Atheism in America

Abstract

The number of Americans who self-identify as atheists has increased in recent decades, as has the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. The United States is often described as a "Christian nation" by devout Christians and political officials, yet the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially prohibits the government from declaring an official state religion. Atheism has gained considerable attention in American society since the 1960s, when a lawsuit brought by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an outspoken atheist, culminated in the Supreme Court declaring the reading of Bible verses in public schools as unconstitutional. In the twenty-first century, atheism has become more visible in the United States, stemming from the publicity it has accrued from several high-profile celebrities, scientists, and journalists.

Overview

Since the 1990s, the number of Americans who openly identify as atheists has increased dramatically, while the portion of American society who identify themselves as Christian has substantially decreased. The Pew Research Center reported in 2021 that 63 percent of Americans identified as Christians though this was down 75 percent from the previous decade (Pew Research Center, 2021). Likewise, the portion of Americans who claim an affiliation with any specific religious denomination has also declined. A national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014 revealed that 23 percent of the US adult population indicated that they were unaffiliated with a religion. In 2007, only 16 percent of Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated. By 2021, the Pew Research Center reported 3 out of 10 adults were unaffiliated with religion (Pew Research Center, 2021). The results of these surveys, as well as other sociological research over the years, illustrated that American increasingly shed their connections to organized religion, and social commentators debated the ramifications that this will have on American society in the coming years.

The United States is often described as a "Christian nation" because during the colonial era, the North American colonies served as a refuge for various European, particularly British, settlers seeking to escape religious-based persecution in their homelands. Also, throughout U.S. history, Christianity has been the most-practiced religion in the United States. Although the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a separation of church and state, including prohibiting the federal government from establishing an official state religion, Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition have nevertheless exerted tremendous influence on the overall culture and government of the United States. For example, Christmas Day (December 25) has been designated a federal holiday, and most governmental offices—such as the Post Office and federal, state, and local courthouses—remain closed on Sundays, the Christian holy day of the week. The motto "In God We Trust" has been printed on U.S. coinage since the Civil War, while the phrase has been printed on paper currency since 1957, at the height of the Cold War. Likewise, the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, which is recited daily by many public school students throughout the nation, beginning in 1954 at the request of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The president of the United States and other elected officials regularly take their inaugural oaths of office on the Bible—unless they specifically request not to. Furthermore, prior to the 1960s, students attending public schools would often read, or be read, verses from the Bible.

Despite the profound Judeo-Christian influence on American society, atheism has gained visibility in the United States since the 1960s. Atheism is defined as a philosophical or religious worldview that posits that deities do not exist and that all religions are falsehoods rather than true, divine realities. The term comes from the Greek words a ("without") and theism ("belief in gods"). One who espouses the tenets of atheism is known as an atheist. Traditionally, atheism was distinguished from agnosticism, which refers to religious skepticism or a general questioning of, and uncertainty toward, the validity of religious doctrines and the existence of deities. In other words, agnosticism expresses an ambivalent attitude towards the existence of god(s), while atheism expresses a firm rejection of the existence of god(s).

Despite the dictionary's differentiation between these two words, however, the precise issue of just who is an atheist and what constitutes atheism can be unclear as even many self-described atheists in the United States nonetheless admit that they either believe in a general concept of god(s) or that they remain unsure as to whether a supreme being exists. In this sense, the common glue holding the nation's atheist population (a highly diverse group in terms of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and specific creed) together is its rejection of public, organized religion. Furthermore, some devout Christians and followers of other religious faiths may consider any person who does not express a firm, definitive religious affiliation or belief in God/gods/deities to be an "atheist," regardless of whether or not that individual self-identifies in this manner. As such, the concept of atheism is a somewhat elusive one. Even the 2014 Pew Research poll referenced earlier, which indicated that over 20 percent of Americans claim no religious affiliation, discovered that only 3.1 percent of Americans self-identified as atheists, while 4 percent self-identified as agnostic. By contrast, 15.8 percent of Americans identified as "nothing in particular," as opposed to either atheist or agnostics. By 2019, 4 percent of Americans described themselves as atheist, 5 percent as agnostic, and 12 percent as “nothing in particular” (Crary, 2019).

A defining moment in the history of atheism in America occurred in 1963 when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its verdict in the landmark case Murray v. Curlett. This case resulted from a 1960 lawsuit brought by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an outspoken atheist and attorney, against the Baltimore City Public School System for requiring its students to begin the school day with Bible readings and the Lord's Prayer. O'Hair maintained that the explicit promotion of religion in Baltimore schools violated the First Amendment and subjected her fourteen-year-old son to religious bullying and bigotry by his classmates. O'Hair lost the case in state court and appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated the case with another similar case, Abington School District v. Schempp, in which a Pennsylvania father, Edward L. Schempp, expressed objections to a suburban Philadelphia public school's mandated daily prayers and Bible readings. In an 8–1 decision, the nation's high court declared school-sanctioned prayers and requirements that students read verses from the Bible unconstitutional and said that public schools could not promote religion.

O'Hair immediately became a target of animosity nationwide among those who felt that she had "taken God out of the schools." In 1964, Life magazine labeled her "the most hated woman in America." O'Hair founded the organization American Atheists (headquartered in Austin, Texas) in 1963, following the Supreme Court's decision, with the purpose of "fighting for the civil liberties of atheists and the total, absolute separation of government and religion." Despite the organization's high-profile nature, given the notoriety of its founder, relatively few Americans openly identified as atheists for the remainder of the twentieth century. A strong social stigma remained attached to this identity.

In 1978, Anne Nicol Gaylor established the Freedom from Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, as a support group for nonreligious people and to challenge public expressions and promotion of religion perceived to be unconstitutional. Under Gaylor's leadership, the Freedom from Religion Foundation endorsed the term "freethinker" as an inclusive label for a wide range of religious skeptics and critics, including atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists.

Further Insights

In the twenty-first century, atheism began to achieve unprecedented exposure in American society, in large part because of the emergence of several high-profile atheists who generated considerable media coverage. These celebrity atheists ranged from journalists to comedians to scientists and included Vanity Fair and the Atlantic writer Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, comedian Bill Maher, comedian Ricky Gervais, physicist Lawrence Krauss, and philosopher/neuroscientist Sam Harris. Unlike previous generations of atheists, who tended to remain anonymous and did not publicly acknowledge their views, these high-profile atheists openly critiqued religion and aggressively asserted their atheist beliefs. For example, Bill Maher—one of the best-known atheists in the United States—produced a documentary titled Religulous in 2008 that mocked Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by illustrating the extremist views of various fundamentalists and obvious charlatans within each faith. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens each wrote best-selling books defending atheism and criticizing religion in The End of Faith (2004), The God Delusion (2006), and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), respectively.

Diversity in American Religion. The rise in atheism occurred at a time in which American religious life became increasingly diversified. Beginning the 1960s, increased immigration from the Middle East and North Africa produced a growing number of Muslim Americans. African Americans also began to embrace the Muslim faith in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. In 2022, there were 3.5 million Muslims in the United States (Kast, 2022). Immigration from Asian societies has also resulted in tremendous growth in the nation's Buddhist and Hindu populations, while immigration from Latin America and the Philippines has resulted in Catholicism becoming the second-largest denomination of Christianity in the United States after Protestantism (PRRI, 2023). Since the early 1990s, a growing number of Americans have also taken up various New Age religious movements. These developments have taken place alongside a rising decline in religious affiliation within the country. The U.S. Census does not ask respondents to identify their religious views.

The nation's shifting religious identities, particularly the sharp rise in atheism and nonreligious affiliation, has generated controversy reflecting one dimension of the so-called culture wars that have gripped American society since the late 1970s. Part of this controversy stems from the lingering negative views toward atheists that have persisted for many decades. In fact, a 2012 Gallup poll discovered that 43 percent of Americans would not consider voting for an atheist for president. By contrast, only 4, 5, and 18 percent indicated that they would not vote for a Black, woman, or Mormon presidential candidate. A hypothetical Muslim presidential candidate fared better than an atheist in the Gallup poll, with 40 percent of Americans saying that they would not vote for a Muslim. This reveals that there is a greater social prejudice against atheists than Muslims in American society, which may be surprising, given the anti-Muslim backlash and rise of Islamophobia in the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a 2015 Gallup poll taken before the 2016 election, the number of people who would not vote for an atheist president had fallen slightly to 40 percent, but the number of people who would not vote for a Muslim president also went down to 38 percent, despite greater anti-immigrant sentiment sparked by election campaigning.

Resistance to Atheism. Several factors account for Americans' strong stigmatization of atheism that remains in the early twenty-first century. The United States has a much larger population of Christian fundamentalists—that is, those who interpret Biblical scriptures literally—than other industrialized, Western democracies, and this group has constituted a powerful voting bloc and exerted a high degree of social, cultural, and political influence since the 1970s. Christian fundamentalists, particularly those who espouse conservative political views, generally perceive the United States as a "Christian nation" and subsequently interpret the removal of prayer and Bible study from public schools, along with other acts of separation between church and state, as having a negative impact on American society and culture. Atheists and atheism have become viewed as the foremost contributors to this perceived problem, particularly in light of Madalyn Murray O'Hair's legacy. Christian fundamentalism only grew more popular in the twenty-first century and began to have a powerful influence over politics in the United States.

Another important factor accounting for the strong social prejudice against atheists stems from the remnants of Cold War culture. Various communist nations—including the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Cuba after Fidel Castro's rise to power, and North Korea, among others—declared themselves to be officially atheist and suppressed all forms of religious freedom and expression. Communists' espousal of atheism derived, in part, from the nineteenth-century writings of the philosopher Karl Marx, who criticized organized religion as "the opium of the people" and articulated that ruling elites in capitalist societies exploit the religious beliefs of their citizens to oppress and subjugate them. As such, during the Cold War (which lasted from approximately 1945 to 1991), the American public came to equate the evils of communism with atheism while diametrically equating the freedoms of the United States with the virtues of religiosity, particularly Christianity.

Atheists Speak. On the other hand, atheists have raised several criticisms of religion, and these criticisms have become more vocal in recent years. These criticisms are multifaceted and may be scientific, theoretical, political, historical, or cultural in nature and scope. One of atheism's biggest critiques of religion is a questioning of the traditional assumption that religion is positive, with several atheists pointing out the negative actions and consequences of religion. Bill Maher, for example, extensively condemned the numerous cases of pedophilia and sexual molestation of children committed by Catholic priests, along with the subsequent attempts of Vatican leadership to conceal these acts. Maher, Hitchens, and other atheists have also criticized the Church of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church) for its history of racial discrimination banning blacks from becoming ministers within the church until 1978.

Atheists often accuse religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and others as allegedly justifying phenomena such as racism, homophobia, oppression of women, religious arrogance/certitude, warfare, intolerance, and religious-based bigotry. While negative actions certainly have been carried out in the name of religion, such a broad-based generalization of religions is widely viewed as shortsighted, as there is tremendous internal variation within all religions, and all religions are subject to liberal, moderate, and conservative—as well as extremist—interpretations.

Richard Dawkins offers a different defense of atheism, arguing for it on scientific grounds. While the various fields of science do not have an official position regarding religion, and scientists across the world exhibit various religious identities and beliefs, Dawkins argues in The God Delusion that a belief in deities is contradictory to scientific thought because it is an untestable hypothesis that is accepted purely on faith, yet religious doctrines are often asserted as absolute truths by their adherents. Whereas scientific knowledge increases over time and is subject to revision along the way, Dawkins notes, religious doctrines assert that their knowledge is permanent, absolute, and fixed for all time.

Viewpoints

Critics of atheism sometimes point out that some atheists appear to be motivated by anger toward religion, which may have derived from various negative experiences in their own lives— such as experiencing physical or emotional abuse by a religiously devout parent or harboring grief that an all-powerful deity would allow human suffering in the form of starvation or warfare. Others have criticized the extreme hostility that some atheists have sometimes demonstrated toward religion or religious practitioners. For example, following the death of Southern Baptist minister Jerry Falwell in 2007, Christopher Hitchens gloated over the controversial pastor's death on CNN and Fox News by claiming, "It's a shame there isn't a hell for him to go to." Certain atheists have also been criticized for coming across just as adamant, self-righteous, and intolerant of other religious views as the very fundamentalists that they criticize. In this vein, such atheists have been jokingly described as "fundamentalist atheists."

Current research reveals that children who are raised in nonreligious households do not lack a sense of morality and, in fact, a 2013–2014 study conducted by Vern Bengston, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, revealed that children raised in nonreligious households had strong ethical values and senses of morality that matched, or even exceeded, those of children raised in religious households. A 2010 study carried out by researchers at Duke University claimed to find that children raised without religious affiliation were less likely to harbor racial prejudices as adults, while other studies by psychologists claim that nonreligious adults are also less nationalistic, less militaristic, less violent, and more tolerant toward individuals with varying definitions of gender and sexuality, as well as toward religious minorities, than adults who identify as religious. In 2023, studies indicated that the pattern of raising children in a non-religious household was only increasing, and there was no indication of a difference in morals between those raised in religious households versus those who grow up in a secular environment (Dhenin, 2023). FBI statistics and research by criminologists also reveal that atheists account for less than 0.05 percent of prisoners in the United States. Such data, if accurate, refute the longstanding stereotype that depicts atheists as "evil" and "immoral" people and challenges the idea that religion is necessary to instill a moral foundation in individuals.

Terms & Concepts

Agnostic: An individual whose views pertaining to religion reflect uncertainty.

Agnosticism: A philosophical viewpoint regarding religion that expresses doubt and uncertainty regarding religious beliefs and the existence of deities. Agnosticism questions the validity of doctrines and beliefs but does not firmly reject religion or deny that god(s) exist.

Atheism: A philosophical viewpoint regarding religion characterized by disbelief in deities and a lack of belief, or rejection, of all religious doctrines. Atheism more firmly rejects the existence of deities, as well as religion in general, than agnosticism.

Atheist: An individual whose views pertaining to religion reflect disbelief.

Deity: A supreme religious being, such as a god or goddess, usually seen as the creator of the universe or as controlling a particular aspect of the universe (such as the sky, sea, sun, or moon).

Fundamentalist: In general, an approach toward religious practice that is based on strict adherence to scriptural texts (such as the Bible, Qu'ran, Torah, etc.), often centered on a literal interpretation of scripture. Also refers to an individual whose personal religious views follow these principles.

Separation of church and state: The legal interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, understood as establishing that the federal government is prohibited from declaring an official national religion; the Constitution also grants private citizens the right to exercise freedom of religious worship, as well as the right to refrain from engaging in religious worship.

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Suggested Reading

Bayer, L. & Figdor, J. (2014). Atheist mind, humanist heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Brewster, M. E. (2014). Atheists in America. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Cimino, R. & Smith, C. (2014). Atheist awakening: Secular activism and community in America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hedges, C. (2009). When atheism becomes religion: America's new fundamentalists. New York, NY: Free Press.

Johnson, P. & Reynolds, J. M. (2010). Against all Gods: What's right and wrong about the new atheism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Lacorne, D. (2011). Religion in America: A political history. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Lindsay, R. (2014). The necessity of secularism: Why God can't tell us what to do. Durham, NC: Pitchstone.

Ruse, M. (2015). Atheism: What everyone needs to know. New York: Oxford University Press.