The nation has grown less religious in the last two decades, a new study shows, with a 10 percent drop in the number of people who call themselves Christians and increases in all 50 states among those who are not aligned with any faith.
Between 1990 and 2008, the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Christian dropped from 86 percent to 76 percent, reports the new American Religious Identification Survey, a wide-ranging survey released Monday (March 9). The group that researchers call the “Nones” — atheists, agnostics, and other secularists — have almost doubled in that time period, from 8.2 percent to 15 percent.
And, in a further indication of growing secularism, more than a quarter of Americans — 27 percent — said they do not expect to have a religious funeral when they die. “Traditionally, historically, people are interested in their immortal soul, salvation, heaven and hell,” said Barry Kosmin, the co-author of the survey and director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Connecticut. “If you don’t have a religious funeral, you’re probably not interested in heaven and hell.”
The survey of more than 54,000 respondents followed similar large studies in 2001 and in 1990. Though the largest increase in “Nones” occurred between 1990 and 2001 (from 8.2 percent to 14.1 percent), Kosmin said more people have been willing to identify themselves as atheist or agnostic in the last seven years. “There’s the anti-religious group among what we call the `Nones,’” he said, “but then the kind of nonreligious, the irreligious … have also increased
A new poll released by The Gallup Survey found that 39 percent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution, 25 percent do not believe in evolution, and 36 percent have no opinion either way.
A new study shows that only 30 percent of those who attend church are completely loyal to the denomination with which they are affiliated.
The economic recession has not led to an increase in attendance at U.S. houses of worship, according to Gallup pollsters.
More evidence that grave financial concerns are foremost in American’s lives today is revealed in the results from a new poll conducted by 
DALLAS (Reuters) – Feeling under the weather? If you’re American there is a one in three chance that you have encountered a divine healing and so you may put your faith in a spiritual rather than medical cure.
