{"id":60076,"date":"2017-05-19T17:00:48","date_gmt":"2017-05-19T21:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=60076"},"modified":"2017-05-19T19:35:49","modified_gmt":"2017-05-19T23:35:49","slug":"538-way-more-americans-may-be-atheists-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=60076","title":{"rendered":"(538) How culturally significant a part of American society are Atheists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After signing an executive order<\/a> earlier this month that seeks to relax restrictions on the political activities of tax-exempt churches, President Trump said the order was an important affirmation of the American identity. \u201cWe\u2019re a nation of believers,\u201d he said<\/a>. Trump is right in one sense \u2014 69 percent<\/a> of Americans say a belief in God is an important part of being American \u2014 but he\u2019s wrong demographically: Atheists constitute a culturally significant part of American society.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not sure how significant, though. The number of atheists in the U.S. is still a matter of considerable debate. Recent surveys have found that only about one in 10<\/a> Americans report that they do not believe in God, and only about 3 percent<\/a> identify<\/i> as atheist. But a new study<\/a> suggests that the true number of atheists could be much larger, perhaps even 10 times larger than previously estimated.<\/p>\n

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: \u201cHow many of these statements are true of you?\u201d Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as \u201cI own a dog\u201d and \u201cI am a vegetarian.\u201d The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, \u201cI do not believe in God.\u201d The totals from the test group were then compared to those from the control group, allowing researchers to estimate the number of people who identify as atheists without requiring any of the respondents to directly state that they don\u2019t believe in God.1<\/sup><\/a> The study concludes that roughly one-quarter (26 percent<\/a>) of Americans likely do not believe in God.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After signing an executive order earlier this month that seeks to relax restrictions on the political activities of tax-exempt churches, President Trump said the order was an important affirmation of the American identity. \u201cWe\u2019re a nation of believers,\u201d he said.…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209,425,155,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americau-s-a","category-atheism","category-other-faiths","category-religion-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60076"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60079,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60076\/revisions\/60079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}