Americans are losing their religion, and that’s good news for Democrats. So says Pitzer College prof Phil Zuckerman in a fascinating breakdown in Bloomberg Businessweek. Americans have long been more religious than almost all other Western societies, but that’s changing fast, reports Pitzer:
In 1990, only 8 percent of Americans claimed to have no religion. Today, about 20 percent claim as much. More than one-third of American adults younger than 30 are now religiously unaffiliated, which means that among 20-somethings, secular Americans far outnumber evangelical Christians — a big shift from 25 years ago.
Which is good news for Democrats, because “63 percent of nonreligious Americans support the Democratic Party, with only 26 percent supporting Republicans.”
Okay, the religiously unaffiliated aren’t necessarily atheists, or even agnostics, but Pitzer says as many as one-half of them are. “Thus,” he notes, “the rise of the ‘nones’ simultaneously indicates an increase in atheism and agnosticism in America.”
