{"id":9105,"date":"2010-05-28T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/05\/28\/blacks-mirroring-larger-us-trend-come-out-as-nonbelievers\/"},"modified":"2010-05-28T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T12:00:00","slug":"blacks-mirroring-larger-us-trend-come-out-as-nonbelievers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/05\/28\/blacks-mirroring-larger-us-trend-come-out-as-nonbelievers\/","title":{"rendered":"Blacks, Mirroring Larger U.S. Trend, Come Out As Nonbelievers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Religion News Service<\/p>\n<p>WASHINGTON, May 2010: Jamila Bey and other black atheists, agnostics and secularists are struggling to openly affirm their secular viewpoints in a community that&#8217;s historically heralded as one of America&#8217;s most religious. At the first African Americans for Humanism conference recently hosted by the non-profit Center for Inquiry, about 50 people gathered to discuss the ins and outs of navigating their dual identities as blacks and followers of the non-religious philosophy known as humanism. &#8220;You renounce your blackness,&#8221; said Bey. &#8220;You almost denigrate your heritage and history of the people if you claim atheism.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A 2009 study by the Pew Forum on Religion &#038; Public Life found that African-Americans were more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, with 87 percent of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another. Nearly eight in 10 African-Americans said religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56 percent of the general U.S. adult population.<\/p>\n<p>The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that those who claimed &#8220;no religion&#8221; &#8212; popularly known as the &#8220;nones&#8221; &#8212; were the only demographic group that grew in every state within the last 18 years, according to researchers at Trinity College.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: Religion News Service WASHINGTON, May 2010: Jamila Bey and other black atheists, agnostics and secularists are struggling to openly,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}