GODLESS WEDNESDAY: "Nones" Projected To Be Plurality In 2035

By 2030 the largest religious affiliation in the United States is predicted to be "none." A computer science professor has analyzed poll responses from the General Social Survey to this question "What is your religious preference: is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?" since 1972 and he makes the above prediction that America is becoming increasingly less religious and that sometime in the next two decades the non-religious will be the largest single religious group in the country.

In fact he says this is probably an under-estimate, for the following reasons:

1. Survey results like these are subject to social desirability bias, which is the tendency of respondents to shade their answers in the direction they think is more socially acceptable. To the degree that apostasy is stigmatized, we expect these reports to underestimate the number of Nones. As the visibility of nonreligious people increases, they might be more willing to be counted; in that case, the trends would go faster than predicted.

1. The trends for Protestants and Nones have apparent points of inflection near 1990. Predictions that include earlier data are likely to underestimate future trends. If we use only data since 1990 to generate predictions, we expect the fraction of Nones to exceed 40 percent within 20 years.

So even though it seems to godless people like yours truly that "believers" are trampling the rights of non-believers. Or at the very least the concerns of believers "trump" those of non-believers, it appears as if the tide will turn in the future.