Re: Atheists identified as America’s mo st distrusted minority
Sean Johnson Andrews wrote:
One question though: The study cites 3% as the number of people who could be defined as atheists. I seem to remember much larger numbers reported by people on this list (maybe as much as 30%). Are they off in their measurements, defining it differently, or just less prone to exaggeration? Or maybe I’m misremembering.
You’re probably thinking of CUNY’s 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which was a successor to their 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification. Here’s a bit of the key findings http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/key_findings.htm: “[T]he greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight percent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001.” But that includes people who identify as atheists (just 0.4% of the pop), agnostics (0.5%), humanists (about 0.02%), seculars (also around 0.02%) - and those who merely say “no religion,” 13%.
Doug