Most of the unaffiliated just “stopped believing,” according to study

A majority of the religiously unaffiliated—the so-called nones—say they fell away from faith not because of any negative experience, but because they “stopped believing,” usually before the age of 30.

Nones now make up 25 percent of the American population, and only 7 percent say they are looking for a religion to belong to at all.

Those are among the findings of a new study of the religiously unaffiliated conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.