Religiosity And Atheism In The World And The U.S.

The information in the graphs and charts above comes from a WINN-Gallup International Poll from 2012 (not connected to the more widely known Gallup Poll). But I think the numbers will still be much the same. If anything, the numbers for the non-religious and atheists will have climbed a little, since that has been the trend for decades now.

Right-wing fundamentalists like to call the United States a "christian" or at least a "religious" nation. If that was ever really true, it is becoming less true all the time. Note that religiosity in the United States (the percentage claiming to be a religious person) is about the same as the global average. The global average is 59%, while the United States is 60% religious (certainly not an overwhelming number).

While the number of people proclaiming their atheism is smaller in the U.S. than the global average (5% to 13%), the number saying they are not religious is larger (30% to 23%). This non-religious group contains skeptics, agnostics, those who simply don't care about religion, and I suspect, a good number of closeted atheists.

But the most interesting graph for me is the bottom one. It shows the 10 countries where religiosity has declined the most (out of all the countries in the world). The United States is on that list, and the number of people claiming to be religious has dropped by 13% (significantly larger than the global average decline of 9%). That's a huge drop in just seven years (from 2005 to 2012), and shows the number of atheists and non-religious people are growing fast in this country.

This has been the trend for many years now, but I suspect it is growing faster now because of the hard-hearted (and indefensible) positions taken by many fundamentalists -- combining religion and politics, and seemingly more interested in judging people than in helping them. They are, in my opinion, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

NOTE -- My apologies for misspelling the word "religiosity" on a couple of the charts above.