Here’s some interesting info from a relatively recent Gallup poll. This chart shows the percentage of Americans (18 and older) who believe in God or a “universal spirit.” Overall, about 92% of Americans believe in God, which is pretty consistent with the 2008 Religious Landscape Survey conducted by Pew, which sampled about 35,000 people, whereas this Gallup poll had about 1,000 participants. Still, it’s important to point out that the margin of error for this poll is ±4 percentage points (it was only ±0.6 percentage points for the 2008 Pew survey).
What’s really interesting, though, is seeing how much variability there is when you break it down into different demographic and political categories. Notice that for people aged 18-29, God belief is about 10 percentage points lower than it is for all other age groups. That’s more than double the amount of atheists! Holy cow.
One possible interpretation of this is that we’re witnessing a lasting cultural shift, and these 18-to-29-year-olds will continue to be atheists as they grow old (and, potentially, future cohorts of young adults will become increasingly non-religious). An alternative interpretation, however, is that non-belief is more common during this phase in people’s lives, but young adults tend to grow out of their non-belief as they get older. There are a few reasons to believe that this isn’t the case, though.
First of all, I don’t think it’s all that common for people to undergo major changes in their religious beliefs after the age of 30. Conversions and deconversions most likely occur during people’s formative years, and also during times of great change or upheaval in their lives (which are also a lot more common during adolescence and young adulthood). Anecdotally, at least, I’ve never known any atheists who’ve gone the other way and have become religious (or re-religious).
Second, I can think of at least one major cultural change that could possibly explain such a big increase in the number of non-believers among this cohort: the internet. It’s possible that steadfast religious belief depends in part on remaining ignorant to other cultures, other religious beliefs, and critical opinions or contradictory evidence towards one’s own beliefs. Given the incredible amount of information that’s become readily available to Americans as the internet has come to play a central role in all of our lives, it’s entirely plausible that the internet has been a big part of this increase in non-belief.
Third, there’s this chart from Gallup which shows that there really has been an overall increase in the number of non-believing Americans over the past 30+ years (which wouldn’t be the case if non-belief were only a phase that previous generations have also experienced during young adulthood):
(source: Gallup)
