Pew Study Shows that More African-Americans Are Saying They Don't Believe In God

Standing before a room full of fellow African-Americans, Jamila Bey took a deep breath and announced she's come out of the closet. 

Her soul-bearing declaration is nearly taboo, she says. 

"It's the A-word," said Bey, 33, feigning a whisper. "You commit social suicide as a black person when you say you're an atheist." 

Bey and other black atheists, agnostics and secularists are struggling to openly affirm their secular viewpoints in a community that's historically heralded as one of America'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. 

"We need black non-theists to gather in one place and say, `Look at her or look at him: he looks like me and they're atheists. And that's OK,"' said Norm Allen, a former Baptist and now the executive director of African Americans for Humanism. 

A 2009 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & 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. 

"You renounce your blackness," said Bey. "You almost denigrate your heritage and history of the people if you claim atheism." 

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that those who claimed "no religion" -- popularly known as the "nones" -- were the only demographic group that grew in every state within the last 18 years, according to researchers at Trinity College. 

Between 1990 and 2008, the number of nonreligious Americans nearly doubled, from 8 percent to 15 percent, according to the ARIS study. 

Among African-Americans, the increase was also nearly double, from 6 percent to 11 percent. 

Howard University graduate student Mark Hatcher says African-Americans are largely invisible in a secular movement that has long been represented by white male thinkers. 

Concerned that black religious skeptics were alienated on campus, he started a humanist student group this year. "It is extremely important to get these people in one room and say, `Hey, you're not crazy,"' said Hatcher.