Religous resource

July 7, 2005 4:25 PM

Is there a resource that can: A- Tell me the number of Americans that believe in God. and B- Tell me what percentage consider themselves "born again." Any ideas?
posted by Shanachie to religion & philosophy (14 comments total)

google
posted by dness2 at 4:29 PM on July 7, 2005

I've looked this up on google several times before. May take some creative google-fu, but I seem to recall it's fairly easy to find this info.
posted by jdroth at 4:47 PM on July 7, 2005

The first search that occurred to me seems quite relevant.

(By the way: there was a great Harper's article on this a few years ago. (Or maybe it was Utne Reader?) If I recall correctly, less than one percent of Americans are atheists, which boggles my mind.)
posted by jdroth at 4:50 PM on July 7, 2005

This poll is particularly interesting.
posted by jdroth at 4:54 PM on July 7, 2005

Thanks for the suggestions... I'm seeking some sort of scientific survey that I use for a documentary. I'm hoping that someone might know something specific.
posted by Shanachie at 5:02 PM on July 7, 2005

(By the way: there was a great Harper's article on this a few years ago. (Or maybe it was Utne Reader?) If I recall correctly, less than one percent of Americans are atheists, which boggles my mind.)

As an agnostic, it certainly doesn't boggle my mind, but an atheist might have issues with their ego clouding their ability to be impartially rational. It's perfectly reasonable for people to want a higher power to put a band-aid on their life, and not farfetched in my mind that in our day and age that people still need that safety net.

Speaking from my own long-standing issues with the whole reason to exist crap, that is.
posted by angry modem at 5:03 PM on July 7, 2005

If I recall correctly, less than one percent of Americans are atheists, which boggles my mind.

I don't know. I kept putting 'Catholic' on any form asking religion for awhile because that's how I was raised. I remember filling out one such form in high school (Catholic high school, so I suppose it was relevant) and wondering what else I could write. The administrator told me to stop messing around and put down Catholic since that's what my parents were and that's what they were really after.

I think a lot of people are unsure or not religious, but they identify with a certain religion because that's how they were raised.
posted by ODiV at 5:09 PM on July 7, 2005

Barna.org has a fairly good amount of religion statistics, but they're an evangelical organization so I'm not sure whether they're really reliable statistics.
posted by Jeanne at 5:12 PM on July 7, 2005

If I recall correctly, less than one percent of Americans are atheists

That Harris poll says otherwise. 10% of adults, and 15% of men, claim no belief in God. Seems atheist enough for government work.

If you found 1% as atheist as a poll result, that's probably because of the connotations that "atheist" commonly carries in the US -- someone who doesn't just fail to believe in any god or gods, but is a dick about it.* Most atheists-by-definition in the US would call themselves agnostic or not religious, or just say that they don't believe in God and not call themselves anything.

*I'm not saying that it's an accurate connotation, or that atheists on metafilter are dicks about their unbelief.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:23 PM on July 7, 2005

Most people are closet apatheists, but the polls never adjust for that.
posted by signal at 6:12 PM on July 7, 2005

Gallup has been asking these questions for years. You might have to sign up with them though to get archives.

This page is interesting.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:05 PM on July 7, 2005

This page at the US Census Bureau has a PDF that contains information gathered from a census on US religious beliefs.

The American Religion Data Archive.

The American Religious Identification Survey collected information on beliefs from 50,000 Americans in 2001.

I don't know that those sources have the exact answers you are looking for, but they seem to be good and reliable sources.
posted by geeky at 8:43 PM on July 7, 2005

Not what you asked for but I would be careful about polls listing figures regarding the "born again" (I read extremist). I live dead in the middle of the "Bible Belt" South and know very few who would characterize themselves that way. Very few I know would say the don't belive in god but not many claim the "born again" label either. It has become popular to characterize all "red staters" as religious fundamentalist but in my experience it just ain't so. My guess is that many polls are trying to prove either one extreme or the other.
posted by Carbolic at 9:37 PM on July 7, 2005

I think one of the reasons this is so difficult to get good numbers on is that the categories are really hard to determine accurately. What different people mean by "god", "atheist", "agnostic", "born again", really cover a range of different beliefs.

As someone said above, many people who don't really believe in god don't like the term atheist because of the anti-god stance that's perceived to go with it. Just as significantly, what some people mean by "god" is pretty vague and inconsequential (from an outsider's pov), and to some extent just comes down to a sense of reverence for the universe. I know some very scientific minded people who are attached to an idea of god, but can't really describe it to me in a way that's distinguishable from "the miracle of being", or whatever you want to call the fact that It Is (we can have a semantic argument about "miracle" but you can see the point).

Additionally, there are a bunch of people who really don't care or give it much thought. Some atheists have spent a lot more time trying to understand their philosophies than some religious believers; plenty of church-goers stick to the tradition for community, ritual, comfort, but not for a deep explication of the underlying truth or anything.

although, having just read the poll that jdroth linked above, it looks like plenty of people are putting forth straightforward beliefs in things like ghosts, astrology, heaven, hell, the devil, yadda yadda. Perhaps some portion of those people have complex philosophical concepts which they relate to those terms, but in general it's harder to give too much credit to what sound like confirmations of simplistic mythologies...
posted by mdn at 8:05 AM on July 8, 2005