Americans Are Less Religious

Despite all the news surrounding the support of Sweet Cakes owners raising over $200,000 to cover their fine for refusing to make a cake for a lesbian couple — Americans still aren't that religious. In fact, a study shows that the number of religious people in the nation is at its lowest point since 1930.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University, crunched data on people's religious attitudes that were found in the General Social Survey. The survey is biannual and highly respected. The data is gathered by the University of Chicago's research institute.

With the numbers in hand, sociologists Mike Hout, Claude Fischer, and Mark Chaves found that in 2011, one in five Americans reported that they had "no religious preference," which is double what it was in 1990. That breaks down to about 20 percent of the American population saying "no thanks" to religion. In 1990 only eight percent of people refused religious ties. Trout, the lead researcher, was unsurprised by the study's results. "This continues a trend of Americans disavowing a specific religious affiliation that has accelerated greatly since 1990," he said in a press release announcing the results.

This is not to say that more people are atheists, it just means that more people are refusing to claim a specific sect. The question the stats were gathered from was "What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?"

Other facts from the study:

- Men are less religious than women. 24 percent of men said they had "no religion," compared to just 16 percent of women.
- Surprise! People living in the south and midwest are the most religious. Another non-surprise? Liberals are less religious than conservatives.
- White people were the least religious. 21 percent of caucasians claimed no religion, compared to 17 percent of blacks and 14 percent of Mexicans.
- There's a big disconnect about religion when you look at age. Almost a third of young people (18 to 24 year olds) said they had no religion. Those 75 and older? Only seven percent reported no religion.

So why all the religious doubt? Well, all the scandals the Catholic church are involved in certainly don't help. But it's also indicative of a world where information is shared so easily that more people get exposed to different ideas than simply what they grow up with. Back in 1990, if you lived in a small town where most people were religious, you probably thought everyone was that way. Therefore you didn't question it much. Now all that small town person has to do to find dissenting thoughts is turn on their smartphone. It's a different world now, and people are finding it harder to say that they fit into one specific category.

[Pic via Flickr - JasonParis]