The percentage of Americans claiming no religion (called nones) continues to rise, going from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001 and now 15 percent. But the big news may be that New England, sanctuary to the Puritans who helped birth the United States and bequeathed its religious legacy, has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religiously affiliated section of the country.
Atheists may have lots of best sellers in the bookstores, but the number of true nonbelievers remains relatively small: About 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. On the other hand, the overall number of avowed atheists has grown sharply from 900,000 to 1.6 million since 2001.
The percentage of Americans who are Christian is edging downward, to 76 percent of the population. (The decline from 1990 to the 2001 survey was far steeper, 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent.) But a look behind the numbers shows that most of the decline is due to the ongoing erosion in mainline Protestantism and that evangelical or nondenominational Protestantism is filling the vacuum.
The East Coast Catholicism that was once the lodestar of the church in the United States is continuing to lose demographic heft to the Southwest, to the extent that California now has a higher proportion of Catholics than does New England.
The Jewish community remains relatively stable when identified by ethnicity alone, but the number identifying as religiously Jewish declined somewhat. Meanwhile, the Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .6 percent in 2008.
2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)
The religious fanatics and George W. Bush took the world as close to the point of no return as it's ever been. For eight long years every scientific fact about our planet and solar system was ignored while these hypocrites raped and pillaged earth in the name of Jesus, a damn made up creature of mythology like Medusa and Cyclopes. Immaculate Conception my ass just let some sterile guy come home from a hard days' work and his wife tell him that she got pregnant by Immaculate Conception. Just let this guy's wife tell her story to a divorce court, a divorce court made up of Christians no less, and see how far she gets with this bull shit.
