Lots of Americans lose their religion: New York Times

NEW YORK, April 20 (Xinhua) -- In 2023, only 39 percent of respondents in a survey said religion was very important to them, compared to 62 percent who said that in 1998, according to an article published by The New York Times on Wednesday.

The survey was conducted on some 1,000 American adults last month by The Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago about the importance of different values to Americans, including the importance of religion.

"When you look at the full results, the picture becomes a bit more complicated," with 60 percent of respondents saying that religion was either somewhat or very important to them, and only 19 percent saying religion was not important to them at all, said the article.

But two things can be true at the same time, Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at Duke Divinity School who directs the National Congregations Study, was quoted as saying: America can still be a comparatively observant nation and religious observance can be on the decline in various dimensions, happening at different paces.

According to NORC data, atheists only made up about 2 percent to 3 percent of the population from 1988 to 2012. By 2021, atheists were 7 percent of the population. In 1988, 17 percent of Americans said they never attended religious services. In 2021, that number was 31 percent.

"In the United States, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches close down every year, either to be repurposed as apartments, laundries, laser-tag arenas, or skate parks, or to simply be demolished," sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman and Ryan Cragun -- the authors of the forthcoming book "Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society" -- were quoted as saying.