The Non-Religious States of America
The Non-Religious States of America
New survey data indicates
that religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. are diverse—and in many
places, they make up a greater share of the population than any faith group.
There was a time, not
too long ago, when the vast majority of Americans identified as Christians, at
least nominally. In some places, this dynamic hasn’t changed much: Head south,
for example, and you’ll find that roughly 60 percent of Mississippians are
Baptists. But in at least 20 states, religiously unaffiliated people make up a
greater share of the population than any one faith group or denomination.
These findings
are drawn from a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, or
PRRI, which sampled more than 101,000 U.S. adults between January 2016 and
January 2017. The report’s state-by-state break-downs offer a detailed look at
the geography of American religion—and non-religion. People who don’t identify
with any particular religion also don’t fit any particular demographic mold:
They come from a range of racial, income, and educational backgrounds. While
Christianity still dominates the country’s religious landscape, people who
don’t have much connection to religion are gaining an increasingly large
cultural footprint in certain places.
Religious
disaffiliation isn’t exactly new in the U.S. The country has always been home
to a sizable minority of people who don’t go to church or identify with any
faith. Religiosity has come in waves: Historians say that early 19th-century America looked a lot like
America today, for example, with large groups of people not associated with any
religious institution.
Over the last
few decades, religious disaffiliation has been rising relative to earlier
points in the 20th century. In 2014, Pew Research Center found that the share of unaffiliated adults in the U.S. had
grown from 16 to 23 percent over a seven-year period. While roughly 70 percent
of American adults identify as Christians, the so-called nones—people with no religion in
particular—have been growing as a share of the population.
The new PRRI
data shows that this is happening more noticeably in some places than others.
Roughly 41 percent of Vermonters and 33 percent of those from New Hampshire
aren’t affiliated with any particular religion, carrying the banner of
secularism for the Northeast. This was also true in the Pacific Northwest,
where more than one-third of residents in Oregon and Washington didn’t claim a
specific faith.
But there were
some surprises in the geographic break-down, too, including states that don’t
fit regional stereotypes about secular, coastal elites or hippie-ish mountain
terrain. Non-religious people compose the largest share of the populations of
Hawaii and Alaska compared to other faith groups. In general, the non-religious
states of America are concentrated west of the Mississippi River, according to
PRRI, spanning Arizona to Nebraska to Wyoming.
Cont.
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