Do kids raised without religion actively seek it out and convert all that often? As it turns out, yes. The most recent data on this that I’ve come across comes from Pew’s 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, which finds that only 46 percent of people who are raised religiously unaffiliated (which includes atheists, agnostics, and those who say they’re “nothing in particular”) remain unaffiliated as adults. By contrast, 68 percent of Catholics and 52 percent of Protestant stay with their childhood religion, and only 14 percent and 13 percent (respectively) stop subscribing to any religion at all…

That’s not a perfect measure, given that a subset of the unaffiliated population (5.8 of the public, compared to 16.1 percent for all unaffiliateds) identifies as religious in some sense, but a study from Georgetown’s Mark Gray using the same data found that only 30 percent of people explicitly raised as atheists (excluding other unaffiliateds) remain so as adults…