A shift
When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check ‘none.’
A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated – a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” – is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They’re more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).
Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew’s new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically.
Better late than never, yeah?
Pew asked respondents what – if anything – they believe.
Well that’s a silly way to put it. Everybody believes countless things; we couldn’t function if we didn’t. We believe the next step we take won’t plunge us into a black hole.
Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.
If there’s a higher power, why doesn’t it do something? Take away our car keys for instance?
Isn’t that a plurality rather than a majority?
The Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-Step term “higher power” is quite loosey-goosey, and is frequently a euphemism for God in such organizations. The way I cope with the stealth theism is to say that the self-help support group offers more than me trying to solve my own problem by myself. The group is other human beings with a purpose of helping each other solve a problem that is intractable in isolation. So, “higher power” can be the group. No importation of magic needed.
I must point out that heaping atheists with those who merely reject organized religions is a bit misleading.
And the pedant in me definitely wants to distinguish between majority and plurality.
The largest group is now the group rejecting organized religion. That’s significant. Those of us who have been involved in the various forms of atheist movements might like if it were the majority, and if that majority were atheists, and it’s not, but it’s still a move away from organized religion. Progress.
Maybe it’s the Deists rather than the Theists who have it right. Perhaps any such power is following some sort of “Prime Directive,” non-interference rule or guideline. Maybe we’re part of some grand experiment that’s not finished running: think of the Gospel According to Douglas Adams. We’ve still got the car keys because he/she/it/they want to see whether or not we’ll crash. Maybe we’re just particles in the deistic equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider and we are being observed, not shepherded.
Being actively shepherded might not be an improvement over being coldly, detachedly observed. Just because a power is “higher,” that doesn’t make it good, or even any better than us. It depends on the nature of the power and the character of those wielding it. We might not like the interventions a higher power might devise. The Olympian Pantheon were nothing if not meddlesome and capricious, with the fates of humans decided on the competing, willy-nilly whims of Zeus and his fellow gods. Is it better to be a particle or a pawn?
Proponents of monotheism have nothing to be smug about; they’ve managed to distill and concentrate all the jealousy and childishness of the Greek gods into one petulant, thin-skinned, all-powerful Being. Yahweh (and his derivatives), has condemned his creators/followers to continuous, turtuous moral gymnastics, because they are hell-bent on defining him as “just” and “benevolent.” Talk about Stockholm Syndrome. You’d think The Problem of Evil would be both a huge contradiction, and a fatal character flaw in an Omnibenevolent Being (fatal at least to those creatures at risk of being smitten in a fit of divine pique), but it seems to be one that his writers/readers seem willing to overlook.
Confining ourselves to the power relations of mere mortals, look at how men have treated women, how supposedly “advanced” human societies have treated supposedly “primitive” ones, and how humans have tended to treat all other beings “lower” than ourselves on the old “Great Chain of Being.” It’s comforting to think that we’ve perhaps improved a little bit over the last few centuries, but what progress we’ve made has been uneven, fitful, and as we’ve seen, contingent, fragile, and always reversible. The arc of history is up for grabs, and bends to wherever it gets pushed or pulled. It’s direction is not inevitable. One era’s advancement of justice can be swept away by the next era’s ignorance and brutality. We’re seeing this play out in real time. Progress is not a given, nor is it permanent. There is no ratchet that prevents backsliding, or reversion to less enlightened and progressive values and behaviours. Every gain has been contested and is vulnerable. Not all changes are improvements; not all movement is forwards.
Shouldn’t that be plurality?
I’m an Ursaline None (I’m from Maine).
Comments?
I’m not sure I agree with this headline. Making ‘nones’ a plurality strikes me as an exercise in massaging numbers. On the one hand, we nones were grouped together – atheists combined with ‘spiritual but not religious’ and whatever else; on the other, christianity has been divided. Protestants and catholics might have some disagreements they consider fundamental, but they still agree on the main thing.
Holms, maybe it’d be more useful to think of it as “Christians now make up less than half the adult population”… Or “Christians now in the minority”
Given NPR’s target audience is probably majority “Nones” at this point pandering to their egos makes a lot of sense.
@Blood, if you look deeper into the source information, Christians don’t make up less than half of the adult population, and are not in the minority.
The clue is in the terms above: 23% are Catholics, and 24% are evangelical Protestants… but what about the other Protestants, the ones who aren’t evangelical? Well, it looks like there are still a few of those dropping dimes in the collection plates down at the Episcopal church.
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/fact-sheet/national-public-opinion-reference-survey-npors/
Add in the non-evangelical (“mainline”) Protestants, and the number is up to 40% total Protestants. So that’s roughly 16% mainline Protestants.
Here’s a bit more from the Pew Research Center (heh) about the different Protestant denominations.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/
Mainline Protestantism is on the decline, and Evangelical Protestantism is on the rise, but the former isn’t dead yet.
sackbut: I actually don’t know that disorganized religiosity is preferable to organized religion. One could make a compelling case in either direction.
Papito @ 10
Good point. The fact sheet you linked to even includes a graphic of the religious affiliation distribution, and the largest bar is “Protestant”. Most of the reports about this survey are saying merely that the Nones outnumber Catholics now, which is big news, but far from a “Nones” majority.
Nullius @ 11
I think I’d lean toward disorganized religiosity being better than the organized kind, but I see your point.
In light of the issues about how Christians are grouped, I think we can’t even say that the “Nones” is the largest subgroup. It’s just bigger than it was, and exceeds Catholics.
You know, I’ve read several articles about this report, some from Pew, and I really wish they’d tease apart the “nothing in particular” people from the “atheist/agnostic” people. Many of the claims they make about beliefs and views and attitudes do not jibe well with my recollections from surveys of actual atheists. Most articles are careful in talking about this group as “nonreligious” rather than “atheist” or even “nonbeliever”, but, for one thing, I’m pretty sure most people will assume “nonreligious” means “atheist”, and for another thing, many of these people certainly are not “nonreligious” by my understanding of the term.