Once again, Portland takes the honors, at least according to this August 3 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute. The yellowish-green bar comprises the “unaffiliated,” and remember that many of these may believe in God, but not belong to a church.
The data below are grouped into four clusters: those dominated, respectively, by Catholics, the unaffiliated, and white evangelical Protestants.
Time to move to Portland (which of course has many amenities other than godlessness)!
No, no – you don’t want to move to Portland. It’s horrible here. I’ve lived here for 25 or so years and have been looking for another place I like better most of that time.
Lovely place to visit, but much too wet to live there. Kinda like Denver in winter — great place to go for some skiing and snowball fights, but it’d be miserable having to actually shovel all that snow day after day.
…or Phoenix…the daytime highs have been right around 110°F, give or take, for the past couple months and will remain so for at least a couple more weeks, when they’ll drop to “only” around 100°F. But then the weather will be positively loverly all the way through May….
b&
Actually, it is not nearly as wet here as most people believe. Much less than Seattle for example.
Seattle gets more inches a year. Portland gets more rainy days. 114 in a row is the standing record!
Ben, you can have it. Here in southern B.C. we are into the third month of very hot (for us)Most consecutive days of mid to high 90’s – Even a couple 101f days. Up to 200 forest fires burning in the province as we speak. I like your place in mid winter.
Sorry to hear…forest fires are scary, especially in temperate rain forests, especially ones as overgrown as our ill-conceived “management” policies have created.
…though, to put temperatures in perspective…overnight lows here in the 90s are not at all uncommon. I know it’s hot there for you, but what’s extreme heat for you is unseasonably cool here even for late summer….
b&
Denver does get snow in the winter, sometime two feet or more at time but we also have a lot of 50 to 60 degree days in Jan. and Feb. Lots of sun and the snow melts quickly.
And weren’t we just told that Portland (along with Seattle) will be toast after The Big One?
Soggy toast, I should think….
b&
I tease a buddy of mine about that – he left Portland for Australia (Melbourne). It’s not so bad over here – there’s a huge (American – well, USA) expat community.
He’ll be feeling like he’s back in Portland lately. Terrible weather we’ve been having, cold and rainy.
I thought Melbourne weather was notorious for its abrupt and extreme changes of temperature?
(I don’t speak from experience, never been there (Melbourne airport doesn’t count))
cr
Indeed, the weather must have seen this comment before I did, it was really lovely today, sunny and feeling like Spring!
Portland is great (imo).
You describe it as “horrible”. Please elaborate. I can’t imagine calling Portland horrible.
I lived in Seattle for 20 years and loved everything about it except the traffic which went from bad to horrendous while I was there. It didn’t affect my work commute (luckily) but it stopped me from doing many things I might otherwise have done (concerts, events, etc.)
Rain, shmrain: I loved the weather there. I never wore a jacket in Seattle (except when I went into the mountains). Almost never had snow to deal with. Ocean on your doorstep. Mountains all around. You could grow almost anything (as long as it didn’t require lots of hot sunshine). No bugs. No poisonous plants/reptiles. The temperature rarely deviates very much from the surrounding ocean temp. (50°F / 10°C). I was in heaven.
People used to say to me: How can you stand the gray skies in winter (people from Minnesota!). The myth is that winters are bright and sunny in Minnesota. It’s a myth. Look at the data: About that same number of overcast days. People just remember the clear days (which are almost always accompanied by below-zero (°F) temps.)
My retirement plans a getting whiplash.
I’d just like to take a moment to observe that, according to this data, here in the Valley of the Sun, the unaffiliated equal the number of Catholics with each at about a quarter of the population — and, presumably, it won’t be long before the unaffiliated are the plurality.
This is in stark contrast to our host’s home town, where the Catholics outnumber the unaffiliated by a 3:2 margin.
I think, in a quarter century or so, right now will be seen as the inflection point on the graph. The religious are already well aware that they’re fighting to hold position in a losing battle; just look at all the complaints of declining attendance. And the “zombie Jesus” meme is inescapable amongst youth, even if it’s not yet dominant. Won’t be long before openly admitting to belief in Jesus in anything more than the “Yes, Virginia, There Really Is a Santa” sense will be socially anathema.
I just wish we didn’t have to go through at least a few more Republican National Conventions before that time came….
b&
Having grown up in a Catholic-y country, I suspect that it will be easier to convert them into nones. Quebec was where a lot of the Catholics were & it’s now the most atheist province.
Diana, I thought we in B.C. had that honor, at least according to the latest Pew report. At any rate good news all around 🙂
Maybe. I thought I read somewhere that Quebec was the most atheist.
According to a recent article in “Der Spiegel,” the number of Catholics leaving the faith in Germany last year set a new record – about 250K, give or take.
I think the well-established Catholic tradition of giving the Pope the finger might have something to do with it. If Catholics are cool with using birth control despite the Church’s insistence that that means going to Hell for all eternity for killing pre-born babies, it’s not that much more of a stretch to realize that the rest of it is bullshit not worth paying attention to, too.
And the prevalent priestly predilection for prepubescent predation isn’t making the Church’s future look any brighter…how can somebody, in good conscience, put money in the collection plate in the knowledge that a sizable portion of it will go to the legal defense fund of the guy who’s accused of raping scores of kids over the course of decades? Not that the accused don’t deserve the right of competent counsel…but why in Jesus’s name should it even be a question in the first place? I mean, these men are the closest to Jesus, right? And if even they not only can’t get it right but can fail so spectacularly, what does that tell you about what it means to be close to Jesus?
b&
“prevalent priestly predilection for prepubescent predation”
Love it!
Did you see the article in Today’s Globe which describes Our Illustrious Leader’s ( StephenHarper) main lawyer sying that if he weren’t an evangelical Xtian he’d be a horrible man. Harper is a horrible man despite/because being an evangelical…
I suspect that is the belief of many. That they themselves would not be as good without God. Well, I can see why they’d think so. They suck that notion up in their mother’s milk. They have every reason to assume all the evil out there in Fox News land is caused by gays and other non-godly folk. There aren’t many counterexamples within their experience envelope.
I’d be tempted to reply, “well I guess he’s not an evangelical Christian then.”
That scandal where his party deliberately mislead people via robocall about the location to vote is awful. He is an affront to democracy and those involved in that scandal should do jail time and the party should receive some sort of punishment too.
Any ideas why Portland is so rational? Is all of Oregon the same? It’s interesting that no other big city comes close.
“Unaffiliated” doesn’t mean rational. A lot of Oregonians are systematically apathetic, and extend their slacker attitudes to the matter of an afterlife.
Especially when God appears to be the parental “clean up your room” that finally made them try out adulthood..
Portland is the last city you can call rational. They voted against Fluoride because hippy reasons.
I’ve always wondered about “Portlandia” because I always felt they were poking fun at LA, but I hadn’t been to Portland for over 30 years so I have no idea what it’s like now.
Sounds like “rational” was definitely a bad word choice on my part! 🙂
Yes, there’s LOADS of “new-age” woo in WA and OR. Just not much traditional religion.
Interesting that the Nones have the lead in DC — but apparently none of them are in Congress.
Because the Congressfolk are all from Somewhere Else. Like guests that move in and never leave.
What will always keep the Nones from having a bigger influence is that they’re just the opposite of a special interest group.
Portland is great and other amenities include The Bridge Pedal which I road in this morning. 37 miles and 11 bridges!!
…So my wife just called to complain that she and her friends are stuck in traffic in Portland due to the Bridge Pedal.. they are trying to get to their bicycle race.
Damn those [other] bicyclists!
Perfect day for it. Mrs Pliny has been recovering from a surgery so no bridge pedal for us, though indefatigable spirit that she is, we road 13 miles and crossed the new Tilikum Crossing. It’s a beauty.
Not many southern cities listed. Makes the Unaffiliated look better that it really it. Notice the few southern cities that are listed have the lowest percentages.
Isn’t Portland and Seattle full of people who moved from California? A big movement back when they use to be much cheaper cost of living verses Cal.
The other thing that makes unaffiliated look better than reality is these are large cities. Religion dominates more in small towns, just as conservatism does. Much of the division in the country, both on social and political dimensions is as much between rural and urban as it is between regions.
Very good point. Whether talking about the rural parts of a state or the rural regions of the country, the division is big. I live in very rural America but cannot figure it out?
That’s kind of a myth too (assiduously propagated by native Washingtonians).
I met more transplants in Seattle from Michigan and New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and many other places) than the mythical “Californian rushing up to drive the real estate prices up”.
I think the “myth” about real estate prices is verifiable. I’ve been watching the market there for about 2 years and they have escalated enormously. Not sure if many come from CA, but somebodies doing it. Must be all the good press the areas has gotten as a retirement mecca.
Bear in mind that we’re still coming out of a recession. According to this graph, Seattle real estate prices today are about where they were 10 years ago, and still less than 80% of the pre-recession high.
Not sure we’re actually ever going to come out of this recession — at least, not while any of us are alive. It’s hard to be sure when you’re in the middle of things, but this extended neverending Great Recession is exactly what the peak of peak oil would be expected to look like from the inside. And, if that’s the case, barring a bigger-than-Apollo effort to transition away from dependency on petroleum, it’s all downhill from here.
The rapid development and adoption of electric vehicles and batteries and rooftop solar are basically our only cause for hope right now. If the surface transportation fleet rapidly transitions to electric, especially solar electric — and it just might possibly perhaps actually do that — then that would free up petroleum to be used for agriculture and plastics and aviation and the like that don’t have a good non-petroleum alternative. That in turn might give us time to develop and build out the infrastructure to replace petroleum in those areas as well…and that infrastructure, in turn, would serve to get us off of fossil fuels entirely.
But that’s an awful lot of “if the deLorean hits the wire at 88 MPH at the stroke of midnight” handwaving, and in the midst of the Great Recession to boot. If we make it, all will be incredibly rosy; energy for all too cheap to meter and so on. But even one good slip-up and the Four Horsemen will eat us for lunch.
b&
Yes, but that said, the last 5 years has seen strong growth in alternatives world wide. With Obama’s Energy Plan which, I understand, is really about on the table, I’m hoping there will soon be a tipping point toward renewables and we just might get it right before time runs out for human civilization. (sounds like evangelical apocolypitcism doesn’t it?)
I think we’re saying the same thing…all hope is not lost, but we’re really depending on more hope than anything else.
All end-of-the-world scenarios are going to rhyme to one extent or another. The difference here is that there’re solid scientific reasons to be afraid, very afraid. In simple terms…oil extraction and consumption has increased at an exponential rate for a bit over a century, and current reserves are about equal to the total amount extracted to date. Which is another way of saying that we’ve used up half our inheritance. And simple math tells us that attempting to continue exponential growth means complete exhaustion in a mere decade or so; “stagflation” just stretches that out to a couple decades at best; and the most realistic scenario is an exponential decline that mirrors the growth, with some more dramatic ups-and-downs immediately following the peak. Economically, that translates into an unprecedented depression.
The big question is how economically sustainable it’ll be to develop renewables and associated infrastructure in the midst of such a depression. Because if it doesn’t all just happen to just work out just right, we’ll be in a situation where we can’t afford to build the new technology we need to have because the old technology is too expensive….
b&
But, on the other hand, as the oil gets harder to extract, and carbon is appropriately taxed, the price will rise lowering consumption. This could create a less traumatic decline and stretch things out for a while. This provides more time for renewables to be employed. Additionally, growth as a way of promoting prosperity seems like a myth economists have perpetrated. A steady state or even a gradual decline in consumption levels would be a much more reasonable goal of societies generally. Do we really need more growing population centers in the middle of the desert?
Yes.
And that’s exactly the problem.
Much of the consumption of petroleum…is by the agribusiness and plastics industries. If we lower consumption in the former, we produce less food and more people starve. If we lower consumption in the latter, we have less stuff with which to make the things we need to switch to something other than petroleum.
There’s a flip side, as well. Prices will rise, but there’s only so much that the market can bear to pay. There comes a point where the total amount people spend on something like petroleum becomes fixed because that’s all the money they have to spend. But the costs to continue extracting what little is left continue to rise. You reach a point where there’s not enough money available in the pockets of customers to pay the expenses of extraction. Lots of oil left, but nobody can afford to dig it up. The kind of market crash that results from that is particularly nasty, and could conceivably take out the entire civilization with it.
On the one hand we need to consume less in order to not run out. On the other hand we need to consume more to be able to pay for the higher cost of production. That paradox could well be our doom.
b&
Let’s hope these issues are ameliorated by a rapid expansion of solar, wind, and probably a return to nuclear. Combine this with strong conservation measures and we may very well squeak by.
Portland is atypical of the rest of Oregon. It’s more liberal (by a long shot) than the survivalists out in Eastern Oregon. I’m an academic, so most of my colleagues and research assistants are atheist, agnostic or apathetic about religion. I’m not sure of the detailed composition of those unaffiliateds. Many may be new age adherents of one sort or another; there is rather high woo titer in Portland (and lots of homeopaths, naturopaths, accupuncturists and the like).
And I’m delighted to know that Pliny and Kate are Portlanders. Did you know that a local atheist group meets in O’Connor’s annex? I was imbibing there a few months or so ago and saw an atheist themed sign.
That is so true of so many states. Michigan is only a blue state due to the population concentration in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area. Outstate MI can be quite red. Think Madison vs. the rest of Wisconsin. Even some of the northeast states follow the same pattern.
You don’t have to go to eastern Oregon to find the religious conservatives. Once you get outside the neighborhoods close to the city, it’s pretty conservative. I’m in outer South-east Portland (the Montavilla area, for any other locals), and the area has a Bible college, lots of evangelical christian schools and churches, and a christian TV station.
I enjoy checking out the nutty slogans outside the churches. My favorite:
“Stop, drop and roll won’t work in Hell!”
I have the impression that Portland, while officially godless, still has a fair amount of woo. Am I wrong in this?
Woo is a serious problem unto itself, but less serious than traditional religion. I’ll take passive-aggressive over aggressive-aggressive any time.
And woo is less deeply entrenched than the traditional religions. Any new form of woo that gets too powerful is quickly labeled the cult it so clearly is — like Scientology. And for it to grow past that stage, it’s got to de-fang itself or else remain forever marginalized.
Plus, having a wide and varied marketplace of bullshit to pick and choose from really lays plain that they can’t all of them be right…and, therefore, that, at best, 99.999% of them are worng. Once you’ve come to that realization, it’s very hard for many to convince themselves that they’re in the 0.001% who actually got it right, especially considering that they’re going to share some obviously-worng beliefs with those they know are obviously worng.
b&
Actually, many types of woo are fairly compatible. Someone I know calls himself an occultist and partakes of many of said domains. Taro, Astrology, Numerology, and various paranormal phenomena. These flakes take credulity to a new level, (but in the most reasonable way possible).
The examples you give are actually mostly just the remnants of the dominant pre-Christian Pagan religions that in turn trace their roots back to ancient pre-pre-Socratic cosmology and physics. A parallel would be somebody “harmonizing” the “disparate” fields of demonology, guardian angels, answered prayers, and divine intervention.
b&
Don’t forget zombies. It’s amusing to imagine harmonizing zombies. Or even a zombie barbershop quartet.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but it would seem that there’s reliable documentary evidence of zombie barbershop quartets….
b&
The internet has finally come into its own.
Portland is Oregon’s Haight-Ashbury. The rest of the state pays for it as a unique social experiment.
You are not wrong. Loads of “new-age” woo.
I was impressed by Denver; with unaffiliated coming in first at 34%, it’s a real contrast to nearby Colorado Springs, which is pretty much the capital of American Evangelicalism.
When the earthquake will hit and destroy Portland, christians will line up to say it’s the fault of pagans, gays, lesbians, evolution, liberalism, Richard Dawkins and the ACLU.
Wow, a great city. It is progressive, secular, laid-back, and allows open carry. Just what a progressive, atheist, gun owner wants.
What is interesting to note is that the “Unaffiliated” group is in the top three of all those cities.
Reblogged this on Richard Trus Videos and commented:
Interesting
I’m surprised New York isn’t higher for unaffiliated. The majority of the people I know here are pretty openly against religion, apathetic or secular Jewish. I suppose the Catholicism is heavily influenced by the large number of Hispanic people here.
For the record,
Eastern Orthodox Christians are about 1.7% of the American population.
Jews are about 1.4% of the American population with far higher visibility in California, the NorthEast United States, and Florida.
Less than 1% of Americans are Buddhist, but by far and away the highest concentration is in California, where it is as high as 1.2%, and they are quite visible in the Bay Area, arguably more than than their actual numbers.
Unitarians are even less numerous, less than 1 million in the United States.
“…and they are quite visible in the Bay Area”
It is hard to miss an otherwise normal-looking balding white guy with glasses who is wearing bright red robes and sneakers.
I saw an acupuncture facility for dogs when I visited San Francisco. It doesn’t get any more woo-ish than that.
Years ago a vet checking my d*g discovered a “subluxation” (my spell checker has never even heard of one). He pushed, the dog yelped, and we never returned.
Portland is very high on the woo factor. I live across the river on the WA side of the columbia.
Portlandia is not that far from the truth.
That said, most people are laid back and a lot of hippie influence in the whole Northwest.