The Atheist Movement Research Paper

The Atheist Movement: Why There are less Christians in America than ever Before

Jaehun Lee

Sitting in his Sunday School class, David Lee, a senior at St. John’s High School, listened to the instructor talk about the public’s sentiment regarding gay marriage. “ Well, Michael [the instructor] said something like ‘As recently as 6 years ago, 60% of Americans were opposed to gay marriage’” recalled Lee, “and then he talked about how changing religious demographics has let to the tables being turned.”

Christianity has been on a downward trend since 1948, according to a Gallup poll from 2014, the number of protestant Christians was 69%, which briefly peaked at 71% in the 50s. Since then, the figure has gone down every year after and today sits at 37%.

What drives this downward trend? i’m going to try to do an interview with a divinity professor within the next week, but this is from online and it seems pretty representative as to why

According to a study done by Allen Downey a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, the answer is internet and the increasing number of people receiving college education. “Since the 1980s, the number of people receiving college level education has increased from 17.4 percent to 27.2 percent in the 2000s. So it’s not surprising that this is reflected in the drop in numbers claiming religious affiliation today. But although the correlation is statistically significant, it can only account for about 5 percent of the drop, so some other factor must also be involved.”

“For people living in homogeneous communities, the Internet provides opportunities to find information about people of other religions and to interact with them personally,” says Downey in an interview with the MIT Technology Review. “Conversely, it is harder (but not impossible) to imagine plausible reasons why disaffiliation might cause increased Internet