Secularism is gaining ground in the United States, eating away at the percentage of Americans who identify with the Protestant Christianity of the founding fathers, a poll published Monday showed.
The percentage of Americans who adhered to no particular religion jumped from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent last year, the third American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted over 10 months last year by pollsters from Trinity College in Connecticut, showed.
When the survey was conducted in 2001, 14.1 percent of respondents said they were not religious.
"Americans are slowly becoming less Christian... The challenge to Christianity does not come from other world religions or new religious movements, but rather from a rejection of all organized religions," said a report of last year's survey, in which 54,461 people took part.
The percentage of Christians in the United States declined slightly between 2001 and 2008 from 76.7 percent to 76 percent, after seeing a precipitous fall since 1990, when 86.2 percent said they were Christian.
Welcome to the world of rationality.
It's about time more people realized that organized religion only encourages divisiveness and intolerance while keeping us from uniting around the things we share and have in common.
