Every few years, a new Pew study is done, and the media and others use it to claim that the belief in God is in decline. But each time, the results are generally quite misrepresented and show a misunderstanding of religion in general.
So let’s just first start with the numbers. In the last decade, among those polled, those who answered that they were Christian have fallen 12% in a decade. Today, it stands at 65%. Those who are classified as none, as they have no religious affiliation, went up 9%. It stands at 26% today. So it would seem, with just those numbers, that atheism is rising quite quickly, or at least that is how many are portraying it.
In reality, during the last decade, atheism has risen by 2%, standing at 4% today. Agnostics have also increased 2%, standing at 5%. That’s a total of 9%, meaning that the rest of that 26%, a total of 17%, is something else, or nothing in particular. There is a caveat here as well. Agnostic does not equate to atheist or even a lack of belief in God. One can be an agnostic theist, as I am, and have faith in God or a god, but identify as agnostic based on the concept of knowing.
There is another caveat. We can’t say for sure what those who aren’t affiliated or have no religion in particular, really mean. If we look at this from a historical view, what we have seen in some segments of Christianity are people who are leaving the faith, aren’t identifying as Christian, but still have a belief in God or a god. Some even subscribe to the ideas that form a foundation of Christianity, but they resist the label because of outside reasons. I personally don’t care for the label as I find that it hinders debates and discussions because there are so many preconceived ideas of what a Christian is.
This particular study doesn’t seem to have asked the question about a belief in a god, but previous studies from 2007 and 2014 show that overall, there was virtually no decline in the belief in a god. What changed over that time was how certain they were about that belief, as in, did one believe it was a cold hard fact, or was it more of something in regards to faith. What the results showed is that more are taking it simply on faith that a god exists.
So what does this all mean? It means that some are leaving the church, they are distancing themselves from a label, but overall, belief in a god has only had a very modest decrease over the last decade. This shouldn’t be unexpected just looking at trends in the US.
Just a quick breakdown of that. After WWII, faith declined worldwide. The Holocaust changed religion in general. It rocked the world, and religion felt that impact. In Europe, that decline never really changed. The US was different because religion in general is different here. While faith in general did decline in the decades after WWII, with people in the 60s being able to declare God was dead, it began rebounding in the late 70s, and really peaked in the late 80s.
Since the 90s, faith has declined a bit, and has changed. Historians would expect a decline after a peak. But the decline hasn’t been drastic overall. The idea that religion is declining quickly in the US, or that atheism is on a quick rise, is simply a myth that is created by misrepresenting the numbers.