Stephen Prothero contradicts the idea that a person who declared no religion in the ARIS survey does not believe in God:

The fact of the matter is that only a small portion of the “nones” is truly secular. This information isn’t in the ARIS report, but when I called [Ariela] Keysar in an effort to dig deeper into the beliefs and behaviors of the religiously unattached, she told me that when asked about God, 23% of the “nones” said they believed in a higher power and 21% pledged their allegiance to a personal God. A parallel survey released in 2006 by Baylor University found that almost two-thirds (63%) of Americans who claim no religious affiliation believe in God, and another third (36%) said they prayed at least occasionally. Finally, a 2008 Pew Forum study found that 41% of the religiously unaffiliated nonetheless describe religion as either very important or somewhat important in their lives. “Nones” are by no means non-believers.

What the rise of the “nones” shows us is not how American Christianity is declining but how it is changing. The data tell us that Christians are increasingly likely to describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious, that they are increasingly wary of labels and institutions, and that they identify their faith less and less with “organized religion” and more and more with the personal power of Jesus himself.

What the data do not tell us is that the United States is becoming “post-Christian.” If you meet a random American walking down the street, the odds are only one in 62 that he or she will self-identify as atheist or agnostic. And even if we accept the ARIS survey as gospel, the United States today has more Christians than any other country in human history. The current U.S. population is more Christian than Israel is Jewish and Utah is Mormon. Meanwhile, Christianity remains, for good or for ill, a vital political force, not just on the right but also on the left, and the Christian Bible remains the scripture of American politics, invoked thousands of times a year on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Read the full article here.

[via: the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Religion News]