracking major social and cultural trends in American society since 1972, when only 5 percent of those polled claimed no religion.

Since 1990, an uptick in those identifying themselves as following no particular religion has progressed steadily with 18 percent identifying as such in 2010 and 20 percent in 2012.