Statistics on Atheism

A note on the numbers

Survey numbers on religion are unusually sensitive to question wording. “Do you believe in God?” produces different numbers than “What is your religious affiliation?” which produces different numbers again than “Would you describe yourself as atheist, agnostic, or non-religious?” The figures below identify which instrument produced them; where sources disagree, both are given. Primary sources are Pew Research Center, the General Social Survey (GSS), the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), WIN/Gallup International, Eurobarometer, and the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA).

Global totals

Pew’s 2012 The Global Religious Landscapestudy — the most methodologically consistent global count to date — estimated 1.1 billion people worldwide as religiously unaffiliated, roughly 16% of the global population. Pew’s 2022 follow-up projections put the figure at approximately 1.2 billion, still around 16–17% of the world. The unaffiliated are concentrated heavily in East Asia: China alone accounts for more than half of the world’s nones. Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand, and parts of Latin America (especially Uruguay) account for most of the rest.

WIN/Gallup International’s Global Index of Religion and Atheism, which asks a different question (“Are you a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?”), reports higher numbers: in its 2017 wave, 25% globally said “not religious” and 9% said “convinced atheist.” The gap between Pew’s and WIN/Gallup’s figures is a good illustration of the question-wording problem: unaffiliation and disbelief measure different things.

United States

The US has been the best-documented case of accelerating disaffiliation in the developed world. Share of adults identifying as religiously unaffiliated — the Nones— by year, per Pew and GSS: approximately 5% in 1972, 8% in 1990, 16% in 2007, 23% in 2014, 26% in 2019, and 28–29% in 2023. PRRI’s American Values Atlas puts the 2023 figure at 27%.

Inside the US Nones (Pew 2023): about 17% self-identify as atheist, about 20% as agnostic, and about 63% as “nothing in particular.” Belief in God among Nones: around 30% say they believe in God or a higher power. Among Americans overall, Pew’s 2023 survey found 63% still say they believe in God with absolute certainty, down from 71% in 2007. Gallup’s 2022 poll found 81% believe in God, down from 98% in the 1950s.

Generational breakdown of US Nones (Pew 2023): Gen Z (born 1997–2012) around 45%; Millennials around 40%; Gen X around 27%; Boomers around 20%; Silent Generation around 13%. The cohort gradient has been remarkably stable across successive surveys, which is the main reason most demographers expect the Nones share to continue rising.

United Kingdom

The 2021 England & Wales census recorded 37.2% as “no religion” — up from 25.2% in 2011 and 14.8% in 2001. This made “no religion” the largest single category in Wales and the second-largest in England, behind Christianity (46.2%, down from 59.3% a decade earlier). The British Social Attitudes Survey, which uses a different instrument, has found majorities identifying as non-religious since 2009; its 2022 wave recorded 53% as non-religious.

Scotland’s 2022 census reported 51.1% “no religion,” overtaking Christianity (38.8%) for the first time in Scottish history. Northern Ireland remains an outlier, with 17.4% “no religion” in 2021.

Europe and Australasia

Eurobarometer and national census data paint a consistent picture across most of Western and Northern Europe: high and rising disaffiliation, with religious belief concentrated among older cohorts and the foreign-born.

Non-religious shares by country: Czech Republic ~72% (Eurobarometer 2019), Estonia ~60%, Sweden ~60% (though still officially Lutheran by membership), Netherlands 57% (CBS 2022), Norway ~48% (SSB), France ~47%, Germany ~43% (2022), Spain ~39%, Australia 38.9% (2021 census, up from 30.1% in 2016), New Zealand 48.2% (2018 census), Canada ~34% (2021 census). For the fuller international treatment, see secular countries.

East Asia

East Asia’s numbers are the hardest to report precisely because the religious categories used in the West fit poorly. China is officially atheist; Pew’s 2012 estimate put 52% of Chinese adults as religiously unaffiliated, though cultural Buddhism, Confucian practice, and folk religion complicate the picture. Japan is similar: official Shinto and Buddhist affiliation numbers are high, but belief in personal deities is low, and WIN/Gallup has consistently found Japan among the least-religious countries on belief measures, with roughly 60% identifying as “not religious.”

South Korea is the clearest East Asian case of rapid disaffiliation: 2015 census figures showed 56.1% as “no religion,” up from about 47% in 2005, making it the majority category. The Korean case is a useful reminder that secularization is not a purely Western phenomenon.

Demographics within atheism and agnosticism

Pew’s 2020 and 2023 studies of US atheists and agnostics find consistent internal patterns: they skew younger (median age in the 30s), more educated (over 45% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to roughly 33% of adults overall), more male (about 60%), whiter (over 70% non-Hispanic white), and more politically liberal. Household income is slightly above average but not dramatically so.

Race and religion: non-white Americans remain more religious than white Americans on nearly every measure. Pew 2020 found Black Americans least likely to identify as atheist (<1%), with Hispanic Americans at around 2%. The overall US rise of the Nones is therefore disproportionately a rise among white, college-educated, and younger Americans — though all subgroups have moved in the same direction.

Trends over time

The direction of travel is consistent across countries with comparable data. Disaffiliation rises in every Western democracy, with essentially no reversed trends. Belief in God declines in parallel, though more slowly. The main exception is the post-Soviet revival in Russia and some Eastern European countries during the 1990s, which has since stalled or reversed in several cases.

Projections are harder. Pew’s 2022 projections expect the US Nones share to rise to between 34% and 52% by 2070, depending on switching assumptions. The UK, most of Western Europe, and Australia/New Zealand are projected to pass 50% non-religious well before then. The big uncertainty is not whether disaffiliation continues — it is how fast, and whether younger religious immigrants offset it in particular countries.

Why the numbers matter

Numbers like these function as something between a weather report and a census. They tell a person questioning their own faith that their experience is shared by hundreds of millions. They tell institutions that depend on religious affiliation — political, educational, medical — that the ground has moved. They let journalists and researchers work from the same baseline rather than from anecdote. And they give this site’s coverage of agnosticism, atheism, and the Nones a shared factual anchor. For a broader data index across all our topic pages, see religion by the numbers.