Data Suggest Non-Believers Don’t Believe for a Reason

On September 28. 2010, Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times reported on a Pew Forum poll that confirms something I’ve known for a long time: Atheists are more knowledgeable about religion than believers.

In a phone survey of 3,400 people in the U.S., self-identified atheists and agnostics scored higher than every category of religious believer (though only slightly higher than Jews and Mormons) on knowledge about the world’s religions.

I found it especially interesting that the average non-believer scored so much higher than the average Evangelical Protestant in the poll’s 32-item quiz. The atheist/agnostic mean was 20.9, almost three and a half points higher than the white Evangelical average.

The data didn’t surprise me, and didn’t surprise American Atheists president Dave Silverman either. As he told the Times, “I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”