Nonreligious people are the largest spiritual group in the US. Why don’t we hear more about them?
When the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released its most recent Census of American Religion, its survey data on U.S. spiritual beliefs identified nine types of Christians (including five types of Protestants and three types of Catholics). However, when it came to religiously unaffiliated Americans, it lumped them all into one group: the “religiously unaffiliated.” PRRI’s other studies and those by the Pew Research Center often break down the religiously unaffiliated into three subgroups: atheists (who don’t believe in god), agnostics (who are unsure if God exists or say it’s impossible to know), and “nothing in particular” (a subgroup often referred to as the “nones” who don’t align with any specific religious tradition or label). Related Religion taught them to hide who they are. They overcame & are living wonderful lives. But these self-chosen descriptors for survey respondents include people with varying religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, some atheists pray, some agnostics attend church, and some “nones” make donations to religious groups — making these terms even more ambiguous and confusing to the average American. While PRRI, Pew, and other polling groups often release statistics on religiously unaffiliated Americans, they never break these Americans into sub-groups, leaving a blind spot on what they actually believe or practice. For example, some religiously unaffiliated people do believe in a “higher power,” some worship lesser-known deities, or have their own spiritual practices outside of a mainstream monotheistic religion — but you’d never know that from the available data. Never Miss a Beat Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Furthermore, mainstream media hardly ever reports on religiously unaffiliated Americans as an influential group the same way they do with, say, evangelical Christians: For example, while some political news readers may know that approximately 81% of white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump in both the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, far fewer are likely to know that over 70% of “secular” voters supported Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in 2024. To better understand why it’s so difficult to get detailed data on religiously unaffiliated voters, why the media tends to ignore this group as a whole, and how this skews public perceptions about religious influence (especially amid rising Christian nationalism), LGBTQ Nation interviewed PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman, secular data analyst Juhem Navarro-Rivera, American Atheists President Nick Fish (an out gay man), and Freedom from Religion Foundation Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “At PRRI, we are nonpartisan, so we’re not like trying to say religion is good or bad or anything like that,” Deckman said. “We’re really just trying to understand how religion or … a lack of religious identity shapes people’s views about politics: support for LGBTQ issues, support for reproductive rights, tendency to hold Christian nationalist views. So it’s really just a layer of analysis.” “We only care about the religious people because I think we care about the religious story in America,” she added, noting that PRRI looks at how religious beliefs intersect with other characteristics like race, gender, age, and geographic location. A pie chart and legend from PRRI’s 2024 Census of American Religion showing the percentages of Americans who identify with different religious faiths. The pie chart shows 11 types of Christians, but just one group for the religiously unaffiliated. | Public Religion Research Institute Deckman noted that the 11 different types of Christians differentiated in the 2024 Census of American Religion have existed for decades in the field of religious sociology. “Part of the broad categorizations is a recognition that, even within these different groups, there’s no monolithic group,” she said. Put simply, each group has distinct histories and theological outlooks that result in different political behaviors. Gaylor said that each group essentially represents a schism in faith that divides each denomination into different sects. “We have historically, as social scientists, tended to look, for example, at Black Protestants separately, in part because the Black church has played such a distinct role in American religious history, and Black Protestants tend to look very different in their political behavior than do white Protestants in general,” she said. A Black Protestant church might view religion through a lens of Black liberation theology, she said, by focusing on Bible stories like Moses leading the slaves out of Egypt. Such a lens (and the congregants’ lived experiences as Black people in America) shapes their views about Jesus and social equality in ways different from, say, a White evangelical Protestant in the South. “Hispanic Catholics and white Catholics, for example, are very different when it comes to things like their voting behavior, their views on immigration, their views on lots of rights. And so, what we try to do in our research is that we think those categories, broken down, are more illuminating than, say, putting all Catholics together [in one large group],” she added. So who are the religiously unaffiliated and what do they believe? PRRI’s religious census estimates that about 28% of Americans self-identify as religiously unaffiliated, a percentage representing 77.5 million adults (nearly double the entire population of California). Among this group, 59% identified as “nones,” 21% as agnostic, and 20% as atheist. “We’re 28% of the population,” Gaylor said, “the largest segment by religious identification, compared to [any one religious denomination].” PRRI’s census also showed that 50% of LGBTQ+ people identify as religiously unaffiliated, by far the largest concentration of LGBTQ+ people in any of the census’s self-assigned (non-)religious groups. The religiously unaffiliated support LGBTQ+ rights by margins much higher than most Christians: An estimated 83% of religiously unaffiliated people support LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections, 84% support same-sex marriage, 69% oppose legal restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors, 54% oppose laws forbidding gender marker changes on drivers’ licenses, and 72% oppose religious-based refusals to do business with gay or lesbian people. Washington, DC – June 9, 2019: Atheist LGBTQ+ allies hold signs at Capital Pride | Shutterstock American Atheists’ 2019 Secular Survey, a non-representative national survey of 34,000 American Atheists’ members, found that more than half of respondents (54.5%) reported negative experiences with family members, 29.4% experienced discrimination in education, and 21.7% in the workplace due to their nonreligious identity. Nonreligious Americans living in highly religious communities were nearly 2.5 times more likely to experience discrimination in education and public services than those living in secular areas. LGBTQ+ atheists in the survey were more likely to report social discrimination or familial rejection because of their atheism, their LGBTQ+ Identity, or both. They were also more likely to report loneliness, isolation, and depression because of this discrimination. “There’s just profound overlap between the LGBTQ community and the non-religious community,” Fish said. “We tend to be more likely to be LGBTQ+ ourselves, and in the reverse of that is true as well, in part because of how we’ve been treated by the churches that we grew up in.” PRRI’s March 2024 survey on religiously unaffiliated Americans backs up Fish’s assertion. The survey showed that 47% of religiously unaffiliated Americans no longer identify with their childhood religion because of its teachings about LGBTQ+ people, an 18% increase from the same statistic PRRI reported in 2016. And yet, the same survey found that 40% of religiously unaffiliated Americans describe themselves as “spiritual,” with 9% saying that they’re looking for a religion that feels right for them. Interestingly, PRRI’s census also asked respondents about their religious behaviors, such as how often they pray, read religious texts, make religious donations, or attend religious services. It turns out that those behaviors don’t entirely dictate whether a person describes themselves as religious or not, since many of these allegedly “religiously unaffiliated” folks still observe those various religious practices. For example, 9% of religiously unaffiliated people attend religious services and make religious donations, 11% read religious texts, and 24% of them pray. This doesn’t mean they’re all secretly religious: One may read religious texts for personal or educational reasons, may donate to religious charities to support their secular work, or may spiritually communicate with deities, higher powers, or objects of worship without following a major world religion. “A lot of these boundaries are really fuzzy,” Fish acknowledged. “They are not, you know, they’re not nice, neat boxes. They are kind of all over the place.” In fact, American Atheist’s 2019 Secular Survey allowed respondents to self-identify not only as atheist, agnostic, and nonreligious but also as humanist (someone who focuses on ethics, reason, and empathy as the basis of moral behavior), skeptics (one who focuses on evidence-based claims to critically question or doubt religious authority), freethinkers (who reject institutional and religious dogma to think independently), and secular (people advocate for a separation of church and state in daily life and governance). A bar graph showing how respondents to Atheist America’s 2019 U.S. Secular Survey described their own nonreligious identities. | American Atheists “If you ask me, ‘What is your religion?’ I wouldn’t say that my religion is atheist or agnostic, because, to me, that is not a religion,” Navarro-Rivera explained. “And then, if I answer questions about belief that say, ‘No, I don’t believe in God,’ that will make me an atheist…. which leads to a lot of potential confusion” since these narrow labels may not necessarily match how a person self-identifies. “You could be religious and an atheist, or you could be a person who did not go to church, who did not feel an attachment to religion, but also have some sort of attachment to Christ,” he continued. “I don’t think the surveys actually reflect that.” To Navarro-Rivera, current polling and reporting about religiously unaffiliated people’s spiritual practices don’t provide a complete picture. “These questions are misleading. So, a lot of what we know about the non-religious is what they don’t believe, what they don’t do, and less so what they do believe and what they actually do.” For example, atheists may commune with deities in a way that is unlike prayer. They may gather with other similarly-minded spiritual practitioners in ways that don’t exactly fit most people’s description of a “religious service.” Current polling doesn’t look too closely at what religiously unaffiliated people actually believe for a couple of reasons. Foremost, it’s expensive to run a nationally representative survey. Even groups like PRRI or Atheists America don’t always have the necessary funding for it. “To get the level of specificity and the amount of data that we would need to be able to do the cross-population comparison, and also having the nationally representative sample … we would have had to survey like 100,000 people, which gets expensive very quickly,“ Fish said. Deckman agreed. Secondly, the spiritual beliefs and practices of religiously unaffiliated Americans can sometimes be so individual that it’s hard for pollsters to know how exactly to count them, how to classify them into larger groups, or how to use their responses to make accurate statements about their group’s general political and social views. For example, when Navarro-Rivera helped sort through the 50,000 responses for a past American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), many respondents self-identified as Jedi, the fictional warrior monks from the Star Wars sci-fi action franchise who maintain peace and justice by using a mystical energy field known as “the Force.” But there weren’t enough Jedis to place them in their own category. So ARIS simply classified them as “other.” The group was so small that it was hard to definitively say that all Jedis hold certain general social or political views, Navarro-Rivera said. This difficulty also applies to witches, neo-pagans, practitioners of smaller native religions, or people who are otherwise spiritual. Why doesn’t the media focus more on non-religious people? A high-ranking Romanian Orthodox priest talking to the press. | Shutterstock Even though 28% of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated, mainstream media seems predominantly fascinated with Christianity. For example, a Google search for news articles containing the terms “religiously unaffiliated” and “2024 elections” yielded 16 results. The same search for “2024 elections” and “Christian” yielded 127 results. “There’s hardly ever any mention of atheists or people who have no religion in any public discourse, Gaylor said. “It does happen. Even George Bush occasionally would [mention] it. It’s not that it’s unheard of, but we get ignored. I don’t get the media banging down our door… It’s marginalization.” Fish added, “The non-religious are sort of treated as a footnote rather than as a unique constituency or unique demographic that needs to be investigated more.” For Deckman, the reason is simple: “Roughly two-thirds of Americans are identified as Christian… a pretty solid majority of Americans. [So] there’s probably more interest in understanding their political behavior through that lens.” Christians form a large bloc of both major political parties, she added. While 13% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats are religiously unaffiliated, she added, 84% of Republicans and 54% of Democrats identify as Christian. Christians also have an outsized representation in Congress. While 68% of Americans identify as Christian, an estimated 88% of federal legislators do. (Only 0.6% identify as religiously unaffiliated.) The U.S. House of Representatives has a Freethought Caucus dedicated to defending the secular character of government and promoting policy solutions based on reason and science. But while it currently has 35 members, its members have always been Democrats, and they’re not all atheists. For example, one of its current members, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), is Muslim. “Privately, I know from conversations with other members of Congress… there are other non-religious people in Congress that haven’t said those words out loud yet, who are nervous about what doing so would have on their electoral prospects and on their careers,” Fish said. He encourages Democratic legislators to embrace their religious non-affiliation while also explaining how their personal values, priorities, and other inspirations may align with Christians. “That authenticity matters far more than… if you sit in a pew at all on Sundays,” he said. “That’s the key thing to kind of promoting that and breaking down those barriers that are still there.” All of our interviewees agreed that the rise of Christian nationalism has created a renewed media interest in religious reporting, especially (as Deckman pointed out) when it’s about topics like the president fighting with the Pope over the war in Iran. Such reporting might compel journalists to see religious viewpoints while ignoring the religiously unaffiliated. The interviewees also agree that finances may play a role in the media’s religious focus. “There’s a structural disadvantage for our community in terms of funders,” Fish said. “Large foundations that have large pots of money [want] to better understand challenges or the views and beliefs of religious demographics, retaining people in the church, to grow the church, [et cetera].” Deckman agreed. “Sometimes we don’t always have the resources,” she said. While the nation has large secular groups — like American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the American Humanist Association, and Americans United for Separation of Church — these groups, by and large, advocate for civil rights. Unlike other, larger religious and political groups, these organizations don’t coordinate and share funds to help raise their collective voices, Fish added. Gaylor commented, “We’re catching up with the Christian nationalists who have an armory, basically of money… The majority of the public is not Christian nationalist, but right now, we’re definitely outgunned.” Some journalists may depend on well-known religious institutions for their reporting, Fish noted. For example, if a non-Catholic journalist is writing about Catholicism, he said, they may call a Catholic person they already know, the office of a regional archbishop, or a Catholic conference to get an authoritative explanation on a religious issue. “That’s a challenge for people in understanding atheists,” Fish said. “I’m the president of American Atheists, but I’m certainly not the pope of atheism. And there’s not an [atheist] archbishop of New York or whatever to call for the perspective of atheists on a topic.” Gaylor disagreed, however, as religious leaders often differ in opinion, and journalists don’t regularly contact atheist organizations to better understand non-religious views. Nevertheless, Fish thinks Americans in general may misunderstand who atheists are and what they believe. An atheist organization tent in San Diego, California, on August 19, 2017. | Shutterstock After September 11, 2001, Fish said some atheist media figures stood out by confronting or mocking religion as “hokey,” “strange,” or “absurd.” This “righteous anger,” he said, was a response to widespread religious abuses, but he feels that this approach didn’t “communicate to the majority of Americans in a way that promotes understanding.” Instead of confronting or mocking religion, Fish said his group focuses on communicating shared values and issues that Americans feel strongly about, regardless of religion. Navarro-Rivera agreed that public understanding of atheists is skewed. Some people (including atheists) may be most familiar with famous atheist thinkers, such as Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, or Sam Harris. But some of these men hold conservative, patriarchal, or even racist views that don’t accurately reflect the views of most non-religious people. He added that media outlets may have an inherent fear of or respect for religions as authoritative social institutions that bias reporters towards defending religion or viewing non-religious people as anti-religious or even anti-social. “Every once in a while, you’ll get these articles … [from mainstream media outlets] talking about the importance of religion, and why is it that people are becoming less religious? But the fact is, if you look at the values of the non-religious, they’re pretty humane. I mean, these are not like barbarian marauders who have no morals.” “Are [these outlets] just defending religion as an institution and fearful of what happens when the unwashed masses actually don’t need someone to guide them?… When people don’t want to be part of [religious institutions], what happens? I don’t think we have been, as a society, able to explore [that as a] larger societal conversation… A lot of the coverage hasn’t reflected the fact that we need to explore what happens in a society that doesn’t care about God.” Ignorance about non-religious Americans allows right-wing media outlets like Fox News to play upon that ignorance and make people afraid of people with different beliefs, Fish said. Deckman admitted, “It’s a fair point that the unaffiliated are a very broad group that doesn’t get discussed a lot, [and] there’s lots of differences within those groups.” Gaylor noted that current trends suggest that the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans is only likely to increase in the coming years, as Pew research from 2025 shows that 44% of 18- to 29-year-olds have no religious affiliation. “A lot of people are questioning the goodness of religion, and it goes along with the fact that the people who are doing the most horrible things in the country are claiming to be Christians and doing it in the name of religion,” Navarro-Rivera said. “This particular brand of white evangelicals has primarily stolen or taken over the brand of Christianity.” He and Fish both said Christian nationalists are comfortable ignoring non-religious people and actively cutting them out of their conception of who counts as “real Americans,” even though Christian nationalists’ views are completely out of step with the actual values that most Americans hold. Navarro-Rivera and Gaylor said this diversity of belief threatens Christian nationalists’ narratives and power. “Given what we’ve found, [non-religious Americans] could swing elections,” Gaylor said. “We’re dangerous [and a part] of changes in our country that are freaking out white Christian nationalism.” “I’ve been saying for years, ‘Why aren’t politicians catching up with the change in demographics? Why aren’t they wooing us?'” she added. “They really woo religion or they wear religion on their sleeve… But what about us and our troubles?” She noted that 98% of her organization’s members are registered voters, and almost the same percentage said they voted in the last election. She also said a recent poll of her members showed their progressive views on numerous topics. “It’s so important that we flex our muscles and our voices are heard,” Gaylor said. “Our voices are terribly important to protecting our democracy.” Fish agreed: “When you have a diverse group of people in a room, you have a diverse set of perspectives…. Embracing [that] all have lends something that’s very much uniquely American to our society. That’s incredibly valuable, and promotes us living together and in being able to exist in society.” Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
English
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)