15 Numbers Which Prove That America Is Turning Away From Religion and Christianity

The decline of the religion and Christian faith in America is accelerating. The results of a last year survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and the numbers are staggering. The percentage of all U.S. adults with no religious affiliation at all is nearly up to 20 percent. Even more frightening, 32 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 have no religious affiliation whatsoever. Meanwhile, the percentage of the U.S. population that is Protestant has hit an all-time low. This survey just confirms what a whole bunch of other surveys have shown over the past few years. The truth is that America is very clearly turning away from religion and Christianity. Right up front I will disclose that I am an atheist, so I consider this to be a very good thing. Others that are reading this may consider the statistics below to be bad thing. But what we should all be able to agree on is that the long-term trends clearly show that Americans are increasingly rejecting the Christian faith. So what does this mean for the future of our nation? Where does America go from here? Those are very interesting questions.

Once upon a time, the Christian faith had an overwhelming influence on every day life in America. Even as late as 1972, a whopping 62 percent of all Americans were Protestant and an astounding 93 percent of all Americans claimed to be affiliated with a religion of one sort or another.

But now things are dramatically changing.

Posted below are 15 numbers which prove that America is turning away from religion and Christianity. The first 10 numbers are from the new survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

#1 Nearly one-fifth of all U.S. adults have no religious affiliation whatsoever. Back in 1972, only 7 percent of all U.S. adults had no religious affiliation.

#2 The number of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown by 25 percent over the past five years.

#3 The younger you are the more likely you are not to be affiliated with a religion. 9 percent of all U.S. adults that are 65 or older have no religious affiliation, but a whopping 32 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 have no religious affiliation.

#4 88 percent of those that are religiously unaffiliated “are not looking for religion”.

#5 73 percent of the religiously unaffiliated support gay marriage and 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated support legalized abortion.

#6 The religiously unaffiliated now make up 24 percent of all registered voters “who are Democrats or lean Democratic”.

#7 For the first time ever, Protestants do not make up a majority of the U.S. population. In 2007, Protestants made up 53 percent of the U.S. population, but now they only make up 48 percent of the U.S. population. Way back in 1972, Protestants made up 62 percent of the U.S. population.

#8 29 percent of all U.S. adults “seldom or never attend religious services”.

#9 51 percent of all U.S. adults believe that churches and other religious organizations “are too concerned with money and power”.

#10 66 percent of all U.S. adults believe that religion is “losing its influence on American life”.

Here are some more numbers which show that Christianity is declining in America….

#11 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans with “no religion” more than doubled between 1990 and 2008.

#12 According to the American Religious Identification Survey, only 76 percent of all Americans identified themselves as “Christian” of one type or another in 2008. Back in 1990, 86 percent of all Americans identified themselves as “Christian” of one type or another.

#13 A study conducted by the Barna Group discovered that nearly 60 percent of all Christians in the 15 to 29 year old age bracket are no longer actively involved in any church.

#14 It is being projected that the percentage of Americans attending church in

2050 will be of what it is today.

#15 According to a study done by Life Way Research, membership in Southern Baptist churches will fall by close to 50 percent by the year 2050 if current trends continue.

If you are a Christian, those numbers should be very sobering. The Church is most definitely losing ground in the United States.

Okay there's a little more:

Success of anti-God books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, AC Grayling and others, the different faiths - though each believes it has the one and only divinely revealed truth and often fights to the death to prove it - combine in curious harmony against secularists.

They blame us for all the evils of modernity, as if they could point to some morally better time when people feared God and sinned less. There is, of course, no evidence that God-fearers ever behaved better than the ungodly. One of the great mysteries of religion is why, even when people believed that heaven awaited the virtuous and everlasting torment was the destiny of sinners, there is no sign it made them any less prone to all the sins flesh is heir to. Yet they turn on atheists for lacking any moral base without a God.

I could say we are mortally offended and demand protection from such insult. But it is the prerogative of religions to be protected from feeling offended. Priests, imams and rabbis reserve for their beliefs a special respect, ringfenced from normal public argument. It is abusive and insulting to suggest that belief in gods and miracles is delusional, or that religions are inherently anti-women and anti-gay. Meanwhile, non-believers suffer the far worse insult that we inhabit a moral vacuum. But we will live with the insult if we are free to reply that there is no inherent virtue in being religious either: it does not make people behave better.

The unctuous claim there is a special religious ethos that can be poured like a sauce over schools and public services to improve them morally has been bought, to a depressing extent, and over a third of all state schools are now religious institutions despite overwhelming evidence that their only unique quality is selection of better pupils, storing up trouble with ever more cultural segregation.

To be human is not to be particularly rational, the senses often overwhelming common sense. There is no emotional or spiritual deficiency in rejecting religions that infantilise the imagination with impossible beliefs.