Multiple major surveys and studies released throughout 2025 show a clear global trend: atheism and religious “non-affiliates” are on the rise, now forming the fastest-growing “faith categories” on the planet.
A Gallup survey, published in July, covering nearly 43,000 respondents across 42 countries from 2005 to 2024, documented a clear upward trajectory of people who consider themselves atheists.
The proportion of self-described “convinced atheists” rose from 6% in 2005 to 10% in 2024. Over the same period, the percentage of people describing themselves as religious fell from 68% to 56%, while those identifying as “not religious” increased from 21% to 28%.
The trend is especially pronounced in “higher-income” nations. Northeast Asia recorded 35% of convinced atheists, while Western Europe was listed at around 14% of confirmed atheists, according to the Gallup data.
A separate Pew Research Center report, released in June, examined religious switching patterns between 2010 and 2020 and found that the population of the religiously unaffiliated grew by 17%, from 1.6 billion to 1.9 billion people. That lifted their global representation from 23% to 24% – the largest net gain of any major “religious group” during the decade, outpacing even Islam’s growth of 357 million followers.
Pew noted sharp increases in Europe, North America, and parts of Latin America. By 2020, those who consider themselves unaffiliated to any religion had become the majority in ten countries or territories, up from seven a decade earlier.
Countries that have crossed the 50% threshold of people who consider themselves disconnected from religion now include Uruguay, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.
An August study in Nature Communications offered further insight into the shift, identifying three stages of disconnection from religion observed across more than 200 countries, which included declining participation in religious rituals, reduced reports of personal importance of religion, and a drop in formal affiliation to religions by families.
The findings align with domestic trends reported by The Dallas Express this past weekend, which showed fewer than half of Americans now consider religion very important in their lives – a 17-percentage-point decline since 2015 and one of the steepest drops recorded globally over the past two decades.
Another stand-out set of data came from Lifeway Research in February, which projected a long-term decline in the number of self-identified atheists from 161 million in 1970 to roughly 133 million by 2050. However, researchers in that case acknowledged that broader “religious nones” – including agnostics and those with no particular affiliation – have continued to grow rapidly around the world.