Religious vs. Non-Religious Countries

With 60% of Americans self-identifying as religious in 2012, the United States is among the countries where the majority of people say they are religious.  This phenomenon is nevertheless not global.  In countries as varied as China, Australia, Turkey, and Ireland, the majority of people say they are non-religious.  Such attitudes towards religion vary in many regions.  While all the countries surveyed in South America (minus the blip for French Guiana which shows data for France as a whole) and Africa report religious majorities, in east Asia you find most South Koreans are religious but not their neighbors in China and Japan.  Similar, the Middle East is not uniformly religious.  Both secular Turkey and the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan have non-religious majorities.  In Scandinavia most Finns are religious, but most Swedes are not.  While most of Germany's neighbors are non-religious, the majority of Germans report they are religious.

The Rise of the Nones

One of the fastest growing religious affiliations in the United States are the un-affiliated.  Sometimes called the Nones for checking off "none" for the question of religion, such people are usually categorized separately from atheists.  The un-affiliated may include a range of people including agnostics and spiritually-oriented people who dislike organized religion.  Non-religious people now make up majorities in Turkey (73%), Vietnam (65%) and Azerbaijan (51%).  Almost a third of Americans (30%) report they are non-religious. Worldwide, almost 1 in 4 people report they are non-religious.

That Old Time Religion: the Ghana - China Continuum

Based on a 2012 survey asking people if they were religious or not, you can see quite a lot of variation between different countries.  In none of the surveyed countries did <11% of the population say they were religious but China and Japan came close.  Only 14% of the Chinese and 16% of the Japanese identify as religious.  In fact, almost half of the Chinese (47%) and almost a third of the Japanese (31%) identify as atheists.

On the other hand, 90% or more of the population report being religious in Ghana (96%), Nigeria (93%), Armenia (92%), Fiji (92%), and Macedonia (90%).  The US is in the middle of the pack with 60% of Americans reporting they are religious.

The survey found that as per capita income increases, religiosity declines.

Atheism Around the World

Today's map shows data from a worldwide survey which asked respondents if they were a) religious, b) not religious, or c) identified as an atheist.  This map shows the percentages of people in various countries who identify as atheists.  By far the Chinese are the people most likely to self-identify as atheists.  Between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 people in Japan, France, and the Czech Republic also identify as atheists.  In 2012, 5% of Americans identified as atheists.

This survey was also given in both 2005 and 2012 in some countries including Japan, France, the Czech Republic, and the US.  In all four countries the percentage of people identifying as atheists has risen:  8%, 15%, 10%, and 4% respectively.  In a reverse trend, the percentage of atheists has dropped in Malaysia and Bosnia (-4% and -5% respectively). In fact, in 2012 in the increasingly conservative Muslim country of Malaysia, zero respondents reported being atheists.

(Note:  French Guiana and other overseas French territories are an overseas departments or territories of France and thus appears as the same color as France's European departments.)