The percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has stopped growing, according to a new report that also finds such individuals self-report higher levels of stress and lower levels of hope than those who identify with a faith.
The State of the Bible report from the American Bible Society found that the percentage of “nones” in the U.S. currently stands at 26 percent in 2024 -- the same as in 2023 and 2022. Other researchers, the report said, have found similar results.
In essence, the term “nones” refers to individuals who respond with “none of the above” when asked in polls about their religious affiliation. Some, but not all, are atheists or agnostics.
The percentage of nones has grown rapidly over the past 50 years, from 5 percent in the early 1970s to 12 percent by 1996. It crossed 20 percent about a decade ago.
“Social scientists acknowledge that a ‘social desirability bias’ might be responsible for some of the rapid growth of this group over the last half-century,” the report said. “That is, in 1972, some nonreligious people considered it respectable to be religious, so they claimed a connection they didn’t really have. Now, there’s no such stigma attached to not being religious. Yet that bias could account for only a small portion of the fivefold increase we’ve seen.”
Nones are more likely to be male and young, more likely to live in cities, and less likely to be married. They are better educated and better paid than other Americans but “self-report lower levels of hope and higher levels of stress,” the report said.
About one-fourth of Nones are “curious about the Bible and/or Jesus,” while another quarter are neutral, and 40 percent are hostile to the Bible, according to the report. One in 10 say they have a personal relationship with Jesus.
Nones are a “vast mission field,” the report said.
John Plake, chief innovation officer for the American Bible Society and editor-in-chief of the State of the Bible, told Baptist Press that the church must learn to reach out to Nones.
“One of the things that we think is really useful in ministering to people with no religious affiliation is just to recognize that they’re not against you,” Plake told Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention. “And they’re not against the church, God, or the Bible. They’re in this place in between.
“It’s this liminal place in between for a lot of Americans, and that gives us hope that we can reach out to those people and we can communicate the Gospel clearly and biblically.”
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Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.