27% of People in 1937 Didn't Have Religious Membership

 An interesting paragraph jumped out at me while looking through an article on religiosity: 

The polling giant has been measuring church membership since 1937 when nearly three-quarters of the population (73%) reported membership in a house of worship. For much of that time, membership remained at about 70% but began to decline after 1999. By the late 2000s, membership had dropped to about 62% and has continued to fall.

KTLA 

Many people would focus on the fact that this article talks about membership in houses of worship dropping dramatically, but the fact of the matter is that it is pretty surprising that nearly a third of Americans historically did not see themselves as members of a particular religious tradition. 

This reminds me of polls from the 19th century which showed that a third or more of scientists were atheists, and polls of Parisians from the same time which showed similarly that only 80% of them identified as Christians. Neither the Jewish or Muslim populations of the city would scarcely make up the rest of the 20% to 100, so sizable religionless populations did exist in those times. 

It may very well be the case that a third of Americans have always been somewhat religionless. I am not saying outright atheist, though certainly it would not be too difficult to believe that maybe 1 in 10 Americans were historically atheist as Rodney Stark has implied, but I can imagine that a very large amount of Americans had extremely mild views about God and spirituality. 

The early 20th century was a time when the occult flourished, after all, and the 1950s onwards were full of New Age movements, fixations on things like hypnotism and Freudian psychology. 

Americans tend to be so obsessed with this idea that grandma & grandpa (and great-grandma & great-grandpa) were pious pillars of their community, along with absolutely everyone else in the community, that they forget that there were porn theaters, prostitutes, alcoholics, atheists, literal Communists and Anarchists, practitioners of the occult, etc., thriving in urban areas, and no doubt having presences in towns and villages.