The share of American adults who identify as religiously unaffiliated, known as “Nones, is now larger than any individual religious cohort, according to a new study published Wednesday.
Over one quarter (28 percent) of American adults now identify as religiously unaffiliated compared to just 16 percent back in 2007, outpacing Catholics (23 percent) and evangelical Protestants (24 percent), according to a Pew Research study released Wednesday.
Notably, over half of all Nones polled by Pew believe in one form or another in a higher power. While barely over a tenth (13 percent) have faith in “God as described in the Bible,” over half (56 percent) believe in some “other high power” altogether. Just 31 percent of Nones do not subscribe to either belief or refused to answer the question.
Nearly half (49 percent) say that some form of spirituality is important to them personally.
“I think it’s possible these people don’t believe in anything [supernatural]. We just don’t have the language yet to describe what they do believe,” an academic who consulted with Pew told the Washington Post. “When someone sees the stars and has an overwhelming, spiritual experience of awe, and they call it a ‘higher power,’ what does that actually mean? And that’s the next step in research. We don’t have answers yet. This report is showing where we need to do more research.”
The millions of religiously unaffiliated Americans are broken down into three main camps: agnostics (20 percent), atheists (17 percent), and those who believe “nothing in particular” (63 percent). Nones are also near evenly split between men (51 percent) and women (47 percent) and, as Pew notes, “younger than the population of Americans who identify with a religion.”
The emergence of young, well-educated, Nones in recent decades continues to shape the social fabric and contours of the United States, particularly given the religiously unaffiliated’s low levels of civic engagement, volunteerism, and voting compared with their religious peers. “We know politically, for example,” the study’s lead researcher told NPR on Wednesday, “that religious Nones are very distinctive. They are among the most strongly and consistently liberal and Democratic constituencies in the United States.”
In 2022, a Pew survey found that most American adults saw the rise of religious disaffiliation negatively, with almost half (45 percent) affirming that the United States should remain a “Christian Nation.”
Notably, the rate of self-identified Nones in Pew’s latest poll dropped slightly from a pandemic high of over 30 percent in the last couple of years.