Godless Statistics

Off the top of my head, I can think of four major rationalist magazines:

• The Humanist published by the American Humanist Association
• New Humanist published by the UK's Rationalist Association
• Skeptical Inquirer published by The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly known as CSICOP)
• Free Inquiry published by the Council for Secular Humanism

You may notice some similarities in their names.

Both The Committe for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism are part of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), the organization that runs CFI - On Campus, which Brown Freethought is a member of. For a long time I would occasionally pick up an issue of Free Inquiry or Skeptical Inquirer when I went to a bookstore. At the end of the summer I finally decided to get a subscription to both magazines. So far, I've gotten two issues of Free Inquiry but none of Skeptical Inquirer. (I'll need to look into this if the next issue doesn't come this month.)

The first issue I received of Free Inquiry had a very interesting article entitled "Profiles of the Godless", which describes a number of surveys of the irreligious. I absolutely love surveys like this. Theey provide real information so we don't need to rely on personal observations to characterize the rationalist population. One topic I really want to see is the political affiliations of nontheists and skeptics, which these surveys don't address. It seems like most nontheists are on the left with a sizable portion of libertarians and small amounts of the other political persuasions. This seems to be the case in Brown Freethought, just like the larger rationalist community. However, I don't know of any data to show that this is actually the case.

In most surveys on religion, nonbelievers get lumped into a single group. At best, they distinguish between atheists and agnostics, but this doesn't tell you what sort of atheist or agnostic these people are. How many agnostics are what I would call atheists and how many are on the fence about religion, rather than actually believing being a real agnostic. My favorite survey in the article is on self-identification:

Respondents were allowed to endorse multiple religious and philosophical views or labels (such as “spiritual,” “agnostic,” and “humanistic”), but they were also asked to choose the single term that best described themselves. This self-identification term served as a basis for categorization. Despite the option of selecting among a dozen labels such as “deist” or “polytheist,” the overwhelming majority of respondents were divided amongst four preferred labels: 57 percent atheist, 24 percent humanist, 10 percent agnostic, and 2 percent spiritual.

There is an interesting shift between the numbers when asked to check all labels that apply versus only the one that is describes you best. The figure above summarizes the results. On the left is the percentage of people who say the label applies to them and on the right is the percentage that chooses that label as the best description of them. The most interesting one is "humanist", which goes from 63% to 23%. It would appear that most of the respondents call themselves atheists, humanists, and other labels, but when choosing a single label, they prefer atheist of humanist. Humanism, to them is secondary.

I'd certainly check both atheist and humanist. If I was then asked to only pick one, I would be more likely to pick atheist as my single term rather than humanism. I'm not entirely sure why, because I think secular humanism should subsume atheism. I suppose the reason is that most people in the general population would have a much better idea about your beliefs if you call yourself an atheist rather than a secular humanist.

I suggest people take a look at the surveys in the article. They deal with a number of other interesting topics as well.