“The invocation was a call for our elected officials and those in the chamber to embrace all that has come from an evidence-based approach to governing,” Scott wrote to the Courier after the invocation May 2.

“It was about appreciating that only human beings working together can solve earthly problems.”

Atheism, agnosticism and generalized spirituality — absent of organized religion — is growing.

According to Pew Research, those who claim to be unaffiliated with any religion grew from 16.1 percent in 2007 to 22.8 percent in 2014, making “unaffiliated” the second-largest religious segment behind evangelical Protestants, who declined in population over that same period from 26.3 percent to 25.4 percent.

Those who described themselves as “atheist” rose from 1.6 percent in 2007 to 3.1 percent, while the largest group of “unaffiliated,” what Pew describes as answering “nothing in particular” in terms of religious beliefs, grew from 12.1 percent to 15.8 percent.

Many of those “nothing in particular” people might just be eschewing the atheist label, said Knief.