There Are Millions Of Atheists In The U.S.

It seems that the prevailing thought in this country is that atheists comprise a tiny minority of U.S. citizens, and most people believe there are very few atheists in this country. They are wrong. The above chart shows the recent growth of non-religious people (people who do not claim a belief in any organized religion) in the United States. It is taken from Pew Research Center surveys taken yearly from 2007 through 2012.

Note that the number of people who openly declare themselves to be atheists has grown each year, and currently is about 2.4% of the total population. That may seem like a tiny number, but if you take the 2010 census figure (308,745,531) it translates into about 7.4 million atheists.

That is obviously an undercount. In many parts of this country, especially in small communities and in the Bible Belt, openly professing to be an atheist can result in serious difficulties (because while religious people claim to be loving and tolerant, many of them react in a hateful way to those who reject religion). Openly declaring an atheist belief can cost a person a job, result in shunning by the community (or even their own family), or even cause physical violence to be directed toward them.

For that reason, many atheists in the United States choose to keep their atheism a secret. Note in the above chart that about one out of every five Americans say they have no religion (about 19.6%) -- and like the number of declared atheists, that percentage grows with each passing year. Currently they make up about 60.5 million people. Now some of these people are those who simply don't care about religion one way or the other, but there are very likely many closeted atheists among this number -- atheists who are just not yet willing to suffer the consequences of openly stating their non-belief.

My point is that if you are an atheist, you have many friends out there in the population who agree with you. At a minimum, there are 7.4 million people who share your non-belief -- and personally, I believe that number is probably much closer to 30 or 40 million people. That's a lot, and it will just grow larger in the coming years.