Ethics

More on the Religious Identification Survey

By Ed Brayton

Ilya Somin has some interesting observations about the American Religious Identification Survey that was released last week. He notes, as I did on my radio show last week, that identifying oneself as non-religious is not the same as identifying as a non-believer or atheist.

A lot of media attention (e.g. - here) has focused on the new American Religious Identification Survey of American's views on religion, which finds that 15% of Americans now say they have no religious affiliation, up from 8% in 1990.

Lack of religious affiliation doesn't necessarily imply atheism however. When asked whether they believe in God, only 2.3% of ARIS respondents said that "there is no such thing" as God. However, 5.7% said that they are "not sure," and 4.3% said that "there is no way to be sure." These two latter answers might be categorized as agnostic. Unfortunately, ARIS didn't ask this question in 1990, so we do not know whether the proportion of atheists and agnostics has increased since then.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on March 21, 2009 (boomark / email).