The United States has always been an unusually religious nation for an advanced industrial society. Other nations with comparable levels of advancement in Western Europe, East Asia, and Oceania are generally far less religious. But that seems to be changing. However, it is a coincidence that totalitarian humanism is rising just as traditional religion is declining? As I have said before, in many ways, totalitarian humanists are merely Christians without a Christ. “Our atheists are very pious people.”-Max Stirner

In its more extreme forms, totalitarian humanism bears a creepy resemblance to Maoism, Nazism, or Islamism. But in its more mainstream forms it seems to be more on the level of the social purity movement, Prohibition, the Legion of Decency, or the Moral Majority.

Pew Research Center

The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009. Members of non-Christian religions also have grown modestly as a share of the adult population.

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