For all that people repeat the statistic that America is a very religious country, they are using faulty statistics. Considering that in many areas the term "atheist" has highly derogatory connotations, people will inherently respond negatively when asked.

On the other hand, there is also a certain menace in the question "Do you believe in God," most simply expressed by Pascale's Wager. Most people in our society are heavily conditioned to say "it is good to believe in God, and bad to be an atheist." Thus, we can expect significant distortion in polling.

More accurate ways of determining who actually believes is by looking at the numbers on the regularity of religious practice, and the af...

For all that people repeat the statistic that America is a very religious country, they are using faulty statistics. Considering that in many areas the term "atheist" has highly derogatory connotations, people will inherently respond negatively when asked.

On the other hand, there is also a certain menace in the question "Do you believe in God," most simply expressed by Pascale's Wager. Most people in our society are heavily conditioned to say "it is good to believe in God, and bad to be an atheist." Thus, we can expect significant distortion in polling.

More accurate ways of determining who actually believes is by looking at the numbers on the regularity of religious practice, and the affiliation with a specific church. These numbers are much much lower.

America is a nation that often professes to be very religious, but in reality, it is not significantly more religious than most other places in the world, and far less religious than a number of countries.

And as for 20/20...

Honestly, I've been on a lot of interfaith pannels, and I swear, I've heard better questions asked on religion by Junior High School Students. I despair that a room full of executives somewhere thought this "journalism" was fit for television.