Heaven Knows Dems Can’t Win Without Atheists
In an editorial in the Sunday Miami Herald, Robyn Blumner of the Center for Inquiry laid out a good case for why the Democratic Party needs to stop dissing its atheist supporters:
Atheists make up 3.1 percent of Americans and agnostics another 4 percent, according to Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study and those are people willing to ’fess up to pollsters. Jews are only 1.9 percent of the population; Mormons 1.6 percent.
In other words, there are a lot of us. We are a growing and essential segment of the Democratic Party. About 69 percent identify as Democrats or lean that way, according to Pew. Atheists and agnostics give Democrats the margin of victory in election after election. Include the entirety of the “nones” — the one-in-five Americans who tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation — and we are the Democratic Party’s largest faith demographic.
About 28 percent of Democrats say they have no religious affiliation, compared with 21 percent who say they are Catholic, 16 percent who are evangelicals and 13 percent mainline Protestant.
Read more here.
