Americans becoming more secular

Editor,

I think there is some very big news that is, unfortunately, not widely publicized. Since 1990, the percentage of adults in the United States that are not affiliated with any religion at all is the fastest growing group in several large, scientific surveys of religious affiliation. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), for example, found that the number of adults checking "none” for religious affiliation has more than doubled from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. If you add the 12 percent whose answers indicated they are deists, the percentage raises to a staggering 27 percent. A deist is one who believes in some vague "higher power,” but not the "personal god” typical of orthodox Christians, Jews or Muslims, for example. More details can be found at www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org. Now, this does not mean that all of these people would identify themselves as atheists, as I do. Only 1.6 percent so identify themselves. However, they might accept a label such as freethinker, or at least skeptic. My question is, when do we get at least a half an hour of television Sunday mornings to solicit money for scientific thinking and evidence-based conclusions?