It may not feel like it, but atheism in the United States appears to have hit its ceiling. According to the Pew Research Center, 2 percent of the country was actively, openly nonreligious in 2011. That number rose to 4 percent by 2021—but has remained constant since.
America’s oft-discussed “decline in religion” is actually a story about a decline in church attendance; one’s investment in an institutional religious community is separate from belief in a god (or gods) of any variety. The unchurched “nones,” named so because they respond “nothing in particular” when asked about their beliefs by survey organizations, are a fast-growing group, to be sure. But a solid majority of nones still believe in a “higher power”—not often the biblical God, but in some spiritual concept like it. Even 23 percent of declared atheists proclaim belief in some kind of spiritual force, interestingly enough.
