2029: The Year Non-Religious Americans Will Definitively Outnumber Catholics
By Hemant Mehta, October 24, 2019

We know the number of non-religious Americans remains on the rise while the number of Protestants and Catholics continue dropping.

It leads to a fairly straightforward question: When will the “Nones” outnumber any single religious group?

Any answer is speculative, of course. You would have to assume the demographic trends continue as expected, and there’s no 9-11-like event again, and that religious groups won’t suddenly fix their problems and become super-popular again. Religion, like politics, can experience serious shifts in short amounts of time even if the trends appear to be heading in a certain direction.

But Professor Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University decided to speculate anyway. He used data from the 2018 General Social Survey, traced data from 1980 onward, and used statistical software to see what religion might look like a decade from now.

With all the caveats in mind, and the reality that future predictions obviously have higher rates of error, he looked at the more conservative end of the non-religious numbers and the more optimistic end of the religious ones. He wanted to know when the lines (even with error bars) stopped overlapping.

The answer? 2029.

(snip)

This is a fun statistical parlor game, but “winning” would only matter to me if it translated into political power.