In 2002, Mike Hout and I identifieda new trend in Americans relationship with religion. Around 1990, the percentage of respondents to the General Social Survey (GSS) who, when asked their religious preference, picked the no religion option starting rising, doubling from about 7 percent, where it had been for many years, to 14 percent by 2000.
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That finding and our efforts to explain it stirred interest among scholars and leaders of American religion. A few weeks ago, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Lifeconvened a briefing session for journalists on what we know about these nones now, a decade after that report. Pew brought together researchers to discuss what the trends look like in three different national surveys the GSS, the Gallup Poll, and the Pew survey itself.
Although the methodologies of the three survey organizations differ (the GSS is the only one using in-home interviews) and the questions about religion that they use vary, there was nonetheless strong agreement on key points: By 2012, the percentage claiming no religion was between 18 and 20; the substantial increase in nones does not necessarily represent a decrease in Americans religiosity; and the trend in nones seems to be really about the act of declaringno religious preference.
The trend
GSS interviewers ask, in person, What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion? In the 1970s and 1980s, the GSS estimate is that 7 percent chose no religion; in the 1990s, 10 percent did; in the 2000s, 15 percent did; and it reached 20 percent in 2012.
Gallup interviewers ask, over the phone, a similar question, but one that also lists Mormon and Muslim as options. With a sample size of over 350,000 (!) respondents in 2012, Gallups estimate is 18 percent none.
Pews interviewers ask, over the phone, a yet more elaborate question, providing respondents with additional options, including atheist, agnostic, and nothing in particular. Adding the last three reply categories together, Pew estimatesthat 20 percent of respondents in 2012 declared themselves unaffiliated, up from 15 percent in 2007. By all these methods, the rise in nones is a major American social trend.
Faith and practice, however
The trend, however, seems not to be substantially connected with Americans religious faith and practice. We see this in two ways: one, by looking at who the nones are; two, by looking at other trends regarding religious expression.
Who the nones are, religiously speaking: As Greg Smith of Pew stressed, most of the nones in their surveys are neither atheists nor agnostics; 71% of their unaffiliated pick nothing in particular. All three polls show that significant proportions of the nones say they believe in God and pray at least occasionally. Frank Newport, Editor-in-Chief at Gallup, emphasized their finding that the increase in nones, at least in the last few years, seems to have come overwhelmingly from the ranks of Americans who were not particularly religious to start with people who did not consider religion important to them, who did not attend church often. The nones seem to be people who were already religiously marginal and now openly declare it.
Trends in other indicators of religion: Newport showed that there was little change in religious practice or feelings in the last few years of the Gallup survey, even as the no-preference category grew. In the GSSs longer time span, we do see changes, albeit much less dramatic ones than the rise in nones from 1991 to 2012. We see a drop from about 64 to 59 percent in the percentage of respondents who were certain without any doubt about the existence of God, accompanied by a rise from 6 to 9 percent in self-declared atheists and agnostics; a drop from 89 to 77 percent in the percent who say that the bible is either the literal word of God or inspired by God; essentially no change (80 to 81 percent) in those who say they believe in life after death; and a drop from 52 to 46 percent in those who say they attend church at least monthly. Notably, the percentage who explicitly say they never attend church rose from 12 to 25 percent in the same 21 years.
Why none?
If changes in religiosity excepting perhaps the growth in those who say they never attend church only weakly parallel the 13-point rise and the near-tripling of the percentage of nones since 1991, where do we look for an explanation for the increase in no preference answers?
Again, the three research teams seem to agree that it is to be found in the symbolic nature of declaring oneself to have no religion or no religion in particular. Newport argued that something in our culture changed in the last couple of decades that now allow the sorts of Americans who were always pretty marginal to or uninterested in religion to feel free to announce to interviewers that they had no religious preference. Maybe such self-labeling is part of a general growth in the ethos of be yourself or reflects a widening distrust of large institutions.
Michael Hout and I presented another angle on why more of the religiously marginal are declaring themselves to have no religious preference: they are making a declaration about cultural politics. Mike presented a graph similar to the one below.
Source: G.S.S. via Michael Hout
It shows that GSS respondents who described themselves as politically conservative (the red line) were only a bit more likely to declare themselves nones in recent years than in the prior roughly 35 years. But among those who described themselves as politically liberal (the blue line) the percentage who declared no religious preference soared from about 15 percent at the end of the 1980s to almost 40 percent now. The trend for self-declared moderates was in between. The growth of nones is largely the liberals trend.
Our argument is that an important part of what has happened is this: A growing proportion of Americans, particularly young ones, who lean liberal (and were not much religious to start with) have responded to the growing connection between churches and conservative cultural politics by declaring to interviewers their opposition to organized religion. If religion means the religious right, they seem to be saying, then count me out. We made this argument in our 2002 paper and then, in American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell elaborated it.
Peering ahead
Social scientists do not project trends forward, even ones that look like straight lines. In American history, there have been periods of strong religious enthusiasm (notably, the 1950s) and of religious depression (e.g., the 1920s; see here). For now, the nones seem to be more about cultural or political issues than about faith itself. Mike Hout was able, at the end of the Pew conference, to hold up Frank Newports recent book and read its title, God is Alive and Well,and then add, But the churches are not! That was a common theme of the conference presenters.
However, if increasingly more young Americans spurn the institution of the church and synagogue and mosque by declaring themselves nones, claiming to never attend, disdaining ministers, and then later by not baptizing their children, buying bibles, attending Easter services, adding to the collection plate, enrolling the kids in Sunday School, and so on, then sociologists would expect that private faith and practice would eventually lose the institutional structures undergirding them. Then, maybe, no religious preference would come to have a much broader meaning.
Cross-posted from Claude Fischers blog, Made in America: Notes on American life from American history.