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 […]

Ann M. Svennungsen is president of the Fund for Theological Education, an Atlanta-based ecumenical organization that gives fellowships and support to young women and men exploring ministry, and Texas Lutheran University in Seguin. She was elected Bishop by the Minneapolis Area Synod Assembly in 2012.

See a Feb. 17, 2010, report titled “Religion Among the Millennials: Less Religiously Active but Fairly Traditional in Other Ways.” The report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says 26 percent of Millennial adults (defined as those born after 1980) have no religious affiliation. But in some other ways, their attitudes about religion resemble […]

Read a May 21, 2010, Gallup story about the decline in religious identity among Americans over time. Twenty-eight percent now say religion is largely out-of-date, the story says.

The Rev. Nathan Kirkpatrick directs Pulpit & Pew, an interdenominational research project that studies pastoral leadership issues.

U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., in 2007 became the first member of Congress in memory to publicly self-identify as an atheist.