Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Has No Religion. Politicians Still Don't Understand What That Means.

About 29% of American adults now identify as atheist, agnostic, or "nothing in particular." That number has stopped climbing after decades of steady growth, according to a major Pew Research Center study released February 26, 2025.

Almost everything the political class and mainstream media will tell you about those 29% is oversimplified to the point of being wrong.

The Distinction Nobody Is Making

Political scientists David Campbell and his colleagues — who spent over a decade developing the research that culminated in their 2021 book Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics — draw a hard line between two groups everyone else lumps together.

Nonreligious people define themselves by what they're NOT. No church. No God. No affiliation. But ask them what worldview guides their life, and many can't tell you. They're not religious. That's about it.

Secular people define themselves by what they ARE. Science. Philosophy. Humanism. They've actively adopted a non-faith framework for understanding the world. Many identify explicitly as atheist, agnostic, or humanist.

Those are NOT the same voter. Not even close.

According to The Conversation's reporting on this research, a "fairly large number" of nonreligious voters supported Donald Trump in both 2020 and 2024. The default media narrative — religious voters vote Republican, secular voters vote Democrat — is too crude to be useful.

Four Groups, Not Two

Campbell's research breaks the American public into four distinct categories: Religionists, Nonreligionists, Secularists, and — here's the one nobody talks about — Religious Secularists.

That last group alone blows up the standard political binary. These are people who attend religious services AND hold a secular, science-first worldview. Think: Reform Jews, mainline Protestants, and a significant chunk of Catholics. They are religious AND secular simultaneously.

The "religion vs. secularism" frame that every pundit relies on doesn't describe maybe a quarter of the country accurately.

This Isn't New — It's Been Building Since 1944

Brookings Institution scholars E.J. Dionne Jr. and John C. Green documented this polarization using survey data stretching back to 1944. Their findings are blunt: the least religious Americans have moved hard toward Democrats, while the most religiously engaged — particularly Evangelical Protestants — have moved hard toward Republicans.

Both groups grew simultaneously. That's polarization.

Brookings notes the "many other religious groups showed more varied patterns" — meaning the faith-based political split is real but NOT comprehensive. Catholics, mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, Jews, Muslims — each group has its own trajectory. Painting American religion in two colors misses most of the canvas.

The Jefferson Problem

Boston University history professor Bruce J. Schulman puts the longer arc in sharp relief. Thomas Jefferson — a man who literally cut miracles out of his Bible and advocated strict church-state separation — was elected president in 1800 despite his opponents calling him "an essential atheist."

Today, according to Schulman's work published in Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), "it's almost impossible to win the presidency without some show of serious religious commitment."

How did that happen? Schulman argues religion moved from background cultural assumption to active political credential somewhere in the 20th century — accelerating with the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s.

The irony is striking: America gets MORE secular in raw numbers, and presidential campaigns get MORE performatively religious. Both things are true at the same time.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

The 29% figure is practically meaningless without the secular/nonreligious distinction underneath it.

Left-leaning outlets are tempted to read the secular surge as a demographic gift to Democrats. That's sloppy. Nonreligious voters who lack any defined worldview are NOT reliable Democratic voters — Trump proved that twice.

Right-leaning outlets are tempted to dismiss the secular surge as coastal elitism. Also sloppy. Twenty-nine percent is not a fringe. That's roughly the same share of Americans as Evangelical Protestants. Ignoring them — or condescending to them — is a losing strategy.

The story is more complicated and more interesting than either side wants to admit.

What This Means for Regular People

If you're nonreligious but not particularly ideological about it, nobody in Washington is speaking your language — because campaigns are still writing you off as a default Democrat or ignoring you entirely.

If you're religious but hold secular views on science and governance, both parties are probably getting you wrong too.

And if you're a voter who's just tired of faith being used as a campaign prop — candidates performing piety at diners and quoting scripture at rallies — understand that this circus exists because political consultants still think it works.

The data says the country is changing. The campaigns haven't caught up.

That gap is where elections get won and lost.