Questions You Should Never Ask an Atheist: Towards Better Measures of Nonreligion and Secularity

As interest in the nonreligious has grown, attention has turned to how to measure both the growth of and variation within the nonreligious. This interest has also revealed that prior measures of religiosity are often problematic. In this research note, I detail some of these problems. For instance, some measures fail to contrast nonreligiosity with religiosity. Other measures are double-barreled or one-and-a-half barreled, making them impossible for nonreligious individuals to answer. Finally, I note that how questions are worded can result in very different estimates of how many nonreligious people and atheists there are in a population.