GODLESS WEDNESDAY: "Nones" Become Largest Religious Group In The United States

Woo hoo! Fear not godless heathens, you are not alone! The Friendly Atheist reports on the latest polling data from the General Social Survey on religion that shows that the percentage of Americans who say that have "no religion" (often called the "Nones" by demographers) is now the largest segment of the population.

Religious News Service reports (and includes the graphic at the top of this post):

According to newly released General Social Survey data analyzed by Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University, Americans claiming “no religion” — sometimes referred to as “nones” because of how they answer the question “what is your religious tradition?” — now represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. People claiming evangelicalism, by contrast, now represent 22.5 percent of Americans, a slight dip from 23.9 percent in 2016.  

That makes the two groups statistically tied with Catholics (23 percent) as the largest religious — or nonreligious — groupings in the country.   

“Nones have been on the march for a long time now,” Burge said. “It’s been a constant, steady increase for 20 years now. If the trend line kept up, we knew this was going to happen.”

So when will public policy (and politics) start recognizing this fact that the populace (and electorate) is changing?

Hat/tip to Friendly Atheist

REPORT: 4.5% of U.S. Adult Population is LGBT, 11+ Million People

The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School, an LGBT public policy think tank, has released their latest estimate of the percentage of the size of the LGBT population in the United States. The number is 11.3 million, or 4.5% of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

Hat/tip Williams Institute

GRAPHIC: Demographics of Immigrant Fraction Of United States Has Varied Over Time

This is an interesting graphic which shows the demographics of the non-native population of the United States has varied over time. Axios summarizes the changes over time thusly:

• For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the vast majority of immigrants came from Western and Northern Europe. The Irish fled famine, the Germans fled political instability, and Italians primarily wanted better economic opportunity.
• The 1965 act ended a program that allowed Mexicans to work on U.S. farms but remain residents of Mexico. That changed the nature of immigration from Mexico and from Central America "to primarily unauthorized," Batalova says.
• In 1986, the U.S. gave legal status to almost 3 million undocumented immigrants — an overwhelming majority of them from Mexico. These new green card holders could then sponsor additional family members.
• There has been a surge of Central American asylum seekers in the U.S. over the past several years as political chaos, poverty and violence have ravaged many of those nations.
• New laws also opened the door to immigration from Asia — initially from India and Taiwan, and later China.
• Following the Vietnam War, there was an influx of Vietnamese people and other citizens of the region who fled to the U.S. as refugees.
• Most recently, there's been a wave of immigration from African countries that began in the 1990s and 2000s for a wide variety of economic, political and humanitarian reasons.

hat/tip: Axios

SATURDAY POLITICS: Trump Approval Shows Disapproval By Everyone (Except Rural Voters)

Hat/tip Axios

#NSF REPORT: U.S. Doctorate Recipients At Near All-Time High (2016 Data)

The National Science Foundation has released its annual Survey of Earned Doctorates and there are some interesting nuggets in the data (up to 2016):

• The largest share of doctorates awarded in 2016 was in the life sciences (nearly 23 percent), followed by engineering (17 percent), and psychology and the social sciences (16.5 percent). All fields of humanities and arts made up 10 percent of doctorates awarded.
• The time between students entering graduate school and receiving doctorates has fallen in all fields of study over the past 20 years, but, on average, it still takes years longer to earn a doctorate in non-S&E fields than in S&E fields.
• The number of S&E doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens and permanent residents grew 2 percent since 2015 and 39 percent since 2006. The number of doctorates in S&E fields awarded to temporary visa holders grew 2 percent since 2015 and 20 percent since 2006.
• The number of doctoral awards to temporary visa holders is highly concentrated -- 10 countries accounted for 71 percent of the doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders from 2006 to 2016. The top three countries -- China, India and South Korea -- accounted for 54 percent of the doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders.
• Women have earned a slight majority of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizen and permanent residents each year since 2002, and women have earned more than 30 percent of all doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders over that period.
• From 1996 to 2016, the number of women earning degrees in S&E fields increased by 84 percent.
• The number of doctorates awarded to blacks or African Americans who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents increased by 32 percent from 2006 to 2016. For the same period, the proportion of doctorates earned by Hispanics or Latinos increased by 67 percent.

One key take-away for me is that 1) Latino doctoral recipients now outnumber African-American and that the gap between male and female STEM doctorates is actually slightly widening, even as both numbers increase (see the graphics at the top of this page).

Hat/tip STEMPROF newsletter edited by Mark Connolly.

GRAPHIC: The racial/ethnic demographics of U.S. Top 10 metro areas

Information on race in America, especially in metropolitan areas in the United States. This is from a recent deep dive into race, politics and demographics by the Boston Globe's award-winning Spotlight team as the paper tried to examine why Boston is perceived as "more racist" than other big cities.

REPORT: 4.1% of U.S. American Adults Are LGBT, Totals 10M

The Williams Institute at UCLA has released another report on the demographics of adult LGBT population in the United States. They also have an interactive website where you can explore this data for yourself.

One key result is that there are well over 10 million LGBT adults in the United States, which is roughly 4.1% of the adult population. However, there is wide variation in the states in which the LGBT population resides. The District of Columbia has the highest percentage of its population self-reporting as LGBT:

Check it out for yourself!

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Theocrat Roy Moore Loses U.S. Senate Race in Alabama

Hmmm, count one electoral win for the godless in Alabama last night. Roy Moore, an unrepentant theocrat who was twice removed from his elected position as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for his refusal to follow the law of the land (once for placing a huge monument to the Ten commandments on state property and once for refusing to enforce the same-sex marriage decision Obergefell v Hodges) lost a special election to Democrat Doug Jones last night.

Born-again and evangelical Christians voted for Moore at the astonishing rate of 80% to 13% while "everyone else" voted 76% to 22% for Jones. How does this voting pattern align with "christian" values?

Other demographics of the vote are also interesting:

This shows that white people overwhelmingly voted for Moore, despite the controversial allegations involving sexual misconduct with minors. It was Black people who were an eye-popping 30% of the electorate and voted for Jones (or against Moore) at the rate of 97 to 3 for Black women and 92 to 7 for Black men.

These exit poll data show the stark differences in the electorate. People under 40 voted for Jones, while people over 40 voted for Moore, but not in as large numbers (and voters over 40 were a large fraction of the electorate, at 75%).

Hat/tip Friendly Atheist

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Another Survey Confirms Increase In Godlessness In United States

Another study of Americans has documented the rise in the "religiously unaffiliated" which we like to call "godlessness" at this blog. The Houston Chronicle reports about a study commissioned by the Desert News (a Mormon-affiliated publication) and  the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University which documents that a plurality of Americans (the largest group in the survey) respond "None" when asked their religious affiliation.

34 percent of respondents said they had no religious denomination, compared to 33 percent who identified as Protestants and  21 percent who said they are Catholic.
[...]
Baptists made up the largest Protestant group, at about 32 percent, with 19 percent saying they belonged to a non-denominational or independent church. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed consider themselves "born-again" or Evangelical Christians.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents say religion is very important in their lives, but only 24 percent say they attend religious services one or more times a week. Fifty-four percent said they seldom or never attend church.
Of those polled, 21 percent said one of the most important issues facing families is "decline in religious faith and church attendance.

Interesting results, eh? I wonder when public policy and politics will start responding to how Americans actually live their religious lives, instead of how people "wish" (or "believe") they do.

QUEER QUOTE: The entire Palm Springs City Council is LGBTQ!

The City of Palm Springs is Queer. Really, really queer! The Williams Institute at UCLA says that Palm Springs has the largest number of same-sex couples per capita in the state of California and is 3rd in the nation.

After last Tuesday's election, Palm Springs has another reason to be considered really queer. All 5 members of the City Council are members of the LGBT community (and Democrats!) Not even "Boystown, USA" (i.e. West Hollywood) has achieved that feat.

The five openly LGBT members of the City Council will be:

• Lisa Middleton*, transgender woman 

• Christy Holstege*, bisexual woman 

• Geoffrey Kors, gay man 

• Robert Moon, gay man 

• J.R. Roberts, gay man

Middleton and Holstege were just elected. The Los Angeles Times reported:

But now, the city is marking a new milestone in gay politics as well. When the two new members of the Palm Springs City Council are sworn in next month, every person on the panel will be a member of the LGBTQ community.

Lisa Middleton, a transgender woman, and Christy Holstege, a woman who identifies as bisexual, each won about 30% of the citywide vote to beat four other candidates and fill two vacant seats on the council. The pair will join three gay men on the five-person body.

Hmmmm, I haven't been to Palm Springs for awhile either. Time to make a trip!

hat/tip to Los Angeles Times

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.

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: 24% Of Americans Are Religiously Unaffiliated

For today's Godlesss Wednesday post I want to return to the topic of how the demographics of religious identity are changing in the United States. A report from the PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) titled "America's Changing Religious Identity"  released on September 6 2017 chronicles these changes. Some of the findings are:

• White Christians, 81 percent of the population in 1976, now account for less than half the public — 43 percent of Americans identify as white Christians, and 30 percent as white Protestants.
• 92 percent of Lutherans are white, more than in any other denomination.
• White Christians are aging. About 1 in 10 white Catholics, evangelicals and mainline Protestants are under 30, compared with one-third of all Hindus and Buddhists.
• Muslims and Mormons are the youngest faith groups in the U.S., with 42 percent of all Muslims under 3o, and nearly a quarter of all Mormons.

The PRRI report is based on a survey of 101,000 Americans in all 50 states and has a margin of error of 0.5 percentage points. Another big take-away from the report is that no single religious group in the United States is larger than the group of "religiously unaffiliated," which makes up 24% of the population.

This is awesome news!

MAP: Trump's Approval Rating Varies Greatly By Stae

It is well-known that Donald Trump has historically low approval ratings, especially for a newly elected president. However, what may not be recognized is the geographical variation in his approval ratings. There are 17 states where Trump is above majority support averaged over the first 6 months of his presidency, according to Gallup. There are also 17 states where his approval average is below 40%!

President Donald Trump, who has averaged 40% job approval since his inauguration, received approval ratings of 50% or higher in 17 states in the first half of 2017. Residents in an equal number of states gave him approval ratings below 40%. In 16 states, his ratings ranged between 40% and 49%.

Hat/tip to Axios

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Australians Becoming Much More Godless!

There's some interesting news out of Australia and the changing (decreasing) prevalence of religiosity among their populace. They conduct a census every 5 years and one of the questions they ask is about religion.

The 2016 results were published this week:

After decades of rapid growth, the number of Australians marking “no religion” on their census forms has for the first time surpassed Catholicism as the most common answer to a prompt in the country's 2016 Census about religion, according to data released Monday. If all Christian denominations are considered together, they would make up just over half of respondents. 

The number of respondents who identified as nonreligious — 30.1 percent — almost doubled from 15.5 percent in 2001. Less than 1 percent identified that way in 1966, the year Australia lifted its “White Australia Policy,” which opened up immigration to non-Europeans and kicked off broader demographic changes. Australia's population has also more than doubled since then.

Hmmm, so we learn several things from this excerpt. First, Australia had a "White Australia Policy" until 1966! Secondly, 30% of Australians identify as essentially irreligious (or "Godless" as we like to say around here). That compares pretty favorably to the rate in the United States, which PRRI estimates to be 25% (in 2016). The following graph also indicates that the growth in the fraction of the population in the United States that is "religiously unaffiliated" has changed dramatically in the last few decades.

Hat/tip to Washington Post and PRRI

POLL: 12% Of California Voters Are #LGBT

Equality California has released a poll which shows that 12% of California voters identify as LGBT. Interestingly, this number varied only slightly by geographical region in the state, from 10% in the Los Angeles area (11% in Los Angeles county) to 14% in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The poll discusses the margin of error:

The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level. This means that 95 times out of 100, if a response to a given question to which all respondents answered was 50%, we could be 95% confident that the true percentage would fall within +/-4% of this percentage - or between 46% and 54%. As 12% of respondents in this survey answered “yes” when asked if they were a member of the LGBT community, we can infer that the sampling error specific to that response is +/- 2.4% or between 9.6% and 14.4%.

The poll's methodology of asking the question "Are you a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, also known as the LGBT community?" online may be an explanation for why they received such larger values than the more typical 2-4% number  that we have been more used to.

SCRUFF Poll Of #GBTQ Men: 79% Clinton, 11% Trump

Somehow I was contacted by the good guys at Scruff (one of those location-based mobile phone apps that gay men use to connect with each other) to present some "Scrufftistics" about a non-scientific poll they conducted from October 28-31, 2016 about the 2016 election with nearly 13,000 respondents. It shows that among "GBTQ" (gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) men that 79% would vote for Hillary Clinton while only 11% would vote for Donald Trump. It should be interesting to see what exit polls of the electorate say about the LGBTQ vote and how (and whether) there will be a difference between these polls (I expect there will be).

There's a now-famous map from 538.com starkly depicting the gender gap between the 2016 presidential candidates. If only men voted the electoral map would look like this:

However, the Scruff data shows that if only gay men voted the map would look like this:

Although the Scruff data also indicates that in 5 states Trump would get more than 20% of the GBTQ vote Louisiana (28.32%), Wyoming (27.78%), North Dakota (23.08%), Alabama (20.48%)
and Delaware (20%).

Again, note that this is a non-scientific poll. There's no guarantee the respondents actually have any correlation with the broader population of GBTQ men in the United States (for example, 95% of respondents said they were registered to vote). Scruff asked age information (over 55% were between 35-54), income information (over 30% claimed over $100k annual salary) and religious affiliation (over 50% said they were not religious) but did not ask about race/ethnicity, which in my opinion was a lost opportunity.

Overall, I found the scruff survey contained an interesting snapshot of the LGBTQ community. I hope to see more information like this in the future.

REPORT: Almost 1 Million Same-Sex Married People In United States

A report has been issued "Marriage and Same-Sex Couples after Obergefell" by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School which demonstrates how well the kultukampf over "gay marriage" is going for the forces of equality. The graph at the top of this blog post demonstrates the exponential growth in the estimated number of same-sex couples in the United States, which is near the 500,000 mark, which means that nearly a million Americans have a legally married spouse of the same-sex.

The report notes that there has been a rapid change since the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell decision legalized marriage equality nationwide in June, overturning provisions in the last remaining states that were still enforcing bans on same-sex marriage despite an unprecedented series of legal rejections by dozens of federal judges.

In fact, in the figure below one can see that the percentage of all new marriages that are what used to be called "gay marriages" has jumped from 6.4% before June 2015 to 11.2% afterJune 2015.

Hat/tip to Joe Jervis

Facebook Releases Data Indicating Roughly 4% Of U.S. Adults Are Openly LGB

Facebook Research released a report showing how Americans are using Facebook to come out as LGB (revealing some kind of same-sex attraction). The report indicates that there are differences over time and geography.

Currently, more than 6 million Americans have come out on Facebook (based on the criteria used in Figure 1). Since we only consider those who have expressed a same-gender attraction or list a custom gender on their Facebook profiles, it is likely that this figure is an underestimate of the total number of “out” Americans. Strikingly, of those who are out on Facebook, approximately 78% made this change to their profile since the beginning of 2012. While this figure may be somewhat conflated by growth in the number of people on Facebook, the sheer magnitude of this increase suggests that the LGBT movement has made significant strides in recent years.

The map at the top of this post shows that New York and Nevada are two states where people are more likely to be out as LGBT online.

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Pew Documents Increase In "Religiously Unaffiliated"!

A report from the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life is documenting the rapid change in the religious demographics of the U.S. population. Specifically, the percentage of "religiously unaffiliated" (what we like to call "Godless" around here) has risen from 16.1% in 2007 to 22.8% in 2014. The report indicates that the number of religiously unaffiliated has jumped from 36 million people in 2007 to roughly 56 million in 2014.


Before we get too cocky, one should recognize that although the fraction of the population that identifies as Christian is decreasing, it went from 78.4% to 70.6%. That is still a huge supermajority of the United States. The mechanism for the increase in the godless apparently is occurring from people primarily switching from being Catholic. The total number of Christians has declined from 178 million to 173 million.

Friendly Atheist notes that atheists and agnostics are a growing fraction of the unaffiliated:

Joe Jervis quotes from the report:

The decline of Christians in the U.S. has corresponded with the continued rise in the share of Americans with no religious affiliation (religious “nones”). People who self-identify as atheists or agnostics (about 7% of all U.S. adults), as well as those who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” now account for a combined 22.8% of U.S. adults – up from 16.1% in 2007. The growth of the “nones” has been powered in part by religious switching. Nearly one-in-five U.S. adults (18%) were raised as Christians or members of some other religion, but now say they have no religious affiliation.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God and Friendly Atheist

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: "Religiously Unaffiliated" Are A Plurality In 13 States!

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has set up an American Values Atlas website which allows you to see the geographic distribution of the various polling data they have collected about Americans.

One result that gladdens my heart is the news that the percentage of what PRRI called "religiously unaffiliated" (and who I would call "godless") is now 22% of Americans overall, and among younger people it is closer to 34%.

In fact, in numerous states (13) a plurality of respondents are godless! Some of those states are Oregon (37 percent), New Hampshire (35 percent), Washington State (33 percent), Vermont (32 percent) and Montana (29 percent).

That's all the geographic-based data on godlessness for today!