They’ve released their latest analysis of the demographics of American ‘skeptics’ (they use the word “skeptic” to refer to the combined group of atheists and agnostics). It’s a somewhat confusing report, because they insist on looking at us through the lens of religion — we’re “unchurched”, they use a set of metrics designed for assessing the religious, they refer to Christian and “post-Christian”, and other annoyingly pointless divisions that only matter to Christians), but in all the clutter, there was something that stood out.
It ain’t just the ol’ white boys club any more.
Five Demographic Shifts among Skeptics
They are younger. Skeptics today are, on average, younger than in the past. Twenty years ago, 18 percent of skeptics were under 30 years old. Today that proportion has nearly doubled to 34 percent—nearly one-quarter of the total U.S. population (23%, compared to 17% in 1991). By the same token, the proportion of skeptics who are 65 or older has been cut in half, down to just 7 percent of the segment.They are more educated. Today’s skeptics tend to be better educated than in the past. Two decades ago, one-third of skeptics were college graduates, but today half of the group has a college degree.
More of them are women. Perhaps the biggest transition of all is the entry of millions of women into the skeptic ranks. In 1993 only 16 percent of atheists and agnostics were women. By 2013 that figure had nearly tripled to 43 percent. This enormous increase is not because the number of skeptic men has declined. In fact, men’s numbers have steadily increased over the last two decades—but not nearly as rapidly as among women.
They are more racially diverse. Religious skepticism has become more racially and ethnically inclusive. While whites represented 80 percent of all skeptics 20 years ago, that figure had dropped to 74 percent by 2013. This is largely a reflection of the increasing Hispanic and Asian adults among the skeptic cohort. Asian Americans, the least-Christian ethnic demographic in the United States, especially tend to embrace skepticism. While a growing number of skeptics are Hispanic, they still remain, along with Blacks, less likely than other ethnic groups to accept the idea of a world without God. White Americans, who constitute two-thirds of the country’s total population, are well above average in their embrace of atheism and agnosticism; they comprise three-quarters of the skeptic segment.
They are more dispersed regionally. In decades past, the Northeast and West were seen as isolated hotbeds of atheism and agnosticism. They still remain the areas where skeptics are more likely to live, but the skeptic population is now broadly dispersed across all regions.
Now we just have to get the word out to the big name atheist organizations, which are still a bit behind the times. For that matter, so is Barna. They are trying to explain why the godless are growing, and they reached for the usual “atheist celebrity” trope.
Many of these ideas are initiated, promoted and reinforced by celebrity personalities and media exposure. There has arisen a new stratum of anti-religion celebrity apologists that includes Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Peter Singer, Woody Allen, Phillip Roth, Julia Sweeney and the late Christopher Hitchens.
Yay! One woman. And one dead guy. And two people I’d rather were not associated with atheism, Maher and Woody Allen. Where’s Annie Laurie Gaylor, Susan Jacoby, Sikivu Hutchinson, Natalie Angier, Anthony Pinn, Margaret Downey, David Tamayo, Taslima Nasrin, Patricia Churchland, Cara Santa Maria, Sanal Edamaruku, or Maryam Namazie? If you just want media celebrities, how about Chris Rock or Angelina Jolie or Jodie Foster? It’s rather telling that when they go looking for names that are associated with atheism, they come up with just the usual suspects, people who aren’t at all involved in movement atheism, and one white man who is dead. Why not throw in Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and Baron D’Holbach, too?
It really is weird how they can talk up the fact that 43% of atheists/agnostics are women, and an increasing number of racial minorities, while simultaneously failing to note that a number of people in these groups are leaders and activists. It is important that we break the conceptual stranglehold that so few people are trotted out to represent us, and they don’t reflect the population at work.
I can’t blame Barna, though, when atheists themselves tend to be just as myopic.
Another important implication from this work, though, is that maybe finally we can break away from one old explanation: that the rise of atheism is a consequence of 9/11, and that it’s a bunch of Sam Harris’s getting all angry at Islam and driving everyone to hate religion. It should be obvious now that with all this diversity there are also diverse reasons why people would abandon their faith.
Wait, Woody Allen? When I think of Woody Allen and atheism, I think of that line from Love and Death (“To you I’m an atheist, to god I’m the loyal opposition.”). And that came out 40 years ago. And is probably one of his least remembered films these days. So I doubt he’s drawing many people to atheism, even without considering recent revelations of his disgusting behavior.
I suspect that Christian celebrities are more likely to cause atheism than atheist celebrities.
Barna has the US as 38% post xian.
They sort of get why people are leaving xianity by the millions per year. IMO, it is vaguely #2. Not lack of trust in the local church, which is meaningless. Within my normal driving distance there is something like 40 different churches including 3 types of Lutherans. Which cult am I not supposed to trust?
It’s more the sheer malevolence and ugliness of the fundies, the most visible part of US xianity. And their political arm, the Tea Party/GOP. They own the Dark Side of our society.
MISANDRY!
There has been an important development in fundie xianity. They are getting uglier and more vicious!!! It’s the cornered rat syndrome!!!
1. This is something I’ve noticed for a while.
2.
3. Amanda Marcotte recently noted the same thing. If you want to be cheered up, go read her short article.
4. This is a positive feedback loop. Fewer Oogedy Boogedy xians, more hate and lies, fewer fundies, repeat again and again. There should also be self selection going on. For some people, hate, lies, and hypocrisy just aren’t worth getting up for early on Sunday morning.
4. This is more an impression than a firm conclusion. We lack viciousometers. There is no 12 month hate forecast. Collecting data on hate levels, viciousness, and cornered rat syndrome isn’t going to be easy.
So, this was actually atheists and agnostics, right? It wasn’t “non-religious” people (whatever the fuck that means) that were assumed to be atheists and agnostics?
This seems too good to be true.
If the demographics are shifting so much, the US should see a downfall of the GOP at the elections.
Ah, it says this:
and they do differentiate between the “unchurched” and the group of skeptics.
Still unfortunate to see the two lumped together though. I’m sure some of them are pretty close to being christian…it even reports that the agnostic group are more likely to monthly read the bible.
@F.O.
That would be epic. Hopefully they can be rallied to the cause!
F.O. @ 7,
Not certainly. Election numbers are about which people are most motivated to vote, not a map of political sentiments. I imagine that there’s a lot of incentive to vote amongst the fundamentalists, and not nearly as much in the non-religious.
I get your meaning, though. I’d put my bet on “money in politics” being the problem there moreso than a problem with the demographics.
The Barna Group drives the right wing barmy. Barna does have a tendency to massage numbers and words to benefit rightwing christians (re: “unchurched”) but they don’t fake their results (re: their studies on religion and divorce rates showing fundies were the most divorced, atheists the least). To their credit, despite being owned and run by fundy christians, Barna has shown a willingness to publish results they don’t like themselves.
Why did Barna mention nearly all white males? Possibly an unwillingness to admit they exist, a deliberate omission.
left0ver1under @ # 10: To their credit, despite being owned and run by fundy christians, Barna has shown a willingness to publish results they don’t like themselves.
You beat me to my point: of all the contemporary “conservative” Christians with any organizational clout, George Barna is the only one I can think of who consistently does his best to tell the truth.
F.O:
I hope, but it’s not that simple. Notice that the non-religious are disproportionately young. And in the USA, the young are much less likely to vote.
Furthermore there are a an awful lot of “libertarian” types among atheists.
Finally, the Democrats pander to religion a lot as well. See for example Bernie Sanders sharing pope quotes from his FB page all the time.
I personally became a skeptic before I heard of any of those folks. Except maybe Sagan, but he was just telling me what I was already thinking (preaching to the choir?).
RE: Elections, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the GOP has a long history of gerrymandering and voter obstruction. It’s no coincidence that their efforts in this area have increased as their voter share has dropped.
I believe the main complaint I have seen regarding Barna is one thing: they have a very strict definition of what constitutes “evangelical”. Or some other similar term (maybe it was Biblical literalism). So they are generally pickier about who they put into the Christianest of Christinas category than most other pollsters. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does mean that there might be a discrepancy between Barna’s numbers and everyone else’s numbers for what appear to be identical questions, entirely because of the minor issue regarding definitions for the groupings.
The “extinction burst” might be at play here to explain the stridency that believers present when they find their numbers diminishing. In this phenomenon in the study of behavioral conditioning, when a behavior is no longer rewarded, rather than stop the behavior there is a burst of that behavior. That burst is postulated as some kind of attempt to get those rewards coming again.
If you look at the adoration that a minister gets from his flock as the reward, it makes sense they would be more strident when that adoration dries up.
I’ve used this phenomenon to explain global warming deniers. As the evidence against them builds up, they become even more strident that they are right and we are wrong.
brianpansky @8:
Do they differentiate between “skeptics” and those of us who are as certain of a natural, un-magical world as we are about evolution, gravity, global warming, and post-Newtonian physics? I am NOT a “skeptic” about any of these, and I am tired of being swept up in that wishy-washy term. The “skeptics” I’ve met are just waiting for a suitably convincing personal transcendental experience (Psychotic break? Charismatic love bombing?) to justify them consigning science and civilization to the trash heap and joining with whatever theocratic nonsense looks attractive at the moment.
I wonder what’s causing the 50% drop among the olds. Fear of death? Senility? I’m 68 and can’t imagine getting religious.
And Sanders isn’t even a Democrat – he’s to their left!
What drop? What makes you think they ever were any less religious than they – I mean the same individual people, not the category – were in the past?
> “They are more educated.”
For once, that is not a good thing. it’s nice that more of the higher educated people are proclaiming ‘skepticism’ but it would be even nicer if skepticism took hold in groups at the lower end of the education spectrum.
@UnknownEric: I agree with you on Woody Allen & Love and Death. He certainly doesn’t leap to my mind as a ‘celebrity atheist’.
BTW, my favorite quote from the movie was always “You know, if – if it turns out that there IS a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that – that the worst you can say about him is that basically, he’s an underachiever.”
“If the demographics are shifting so much, the US should see a downfall of the GOP at the elections.”
Racists and sexists do not require religion to justify themselves (cf: the formal atheist movement), and they gleefully make common cause with those who do. The GOP will be fine for the next decade or two until there just aren’t enough white people left to gerrymander into power.
Why would anyone need to read the Bible monthly? Are they reading it one page at a time? I’ve read it through a few times and I don’t think it ever occupied more than a week.
@nothere, it’s not actually a drop in the numbers of olds. It’s that the number of youngs joining the movement has grown much faster.
You have to scroll to the bottom of the Barna article to find it, but the proportion of “unchurched” adults they are finding nearly doubled from 2008 to 2014.