Americans and Religion

[kandrathe]

The best I could come up with on a quick web search (no idea of the validity of the data -- as the article says it's extremely difficult to assess rates of relgious belief) was

http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zu...an/atheism.html

which gives 3-9% for athiest/agnostic/nonbelievers in the US and 39-44% in the Netherlands.

Not sure, though, what you mean by 'avowed atheists'. Would you would draw a distinction between, say, 'Christians' and 'avowed Christians', and where woud you lump non-religiously practicing 'agnostics'?

Well, from the study...

By any measure, there are not many atheists in America. While about 14 percent of Americans name no religious preference (Hout and Fischer 2002; Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar 2001), most of these religious “nones” also say that they believe in God and pray regularly (Hout and Fischer 2002). In the 2000 GSS, only about 3 percent of Americans affirm that “I don’t believe in God,” perhaps the best direct indicator of being an atheist, while another 4.1 percent agree with the statement “I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is any way to find out.” Taken together, these “skeptics,” as Hout and Fischer (2002) call them, make up only 7 percent of the population. In fact, only about 1 percent of Americans self-identify as “atheist” or “agnostic,” according to Kosmin et al. (2001). This gap may indicate that many skeptics do hold some form of religious belief, or it may signal the stigma attached to the atheist label.