Being non-religious means you simply aren't concerned. Are there gods? Great. Are there no gods? Awesome. Jesus is the one God? Okay. Zeus leads his pantheon of gods? Nice.
Atheism meanwhile is a deliberate belief in no religion. It's different from simply not caring about religion at all, because you do care about religion insofar as to not believe in it.
The way I see atheism is that a belief in no religion is, by its nature, a religion. Joe is a christian and believes in Jesus, Bob is an atheist and believes no god; both are merely two sides of the same coin. You can't call yourself non-religious if you believe in a religion, whatever the specific form.
Being non-religious means you don't care; it's not that you don't believe, you simply could not care less one way or another. Wikipedia appears to call it apatheism[1] and more broadly irreligion[2], but semantics aren't the focal issue here.
Agnostic means you believe it's impossible to know whether god exists or not.
I do agree with what you're trying to describe, that many people in some European countries just don't care one iota about religion. I don't think Americans can really understand that without living in a secular society. It's such a non-thing in our lives that, non-religious, agnosticism and atheism, etc. all tend to get mixed into one.
Society has become so secular that those technical definitions have become essentially meaningless. God doesn't exist/I've given it no thought/I don't know if a God exists/I don't acknowledge the existence of supernatural entities all are essentially the same position because it takes up so little of our time or brain power and has so little consequences on our lives.
I stress "some" countries as some European countries, or just small parts of those countries, are still fairly religious.
Some people are agnostic, meaning they are religious but don't subscribe to a particular god or doctrine. However no one makes the distinction between atheism and non-religious that you're making here. It may have something to do with the fact that society in the US is so pervasively religious that the only way to escape it is to explicitly identify yourself as an atheist.