Adherents.com posts lists of the countries with the highest proportion and highest numbers of atheists and agnostics in 2005.

About.com cites a number of polls on Americans’ attitudes toward atheists.

A Barna study, conducted from January 2007 through January 2008, found similar percentages for divorce among atheists and agnostics as among Christians. The Barna Group partners with organizations and others “to be a catalyst in moral, social, and spiritual transformation.”

Daniel Aleshire directs the Association of Theological Schools, which is based in Pittsburgh, Pa. The association has 251 member schools with 80,140 students total, of whom 64 percent are men and 36 percent are women. The ATS posts a number of tables on seminary enrollment.

Read about a survey of atheists, agnostics and Christians conducted by the Barna Group from January 2005 through January 2007. The findings compare the groups’ attitudes and behaviors on matters ranging from political involvement to charitable contributions and volunteerism.

A pie chart posted by the Pew Forum shows the religious self-identification of the 5 percent of Americans who do not believe in God or a universal spirit, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. The chart indicates that only about a quarter of those people call themselves atheists.

Jackson Carroll is author of God’s Potters: Pastoral Leadership and the Shaping of Congregations (Eerdmans, 2006) and professor emeritus at Duke Divinity School.

Read a report giving more extensive details about the ARIS 2008 findings regarding “nones,” only a fraction of whom are atheists.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that about 12 percent of Americans say there is no God or it’s unknowable whether there is. The percentage of respondents who self-identified as atheists or agnostics, however, was much lower. The survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College’s Program on Public Values, followed previous large-scale religious identification surveys in […]