A new Pew survey on religion in America was released yesterday.

The most interesting finding to me is the “Unaffiliated” group, which makes up 16.1 percent of the total adult population. About a third of those are at least somewhat religious, just not any religion in particular, leaving the nonreligious total at 10.3 percent — 1.6 atheist, 2.4 agnostic, and 6.3 just plain secular. A quick read might suggest that the whole 16.1 percent is nonreligious, so I want to emphasize the more accurate 10.3 percent figure.

[Update: I generally love the think tank Center for Inquiry, so I was slightly disappointed to see them eliding "unaffiliated" with "non-religious" this press release.]

Breaking it down by percentage, apparently about 16 percent of the nonreligious in the U.S. identify as atheist, 23 percent as agnostic, and 61 percent as secular. I suppose this might inform the debate about whether people should identify as atheists or not.

Unaffiliated is also the fastest-growing group: only 7.3 percent of the population says they were unaffiliated as a child, meaning it’s more than doubled in the past generation, despite not having a very high retention rate (many people raised unaffiliated later become religious), and the unaffiliated are disproportionately young.

The 16.1 percent figure basically confirms the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), which found 14.3 percent of the U.S. population identifying as nonreligious, as well as 16 percent having a secular outlook. (The two groups probably mostly overlapped.)

Other points of interest:

• Unitarian Universalists come in a 0.3 percent. Assuming roughly 225 million adults in the U.S., that gives us about 675,000 UUs. (Another blogger estimates 683,000.) What’s shocking is that the Unitarian Universalist Association’s own figure is about a quarter of this figure, suggesting that most self-identified UUs aren’t a member of any UU church (society, etc.). More discussion at Philocrites and the above blogger, and elsewhere no doubt.
• Quakers clock in at “less than 0.3 percent,” meaning “less than 675,000.” Perhaps a lot less, since our own count is only 87,000, but as with UUs, there are probably many who identify as Quaker who aren’t in the membership rolls. Don’t see much discussion of this yet, perhaps because it doesn’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know.
• “Spiritual but not religious” are also a tiny “less than 0.3 percent.” It would be interesting to compare this to the larger percentage (if I recall correctly) found by the ARIS.