Yesterday, I saw a news story announcing that most young people today (specifically the 18-29 crowd) don’t go to church and consider themselves “more spiritual than religious.” Thomas of WWGHA calls the story heartwarming. I disagree: look at the rest of the details of the report, you’ll notice that close to two-thirds identify as Christian, and half say that Jesus is the only path to heaven.

Look at the details and you’ll also notice that a Christian company is behind the survey. That explains why the statistics are being spun the way they are: the people behind the survey want to alert their fellow Christians to the fact that, horror of horrors, not everyone in America is a fundamentalist Christian, and hope that will get them agitated and ready to take some kind of action (though I wonder if the survey takers know what their comrades are supposed to do).

In fact, it’s been true for awhile that lots of people who are Christians are “mushy Christians” (as the pollsters say), that lots don’t bother going to church on a regular basis, that most people don’t make it to church every week even if they have a vague commitment to trying to do so, and that only one-third to one-half of the population will agree to the more conservative Christian doctrines.

This is a situation that naturally makes a lot of people unhappy: if you think all non-Christians are going to Hell, it should worry you if half the country is somehow unaware of this fact. If you don’t believe in Hell, it should worry you if even a third of the country thinks you deserve to go there for not sharing their beliefs. But that doesn’t make statistics like these news.

One statistic is new to me, though: the number of young people who identify as atheist (6%) or agnostic (8%). Previous surveys I’ve seen show a fair number of people (10-20%) with no religious affiliation, lots of people who say they don’t believe in God or aren’t sure whether he exists, but only a very few (1-2%) who are willing to call themselves atheists or agnostics. The higher numbers of self-identified atheists and agnostics indicates that the taboo has come off these words. That genuinely is encouraging.