• More people are identifying themselves as not having a religion.
• Secularism became more prevalent during the 1990s than in the 2000s.
• There is still a core of strong believers in the Christian God.

More people are willing to identify themselves as having no religion than before, according to the American Religious Identification Survey 2008.

Fifteen percent of the U.S. adult population 18 years and older identified themselves as having no religion in 2008, compared to 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the survey, conducted by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College.

One of out every five Americans failed to indicate a religious preference, the survey found.

ARIS 2008 measures change of religious self-identification over time with greater changes in self-identification between 1990 and 2001 than between 2001 to 2008.

Throughout the continental United States, 54,461 adults were surveyed, according to the ARIS 2008 Web site.

The key question for the survey was "What is your religion, if any?" said Barry Kosmin, principal investigator for the survey.

One of the follow up questions was "Regarding the existence of God, do you think…" followed by a list of possible answers.

Only 69.5 percent of the American adult population believe "there definitely is a personal God" while 76 percent of Americans label themselves as Christians, according to the survey, which is used in the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States.

People used to be afraid of being labeled as atheists but that's changing, Kosmin said. Even so, more people are willing to say that God doesn't exist than to call themselves atheists, he said.

Another reason Kosmin gave for this disparity is that non-religious terms, such as atheist and agnostic, aren't in the public lexicon.

"There's an educational factor here," he said.

Theologians have noticed that many people choose to believe in a god without belonging to a religious denomination or church, but in this case it appears people are belonging without believing, said Bill Oliverio, a theology lecturer at Marquette.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect to have a religious funeral, which is another sign of Americans' lack of attachment to religion, according to the survey.

Kosmin said he was surprised at this number because religion deals with mortality.

While the number of people without a religion has increased, the total number of Christians declined from 86.2 percent in 1990 to 76 percent in 2008, according to the survey.

There is a cultural and religious polarization causing people to move either away from religion or to be more conservative about religion, Kosmin said. There are more people on each extreme, he said.

Steve Long, a Marquette theology professor, said we live in the post-Christian era. Going to church used to be the center of the social world, but now people are looking at other institutions to fulfill the former needs of the church, he said.

People aren't overly concerned with the states of their souls now, he said. They are looking to other things to preserve them.

"It may be better for the Church," Long said.

Those now going to church are there for the right reasons: wanting to honor and worship God, he said.

There is a smaller number of true believers, but there is still a core of many religious Americans, Oliverio said.

"We're still a religious nation," Oliverio said.