The recent Pew Report on “America’s changing religious landscape” showed, over the last 7 years, a sharp decline in adherents to mainline Protestantism and Catholicism in the U.S., and a corresponding increase in the numbers of religiously “unaffiliated” (the latter went from 16.1% in 2007 to 22.8% last year). Now, not all of the “unaffiliated” are nonbelievers: many are simply people who believe in God but haven’t found an established church that meets their needs, while others may believe in some kind of nebulous and unspecified divinity. Still, the report emphasizes that atheists and agnostics themselves are on the rise. From p. 14 of the report:
As the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow, they also describe themselves in increasingly secular terms. In 2007, 25% of the “nones” called themselves atheists or agnostics; 39% identified their religion as “nothing in particular” and also said that religion is “not too” or “not at all” important in their lives; and 36% identified their religion as “nothing in particular” while nevertheless saying that religion is either “very important” or “somewhat important” in their lives. The new survey finds that the atheist and agnostic share of the “nones” has grown to 31%. Those identifying as “nothing in particular” and describing religion as unimportant in their lives continue to account for 39% of all “nones.” But the share identifying as “nothing in particular” while also affirming that religion is either “very” or “somewhat” important to them has fallen to 30% of all “nones.”
And, as I showed three days ago (well, it was shown by David Leondhart in the New York Times), the proportion of the nonreligious is highest in the youngest generation: 25% of “millennials” (those born after 1980) are either agnostics (7%), atheists (5%), or whose religion is “nothing in particular” (13%). By comparison, for those born between 1946 and 1964 (my generation), the total figure is only 11%.
There’s no way to interpret the data except as showing that religion, either formal or construed as belief in God, is on the wane in America.
But some people still try to pretend otherwise. One of those who seems to ignore the facts is author Peter Manseau, who wrote an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, “Thou shalt worship none of the above.” Manseau’s point is that Americans have historically gone through periods of coming to and then leaving traditional faiths, so there’s nothing new about Pew.
He gives a potted history of some evangelists who rejected traditional faith, but it’s thin and unconvincing. Yet from it he draws fairly strong conclusions:
This history suggests that, despite the headlines to the contrary, we are not necessarily seeing a period of religious decline. Rather, this may be just the latest in a series of moments when more Americans are intent on custom-tailoring their religious identities. The Pew numbers support this: At least a third of Americans today do not maintain the affiliation with which they were raised.
Look at the evidence, my dear Mr. Manseau! Religious identity isn’t just being swapped from one faith to another (or to a non-churchy belief in God)—it’s disappearing!
Most important, Manseau fails to address the palpable increase in not just the “nones,” but the proportion of Americans who are both “nones” and nonbelievers. Here’s his argument (my emphasis):
More recently, Americans’ desire in the 1970s and ’80s to devise spiritual identities apart from traditional categories was labeled “Sheilaism” by the sociologist Robert Bellah, for a woman called Sheila who believed in God, did not go to church, but trusted her own internal voice to direct her on a spiritual path.
Many of today’s “nones” are yesterday’s “Sheilas,” and some of them may be spiritual descendants of those New Lights whose innovative ways of being (and not being) religious established trends in American belief nearly three centuries ago. The rising and falling preference for the open air of unaffiliation is not only not new, it is exactly how religion in America has been periodically enriched and expanded from the beginning.
It’s too soon to tell what the continuing negotiation between belief and unbelief described in the Pew study will bring, but the picture it provides of religious communities in flux suggests that the next Great Awakening — a transformation of the religious character of the nation as radical as it is unexpected — might be led by those with too many spiritual influences to choose just one.
Seriously? He uses “Sheilaism” to claim that religion (in the form of spirituality) is still with us, and that religion isn’t waning, but just changing? There are none so blind as those who will not see.
As Dan Dennett has noted, it’s possible that some cataclysm could force Americans back to church, but that hasn’t happened for decades. Instead of trying to reassure Times readers that they needn’t worry, as faith is still with us, Manseau should just bite the bullet and admit that America is losing its faith.
But that wouldn’t sit well with the editors of the New York Times, who hold a journalistic “Little People’s View”: we aren’t religious, but we need to reassure our readers that belief is good, and remains an important part of America. Why else would they continue to publish the mushy lucubrations of Tanya Luhrmann, but abjure columnists who regularly criticize religion?
….I have been agnostic/atheist all of my life…..I have lived my life fine without belief in a deity……
….like Ron Regan. not afraid of burning in hell…..
#notafraidofburninginhell
It’s in my Twitter profile!
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NPR has been hilarious at trying to deny or figure out how to ameliorate (in their view) this terrible trend.
On “The Diane Rehm Show” guest host Tom Gjelten kept asking his Catholic Priest guest to try to win people back on the air. Scott Simon had an Episcopal bishop on to discuss the poll rather than a secularist. (natch)
FYI I’m continuing to track the ostentatious “Belief in belief” of public radio in a growing post on my blog.
https://airbagmoments.wordpress.com/2015/02/19/yes-public-radio-is-pro-religion/
They absolutely believe in belief. Like some sort of Rockwellian folk past that needs preserving alongside Old Glory and mom’s apple pie. Listening to Prairie Home Companion can often be as taxing as if I were sitting in church itself, replete with bad hymns and constant lauding of the protestant (Lutheran, specifically) church as cornerstone of modern Americana.
Exactly. One of my projects to to get the correspondents on record as to what their faith is. Gjelten nicely responded tellingly “Lapsed Norwegian Lutheran (ie, unaffiliated) but humble enough not to claim I grasp anything cosmic, respect those who do.” Automatic respect for people of faith, seemingly regardless of what the faith is.
Most correspondents ignore the question. At least he responded, which is good because he’s on the NPR religion beat.
Can you imagine the uproar if they tried to “ameliorate” the effects of gay marriage? Of Judaism or Islam? Of Black culture?
Nonbelievers outnumber all of those demographics combined.
b&
The writers and other prophets who promote the ideas such as Peter Manseau are nearly always of a religious persuasion of one kind or another. They cannot let go so the only alternative is to spin it to fit their world.
“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Funny, but I often get a variation of this line from believers on Twitter. “Look around you! Of course God exists! Look at the stars, look at nature, look at the sunset!” To which I usually add, “Yeah? Well, look at parasites and the Ebola virus.” That often shuts them up.
For me “Rabies” the go-to one-word proof that there is no god(s).
Or that god is a monster with a very sick sense of humor. Even if god provided irrefutable evidence of its existence, I still wouldn’t worship or even respect god.
Jerry, Have you posted a link to your interview with Sam Harris? I can’t imagine I’m the only reader of yours who would be interested. The conversation about free will was particularly interesting; I was happy to see you take on Dan Dennett. I was a little sorry nothing about Chomsky, but I can see where that might get sticky.
… And what do they need to see the “beauty of D*g’s creation,” but lenses and microscopes – products of science.
But don’t you see? He also gave us the intellects we would need to figure out all those clever little puzzles he left us. Braiiiiiiize Cheeses!
b&
Sheilaism? That’s a new one on me. In what is it now, 6yrs of this website, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term.
The parsimonious take on the numbers seems to say to me that people are increasingly setting their religion down on the curb, as someone once commented here (wish I could remember who – claim the quote if you see this) and walking away from it. Their rates of departure differ, but they have lifted off.
… what is now, what, 6yrs of this website(?), I don’t…
Sastra has mentioned it a few times.
Well, she would!
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‘Sheila’? That’s the generic Aussie term for a female. As in the plaintive traditional refrain of the Aussie abroad:
“What would I do for a naughty? What would I give to get plastered?
But the beer’s all crook and the sheilas look like you, ya pommy bastard!”.
Yeah, I’m guessing the US 1800s great awakening wasn’t presaged by a doubling of the number of self-declared agnostics and atheists in the country. Just a clue there for you.
Yes, Quietists, Inner Light-ers, Quakers and so on have been part of American Protestantism for centuries. But as negligible part in terms of numbers then, as are, say, Unitarian Universalists are today. The notion that an individual needs no institution beyond the self to find and live with/in god derives from Romanticism and the ‘Book of Nature.’ Meditation aimed at transcendence.
As science has radically revised and expand the ‘Book of Nature,’ its ‘readers’ have come to accept its naturalism and, concomitantly, its roadmap to secularism. If what I’ve just asserted is true, perhaps it is a cause of the increasing number of ‘nones’ in surveys such as the Pew.
Quietists? that, along with Sheilaism, is a new one for me.
as for “inner light”, if you want inner light, talk to your proctologist!
For me too!
quietism |ˈkwaɪəˌtɪzəm|
noun
(in the Christian faith) devotional contemplation and abandonment of the will as a form of religious mysticism.
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ah. I was hoping it was a religious movement where the devotees just shut about it and leave the rest of us alone for a change. Fat chance, right?
Lol, just what I was going to say!
Those Great Awakenings sound more like epidemics of mental hypersomnia. The rise in nonbelievers is the real Great Awakening.
I was raised in an Irish Catholic Family, but once the fog of Religious Belief had been lifted from me thanks to an education by the De La Salle Brothers, whose idea of Teaching was to beat the shite out of you until it sank in,it was a great liberation .Free from the shackles of Religious Belief allows you to see more clearly the Straw Men that try to blind us with their Proselytising.
Having participated in Sean Carroll’s conference on naturalism a few years back, Jerry knows that Dan Dennett is one of those people trying to protect the Little People; who, as Dan puts it, “Can’t handle the truth.” His potential projection of a wholesale return to religion in case of societal collapse is another example of his belief that the Little People are weak in their beliefs and would fall back quickly, if provoked.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
That aside, I’d like to see the Pew report broken down regionally. We seem to be geographically dividing on political/religious grounds, and I’d like to see how the data play out in the various parts of the country. Is the Midwest, for example, following this trend? The Deep South? Are the Northeast and West Coast maintaining the curve?
To have added weight to his argument, Mr. Manseau should have compared the American experience with the European one. Surely, he must recognize the general ties between Europe and America; and does he think the European drift from religion also part of a larger waxing and waning? Does he have data to support such a contention? Does he expect a wholesale return to Lutheranism in Norway now that oil prices are weakening?
The greatest threat we are exposed to in the face of declining religiosity is desperation attacks by True Believers who feel threatened. That can get expensive. All other things being equal, though, we can expect the arc of history to continue on the course it’s been on for the past 100,000 years or so. It’s hardly an American phenomenon. If you want to consider the, arguably, two most prominent religious figures in the world today, Frank and the Dalai Lama, one of them is virtually an atheist and the other has given up pushing god in return for pushing human values. What’s this world coming to? History is not being kind to religion.
Sounds like a kind remark concerning the Pope, but today he is mostly a PR department of the institution because he has to be. Justifying the Catholic behavior of the past would take more than a few miracles.
Johan,
The regional breakdown is in the report, pages 65-67 and pages 143-147. There are more overall nones in the South than in any other region, but a plurality of them are nones who say religion is important. There are more overall atheists, agnostics, and people who say religion is not important in the West. However, the numbers are all pretty even, with most groups being distributed between 20%-30% in each region. Example: the atheist distribution is 24% Northeast, 20% Midwest, 26% South, 30% West.
See the report for more details (such as breakdowns by state and by major city).
Thanks.
If this trend continues, in my opinion inevitable, I predict that there will be a tipping point that will accelerate the ‘deconversion’ of the faithful over to the publically non-believer/agnostic category. Likely a significant percentage of those that claim adherence to woo are actually closet skeptics who for myriad reasons still must pull the wool over their own eyes, even in anonymous surveys. As the pre-boomer generation passes on (and removes countless ‘mommas’ who would be heartbroken by heathen children), relentless pressure builds for reason and justice driven by the newer generations, scientific advances continue to wither away baseless theological claims, and the climate becomes (not only warmer but) safer for atheists and ‘the nones’ to acknowledge themselves in the open, the flood gates will open and theists will find themselves in the minority. At that point, I predict, the alliance between big business and the theocrats (the basis of right wing politics) will dissolve as being economically and politically unfeasible and the whole house of cards will tumble down. Will it take the percentage of unreligious to increase to 30%? 40%? 50%? Or will it take a unique event, such as discovery of extraterrestrial life, to shift the balance?
Time wounds all heels.
In today’s world in the U.S. social pressure is everything. So once religion falls out of fashion and finds itself in the minority it will go the way of the hard line phone.
It’s not just in the US; everywhere people’s beliefs are governed more by their peers than by logic.
Manseau needs to extend homework to what can be found in and around the atheist community. The so-called millennial shells, if they exist at all, are akin to agnostics. This is the transition period for many who were faithful or never faithful but wished for something transcend and personal in their lives.
With age most who are agnostic become strongly agnostic and then weakly atheistic and then fully atheistic. I have witnessed this transition in many people.
Millennial “shells”? “Sheilas”?
A;though I quite like the idea of “shell” – a candy coating of religion over a chewy atheistic centre.
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Shouldn’t that be pasta shells with a nice marinara sauce?
b&
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The final step, which I don’t think has been achieved yet, would be for neurology to explain the emotion called spirituality. The Sheilas feel it but can’t explain it, the religious feel it and ascribe it to god and the godless feel it but don’t want to go there.
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I should have said that most godless don’t want to go there. I hear the voices and get the rushes of emotion but it’s such a common feeling for me that I don’t give it any credit at all as an extra sensory experience. It’s just another pleasant feeling for me.
A huge error on the part of P. Manseau. While being able to perceive that religiosity has declined, he fails to see that any increase later on will depend on ‘none’ parents teaching their children to be more religious than they were! That simply will not happen. Once a generation wanders away from the pew the next will not return.
I doubt its as clear-cut as that. Kids often rebel against their parents’ beliefs, and it isn’t just in the ‘more liberal’ direction, it can go the other way too (kids being more conservative/traditional than their parents). The children of the ’60’s hippies were the ’80s yuppies. If their parents teach ’em atheism, that’s going to be reason enough for some kids to become believers, at least for a little while.
I’m ultimately optimistic about liberalization in western society, but I don’t think we should kid ourselves that this will be a steady progression. Its going to be two steps forward, one step back. We will have occasional steps back to more conservative values in some areas…and more than likely, our kids will be responsible for some of them.
Fortunately, the same is true in the other direction; which is why we needn’t worry about the believers out-breeding us atheists. The kids, in general, will be more influenced by their contemporaries than their parents.
And for what it’s worth, the children of the hippies were much more liberal, on the whole, than their parents started out as. Some rebelled, but amazingly few, all things considered.
Yes…and no.
Been a long time since kids rebelled against their Christian parents by returning to the Roman gods that the Christians usurped.
And “Zombie Jesus” is now very firmly planted in the psyche of today’s youth. It’ll be damned hard for kids to admit that, yes, they really believe in Zombie Jesus, only he’s not that kind of zombie….
b&
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I have a liberal Christian friend who describes herself as having rebeled against her nihilistic atheist parents by becoming religious. So, yes it does happen, but she rebeled in what I would say is the least innocuous way one could rebel through religion, basically rejecting all the backwards social teachings. Clearly, it’s a case of not wanting death to really mean lights out. I’d say if we could get that sort of religion to be the dominant form, we’ll be a hell of a lot better off. As Dawkins said, if Tillich or Bonhoeffer represented mainstream religion, he would have written a very different book. I’m sure it’s probably happened, but I’d venture to guess rebeling against atheist parents to become a creationist fundamentalist probably happens far less. Are there any examples of people picking up this nonsense as an adult after having been formally educated?
‘least innocuous way’? I think maybe you mean ‘most innocuous way’ ?
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The rising and falling preference for the open air of unaffiliation
That’s some pretty phrasing right there! It’s interesting the writer connects this with “enriching” religion, when the supposed periodic “rising” must certainly enrich secularism as well.
I wonder if he has noticed any correlation between the “falling” and social upheaval, or between “rising” and times when the religious have been seen as bad actors? I’m sure there’s a pro-God spin to those effects as well given sufficient thought and ink (er, pixels).
If only all believers were quite so la-dee-da about the trend: the next generation might slip into reason without the sh**tstorm that is currently building as belief loses its grip.
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