How Many Atheists Are There in Your State?
And, what factors predict higher rates of atheism?
I give a lot of talks about the "nones." This includes Zoom meetings, webinars, lecture series, and sermons at various venues such as churches, colleges, and social organizations. My slide deck is as dialed in as it can be. I know which statements will resonate, how to elicit a quick laugh, when to speed through a graph, and when to pause to let people take photos of a slide.
I aim to provide the audience with a few key takeaways from the talk. One of them is this: most "nones" are not atheists. I believe that when most people hear the term "none," they immediately picture an atheist. However, I emphasize the "nothing in particular" group more because it's significantly larger.
I do, however, believe that atheists are crucial for the future of American society and politics. As I've previously written, they are among the most politically active groups in the United States.
But how many are there? The Cooperative Election Study can help us with an estimate.
According to this data, about three percent of the adult population were atheists in 2008. This number has slowly risen over the last fifteen years. It was five percent in 2014, then increased to 6% by 2016. What's striking is that there hasn't been any appreciable increase between 2015 and 2022; it's remained around six percent.
I've also attempted to generate state-level estimates of atheists, which is not straightforward. When a group comprises only 6% of the general population, the margin of error increases. This is even more challenging at the state level, requiring a large sample size to include enough respondents from states like Vermont or Wyoming to produce confident calculations. Yet, I'm giving it a try.
Below, you'll find estimates of the atheist population for all 50 states. I used two sources: the Cooperative Election Study (CES) data from 2016-2022 and an estimate from Nationscape with has over 477,000 respondents. Despite the large sample sizes, four states in the Nationscape sample had fewer than 1000 respondents—Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North Dakota. However, this is as accurate as it gets with the available data.
I visualized the estimates with 84% confidence intervals. A rule of thumb is that if the error bars from each survey overlap, the estimates are statistically similar. This occurs in some states like Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, and Mississippi. Generally, the CES tends to have higher atheist estimates than the Nationscape survey, but the differences aren't substantial, averaging a discrepancy of 1.9 points.
I'll now share the atheist estimates from both surveys for all fifty states to illustrate the range of these numbers.
In several states, one estimate may be 4% and another 5%, such as in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Texas, and Florida. It's reasonable to conclude that in these locations, atheists may constitute one in twenty adults. Other states fall into a similar range, like Pennsylvania, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas. The largest discrepancies were found in Washington (4 points) and Oregon (5 points), it’s hard to figure out why this is happening in these two states.
To generate my best guess, I averaged the estimates from the CES and Nationscape surveys. Although the CES estimate might be slightly high and the Nationscape slightly low, the midpoint should provide a close approximation of the actual percentage.
It's reassuring when the data align with perceptions - that’s the case here. For example, the Bible Belt displays a lower atheist percentage, with states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky showing shares below 3%. North Dakota's outlier status likely reflects the impact of sample size.
The atheist population in most states falls within the 4-6% range, encompassing the upper Midwest, the Rust Belt, and parts of the Southwest. Missouri, with a 5.1% atheist population, serves as the median state, aligning more with its northern neighbors than those to the south.
The dark blue states, which are most likely to have atheists, can be best described as including the Pacific Northwest, some Great Plains states, and New England. However, the epicenter is undoubtedly in the top left part of the map, with Oregon at 9.2% atheists and Washington at 8.2%. The only other states that come close are the relatively small ones: New Hampshire (9.4%) and Vermont (9.2%).
Let’s have some fun now, though. What factors predict a greater percentage of atheists? I think even amateur social scientists can probably do a bit of theorizing at this stage. Let’s start with some low hanging fruit - age. This is a scatterplot of median age on the x-axis and the share of atheists on the y-axis.
The trend line is unmistakably positive—states with older populations tend to have more atheists. Surprising, isn't it? Take note of the three outliers in the top right—New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. These states are both significantly older and have higher proportions of atheists than the norm. On the other end of the spectrum lies Utah, a notable outlier. Despite its relatively young median age of 31.5, its estimated atheist share is 5.4%, which significantly exceeds the expected trend of 4%.
But what does this correlation translate to in concrete terms? If a state were to age by five years, on average, it could anticipate a one percentage point increase in its atheist population. This change might not seem substantial, but considering the implications of a statewide median age shift of five years, the impact is noteworthy.
Let’s explore another influential factor: politics. I analyzed Trump’s vote share from the 2020 presidential election and plotted it against the share of atheists.
This relationship should be relatively straightforward to understand—the higher the percentage of Trump voters in a state, the lower the percentage of atheists. Vermont stands out as an anomaly in the top left, where only 31% of voters supported Trump and 9.2% of the population identifies as atheist. Massachusetts presents an interesting case for comparison; its Trump vote share was nearly identical, yet its atheist share was two percentage points lower.
Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming significantly deviate from the trend. I attribute this to two main factors: the small sample size and the unique political landscape in these states, where conservatism is not primarily driven by religious motives. A Republican in Montana is markedly different from one in Mississippi.
But what does this correlation look like in real numbers? For every ten-point increase in Trump’s vote share, the percentage of atheists decreases by about 0.9%. This is less than a single percentage point. For example, if Vermont's Trump vote share increased from 31% to 51%, we might expect its atheist share to decrease from 9.2% to 7.4%.
Before concluding this post, I put together a regression model with additional variables such as the percentage of the state population with a college degree, the median income, and the gender ratio to identify factors that influence the percentage of atheists. Here are the findings.
Education, age, and income did not provide statistical significance in this analysis, which is certainly noteworthy. The primary factor influencing the atheist percentage was political orientation. A higher number of Trump voters correlates with fewer atheists, all else being equal. Additionally, two demographic variables—higher percentages of white people and men—were associated with increased atheism rates. The effects of these variables were positive and of similar magnitudes, indicating that neither is significantly more predictive than the other.
It's important to emphasize that atheists have not been growing at an exponential rate in America. They accounted for six percent of the population when Donald Trump was elected President, and this figure remained unchanged as of 2022. The increase in "nones" is attributed more to a rise in individuals identifying with "nothing in particular" rather than a surge in atheism. While states like Oregon and Vermont have notable atheist populations, atheism is relatively rare in places like Alabama.
The inverse relationship between age and atheism deserves further reflection. When combined with data from a previous analysis highlighting the low fertility rate among atheists, it becomes clear that the growth of atheism likely depends more on converting individuals from other traditions than on passing atheistic beliefs down through generations.
However, the relatively high incomes and education levels of atheists, coupled with their lower fertility rates, position them to continue exerting significant influence across various aspects of American life, both now and in the future.
Code for this post can be found here.
The Utah data make complete sense. People who leave the LDS church don’t become Presbyterians, they stop believing at all.
I suspect that the distinction between atheists and agnostics is not as strong as the figures suggest. There are several famous agnostics such as Tyler Cowen, Neil deGrasse Tyson — Einstein, even — who, when they speak of God, use all the same language as atheists but choose to not accept the label. To an extent, choosing to adopt the 'atheist' label is a political statement. Most people who believe that there is no God don't accept the label that goes with it.
Similarly, the nothing-in-particulars include a lot of people who haven't really thought about it. They may not all be atheists but I'll bet many of them are — they just don't choose to use the label.