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Nearly a third of Americans in a recent Associated Press-NORC poll said they have no religious affiliation.
The recent poll, taken between May 11 and 15 of this year, found 30 percent of respondents saying they have no religious affiliation, whether they said they are agnostic, atheist or “nothing in particular.” In comparison to data from a poll fielded in Oct. 2021, there was an 8 percent jump in those who said they had no religious affiliation from 22 percent.
The data also found the amount of Americans identifying as “Just Christian” has dropped from 21 percent in Oct. 2021 to 18 percent in May 2023. The amount of Americans identifying as Protestant dropped from 26 to 25 percent in the same time period.
The May AP-NORC poll also found more Americans having “hardly any confidence at all” in people running organized religion, at 44 percent in 2023 versus 37 percent in 2020. The numbers from 2023 and 2020 are even higher than in 2017 and 2016, when the percentages of those who said they had “hardly any confidence at all” in people running organized religion were at 32 and 24 percent respectively.
Other results from the poll include 55 percent saying they don’t consider themselves religious because they “don’t like organized religion.”
Thirty-three percent said they don’t consider themselves religious because they “don’t believe in God” and 55 percent said they don’t consider themselves religious because “they don’t like the positions that religious faiths take on political or social issues.”
The May 2023 poll features responses from 1,680 adults representing the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error was 3.4 percentage points.
The respondents from the May poll who said they have no religious affiliation were sampled at a higher rate than their proportion of the population “for reasons of analysis,” according to the poll. Their 900 interviews had a margin of sampling error of 5.0 percentage points.
The Oct. 21 to 25, 2021 poll features responses from 1,083 adults representing the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error was 4.0 percentage points.