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It may not feel like it, but atheism in the United States appears to have hit its ceiling. According to the Pew Research Center, 2 percent of the country was actively, openly nonreligious in 2011. That number rose to 4 percent by 2021—but has remained constant since.
America’s oft-discussed “decline in religion” is actually a story about a decline in church attendance; one’s investment in an institutional religious community is separate from belief in a god (or gods) of any variety.
Nick Pompella is a science writer, editor, and reporter at Purdue University. He also works as a freelance fiction editor, and has published art criticism and foreign policy analysis for National Review.
