Results of a major 2015 study from Pew have been much-reported lately. The massive-in-scope survey shows that Christianity is on the decline in the U.S., while the unaffiliated (“nones”) have grown by leaps and bounds. In 2016, a Gallup survey found very similar results. Pundits immediately tried to interpret the findings, with some publications lamenting the trend and others celebrating it (I will do neither in this entry). But what did the study actually show?

Like many, I was curious not only about the findings, but about the reasons for the shifts.

Some Things To Note About The Survey

• It was huge — more than 35,000 people participated.
• The study asked “would you describe yourself as...” and listed broad categories of religion; it didn’t tabulate actual church membership or attendance.
• It also didn’t report on beliefs, but affiliation (of course, at least some beliefs can be extrapolated from the affiliations)
• For “trends”, the survey’s results are compared to a similarly-sized survey from 2007.

Relevant Results From The Survey

• Those identifying as “Christian” decreased in the U.S. from 78.4% to 70.6% — as a share of the total population.
• All major subcategories of Christianity showed decline.
• Extremely small groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example) showed apparent growth that fell within the margin of error.
• Muslims more than doubled (to a still relatively small percentage), while there was a slight increase in followers of Judaism and “other world religions”.
• The biggest increases (in sheer numbers) came among those who answered “nothing in particular” (12.1% to 15.8%) and “atheist” (1.6% to 3.1%).
• Combining “nothing in particular” with atheists and agnostics gets a total of 22.8% — a group now called “the nones”.

Who Are The Nones?

It’s the “nones” that everyone seems to be focusing on.

Since the study didn’t focus on beliefs, but on affiliation/identification, “nothing in particular” simply says they don’t self-identify with any of the religious groups listed, nor do they identify as atheist/agnostic, which were also listed as choices and both of which have specific definitions (atheist = “don’t believe”, agnostic = “don’t know”).

There are three major possibilities: (1) they actually are atheists/agnostics but don’t realize it, (2) they are atheists/agnostics by definition but avoid the terminology for whatever reason, or (3) they are believers but don’t to associate their belief with organized religion or commonly defined religious groups.

My assumption tends to fall into the latter camp, based on many anecdotal experiences. Numerous people I’ve known believe in a God very like the Christian God. If asked, they’ll tell you that he created the world and all of life (though perhaps not in six days), that he occasionally intervenes in world affairs and even in specific situations — as part of his “mysterious” plan, and that his rules for morality are very like the rules they think are laid out in the Bible — though very few of them have actually read the Bible. They don’t go to church, though they might have attended when they were younger. They have a negative opinion of “organized religion”, sometimes based on previous experiences but more often based on vague impressions they’ve picked up from others. Many of them have an oversimplified theology that “if you’re basically a good person, you’ll go to Heaven.”

Some of them feel no need to think about it regularly; others are uncomfortable discussing it.

This is not entirely an assumption on my part. Just last year (2014), Gallup asked “Do you believe in God?” and 86% of Americans responded that they did (update: it was 87% in 2017), with only 11% answering in the negative. That means that of the 22.8% in the Pew survey, a good chunk of them believe in God — as many as half of them. The atheists don’t, and the agnostics aren’t sure, which means a bunch of the “nothing in particular” (15.8%) actually do have such a belief.

Why The Sharp Rise?

There is a broad range of opinion as to why the number of “nones” is rising, something the study itself doesn’t address. I’ll mention some of them below, including my opinion on which reasons are believable. But first, I think it’s important to note that it’s highly unlikely that there is a single root cause. Not only will each person who left the faith have her own reasons and unique individual experiences, but in real life, our reasons often overlap and intertwine.

Rick Santorum claimed “the left” is using higher education as a tool of “indoctrination” in order to maintain power. Universities, he said, teach “radical secular ideology” and “62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it”. I don’t think he’s correct, of course. While there have been slight increases in the number of Americans getting college degrees, the percentage of unaffiliated rose by about the same amount for people with and without college degrees, and the increase of “nones” far outpaced the rise in degrees overall. (And, as this chart shows, Evangelical Protestants are more likely to have college degrees than the unaffiliated, though slightly less likely to have higher degrees.)

Others have been busy claiming that atheism (specifically) is dominated by white males, but the Pew survey shows that’s not true: “the religiously unaffiliated are growing among women at about the same rate as among men”.

Immigration? No, because the survey’s respondents born outside the U.S. had a higher rate of religious affiliation than natural born citizens.

Changes in ethnic demographics? No. The percentage of the unaffiliated grew in each major ethnic group.

I saw many pointing to the age groups: “none” is most prevalent among younger adults — millenials and Generation X. (Generation X comes in at 23% and Millenials are at 35%, while older folks are somewhere between 11 and 17 percent.) But the percentage of the unaffiliated has grown even among the older generations, and almost all the “nones” report they were raised with religion. The age argument is further destroyed by the finding that Hindus and Muslims are, on average, younger than the unaffiliated.

One author claims it’s economics, that the decline of the middle class that resulted in the decline of Christianity, while many others say nearly the opposite — that the U.S. is finally catching up to the worldwide trend of wealthier nations being less religious — as shown on this graph from a 2007 study. But I think it’s clear that economics doesn’t have a direct, immediate correlation with religious affiliation. Wages in the U.S. have been rising steadily since the 1950s and ‘60s, and women’s wages went up more steeply in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Since 2007, everyone except the ultrarich has seen incomes decline. (According to figures found here.)

Bill O’Reilly — pundit, war hero, and settler of sexual harassment claims — said that rap music was to blame. Just, no. O’Reilly is grasping at straws here. The U.S. rap industry is highly religious, with most rappers identifying as believers and regularly mentioning God and Jesus on every album (and thanking God for every award). Arguing that they encourage certain behavior is one thing, but they have nothing to do with people deciding to not be religious.

A New York Times op-ed suggested that it’s partly due to Millennials taking longer to “grow up”. The writer claims it’s common for people to ignore their religion during young adulthood and then revert once they settle down and start families — and since Millennials are starting families later in life, the “reverting” is taking more time. This too seems farfetched as an explanation. People are indeed marrying later (.pdf, 218kb), but not much later (27 for Millennials, 25 for my generation). And that trend began in the 1960s, not in the 2000s. While it’s certain that many people stop attending church during young adulthood only to return once they’re married and have kids, there is no evidence that they stop calling themselves “Christian” during that time.

Some political scientists suggested (source) that “the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches”. This is the first one that rings a little true to me. Before the 1980s, the political right and certain strains of Christianity were not as synonymous as they are today. However, it’s the more liberal church groups that have seen the greatest declines, while the more conservative groups are close to holding steady. And politicization of one’s church seems like a reason to look for a new church or stop attending, but not a reason for millions of people to suddenly stop identifying with Christianity itself — unless they all had been fairly unsure all along.

One prominent Baptist said it’s a result of having “fewer incognito atheists”, which he called “a good thing”. He claims many of the “nones” formerly identified as religious out of cultural/societal pressure, something he calls “almost Christianity”. This might be partly true. The Christian Post asked Pew about this, and got the response that it was at least “partly” due to “weak identifiers no longer calling themselves ‘Christian’.” The Pew researcher “cautioned, however, that the decline in weak Christian-identifiers might not explain all of the overall decline in Christian identifiers, because ‘the religious “nones” aren’t just growing — they’re also becoming more secular as they grow’.”

One religious blogger shared another possible reason: “Christians are seen as overbearing, uncaring judges rather than loving Christ-followers. When it comes to social issues, the world looks at how Christians react, or in many cases overreact, and does not see love, but only hateful judgment.” This, combined with the previous cause, carries some weight. Many of today’s hot-button political issues highlight the negative reactions of some prominent Christians, especially to the younger generation. On issues like marriage equality, LGBT rights in general, abortion, euthanasia, government assistance for the poor, separation of church and state, healthcare, the environment, stem cell research, scientific funding, etc., Christians have been slow to fall on the winning side. And their loudest voices, those most often on the news, have trouble appearing kind and loving when commenting about them. Some (link removed) claim that the media is misrepresenting their message, while others say the message itself is bigoted.

Thinking of the “numerous people I’ve known” (mentioned above), they likely would have answered “Christian” in such a survey years ago, but now might answer “none” or “nothing in particular”. In the past, “Christian” was simply the accepted answer to the question, but now they associate the word with organizations, churches, TV preachers, and right-wing politicians whom they increasingly see as counter-productive, holding back social progress. It doesn’t mean beliefs have changed, just the willingness to identify with particular groups.

However, the perception of Christians as backward or bigoted can’t be responsible for all of the shift to “none”; the denominations experiencing the greatest declines are generally those that have accepted equality and other progressive ideals; the ones that are holding steady are those that are widely perceived as the most hateful. (This makes me wonder whether the more “liberal” churches are occupying an untenable middle ground, holding on to forms and rituals while shedding many of the specific beliefs that secular society finds so distasteful.)

A few point to the rise of internet usage as a possible cause. Here is one example, from before the Pew study was published, but there are others. “For people living in homogeneous communities, the Internet provides opportunities to find information about people of other religions (and none), and to interact with them personally”, said one researcher. I think I accept this answer more than any of the others above, especially for those of us “nones” in the 50-and-under age brackets. Not only can we interact with people of other faiths (or those with no religious beliefs), but we can easily and quickly look up information (a lot of which directly contradicts claims made by our former religions).

When I think of each preceding generation, going back further in time, I think of their increasing lack of connection to the world beyond their country, their state, their valley, their village. Today, online, where many of us increasingly find our social circles, there aren’t borders or distances. A man in Indonesia or a woman in Scotland is just as close to me as my physical neighbor in Texas. My first true social media experience was Flickr, where I went to host photos, but quickly met people — from all over. Soon, my contact list had grown to a few hundred photographers. It turned out that these people were from all walks of life, from all the populated continents, with widely varying political and religious views. I never would have met these people face-to-face without the internet, but now these friendship are just as “real-life” as relationships with people I met face-to-face. It’s much more difficult to hold in contempt other cultures, practices, or beliefs when your social circle includes representatives from each.

In addition to wider circles of information and friendships, for those of us who participate in it, the internet provides a sounding board for one’s own ideas and viewpoints. Platitudes and memes that easily survive homogeneity can encounter heavy criticism — or at least sincere questioning — when exposed to the light of day. Many of my own opinions and viewpoints have been tempered (or changed entirely) in this way. For someone on the fence, this interaction can easily result in changed beliefs and affiliations.

2017 Addition: Ten Reasons

Two years after writing the above, I came across another attempt to explain the emptying of the pews, this time focusing specifically on Millennials (people born 1981-1996/7). Alex McFarland — who calls himself a “doctor” because he was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by Southern Evangelical Seminary and Louisiana Baptist University (though his website doesn’t say which field(s) those degrees cover — his master degree from Liberty University is in “Christian Thought / Apologetics”) — lists “ten reasons millennials are backing away from God and Christianity” in this column published by Fox News. He seems pretty concerned about it, but instead of looking for actual causes of abandoning faith, he instead engages in what we former Christians call “lying for Jesus” — inventing alternate reality and claiming it’s true. (Note: McFarland never says in his Fox News op-ed why it’s so worrisome that young people in our country are less religious than their older counterparts. It’s just assumed that it’s bad. You’re supposed to know that this is scary and/or sad.)

Before offering his ten “reasons”, McFarland claims he’s conducted “research”, including “dozens of interviews with teens, twentysomethings, professed ex-Christians, and religion and culture experts”, and then goes on to show how pointless that research was.

1. Embarrassingly, the first one he trots out is lack of brand loyalty. McFarland claims that because Millennials are less likely to stick with one brand, one genre, one category — of anything — then they do the same with religion. Even religious people should be ashamed of this argument: “brand loyalty” has to be among the worst possible reasons to stay religious.

2. Secondly, he resorts to the decades-old breakdown of the traditional family argument, and like his forebears, he presents no evidence of this. I can’t find a single study (and McFarland doesn’t mention any) that shows non-religious people are less likely to come from stable families. Many atheists were raised in two-parent Christian homes, and plenty of current Christians come from what we used to call “broken homes”.

3. And watch out for the militant, enforced secularism, because that’s the third reason. “People today are subjected to an enforced secularism”, McFarland claims, while he freely writes Christian tripe for the most-watched news network in a country where 91% of Congress is Christian (and the rest are Jewish, Muslim, and “other”), every president of my lifetime has claimed Christianity as his religion, and the U.S. Supreme Court is comprised mostly of Catholics (and the rest identify as Jewish).

The example he lists to support that claim is public education, which he complains is too concerned with “methodological naturalism”, a phrase that simply means “the scientific method confines itself to natural explanations without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural”. In other words, until public schools are straight-up teaching Christian dogma as fact, McFarland will claim they’re “militantly” secular. And he will continue to ignore that it was Christians who set up this country to be secular (which simply means it doesn’t espouse any particular branch of religion).

4. Next, it’s the lack of adult Christian role models. Which is a weird claim to make since we’re discussing why a younger generation is less religious than the preceding generations. (And perhaps McFarland isn’t aware that typical atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do.)

But if you check McFarland’s exact phrasing on that one, he’s allowed himself a lot of wiggle room: “Many youth have had no — or very limited — exposure to adult role models who know what they believe, why they believe it, and are committed to consistently living it out.” He qualified with three requirements — these adult role models have to know what they believe, why they believe it, and be “committed to consistently living it out”. The first requirement leaves out most Christians — most have never read the Bible and can’t recite their church’s statement of faith. The second requirement leaves out a bunch more; it’s rare to meet a Christian who can express why they believe beyond meaningless phrases like “I just feel it’s true in my heart”. The third requirement is so subjective that it’s ridiculous. If I point out my Christian parents, will McFarland dismiss them as not being committed enough to “consistently living it out”?

So maybe he’s right on this one. If we atheists had known more Christians who could clearly express exactly what they believe, then give us good reasons for why they believe it, and then prove that it’s worth believing by living it every day, then maybe fewer of us would have begun exploring other options.

5. Fifth, McFarland says the Church’s cultural influence has diminished. But isn’t this a symptom (not a cause) of people leaving religion? People don’t leave religion because the Church has grown weaker; the Church has grown weaker because people are leaving religion. But it could certainly be part of a downward spiral — the fewer people influenced by the church, the less likely they are to raise their own children in church, thus weakening the Church further in the subsequent generation.

On the other hand, I find very little evidence that Christianity’s hold on our culture has weakened. It’s difficult to find a movie or show these days that doesn’t feature God in some way, at some point. For crying out loud, I went and watched the latest “Fast And Furious” movie this weekend. It ended in a prayer — I’m not making this up. Every single day, when I read the news, I see another “news” story that mentions religion — often as if it’s true. Just this morning, I saw three or four storm damage stories in national media outlets, each quoting residents who said God saved them from disaster (right after God allowed their home to be destroyed).

6. Next, McFarland says our cultural abandonment of morality is “pervasive”, explaining: “The idea of objective moral truth — ethical norms that really are binding on all people — is unknown to most and is rejected by the rest.” It’s almost as if no one has ever shown that there are objective moral truths, and almost as if his own religion has subjectively changed its own moral standards throughout history and is continuing to do so today, kind of disproving his point.

7. And maybe he accidentally got another one right with intellectual skepticism; that would be two so far. Everyone reading can agree that one of the reasons for people in the U.S. being less religious these days is that they’re skeptical of the claims of most/all religions. Christians take note: if your religion is true, the skepticism should be what you want. Skepticism doesn’t mean “I believe nothing” or “I’m willing to believe anything”. Both are absurd. Skepticism means being skeptical of huge claims that offer no evidence.

All of us are skeptical to some degree. If a TV ad tomorrow claimed that a new pill could return you to your physical prime — including weight loss, memory repair, energy levels, wrinkle/mole removal, etc. — would you go buy it that very day? I like to think most of us would wait to see at least a news article or a friend’s testimony before spending money on it. Personally, I’d believe it only if I saw that it was working for people I already know and trust, and if I read peer-reviewed studies showing it to be true (and without worrisome side effects).

The only reason anyone ever discourages skepticism is if they have something to sell and their claims can’t be backed up.

8. As with the others, McFarland has no evidence when he claims it’s now cool to be an atheist. I believe it might actually be true in some circles. Perhaps in Portland or Austin among a certain age group. But in most circles I’m familiar with, it’ll get you immediately branded as the weird one, the fallen one, the one who can’t be trusted around children. I don’t mention it offline. There are more churches in my city than schools, libraries, and bookstores combined. God is on bumper stickers, billboards, and TV commercials. No one’s ever knocked on my door to tell me the “good news of atheism”, but religious folk do it weekly (no exaggeration).

McFarland refers to the “rise of a fad”, and names a single dead atheist author who rose to (some) fame a few years ago as an example of how popular atheism is now. But I’ll bet a dollar that fewer than one percent of all the Christians I know have ever heard of Christopher Hitchens (until now). I’ve never read a book by him. McFarland conveniently leaves out that Christian books, talks, and music are orders of magnitude more popular in the U.S. Every bookstore has a religious section, yet I’ve never seen one with an “atheist” section. I’ve never heard of a TV show with the sole purpose of convincing people gods aren’t real, but there are dozens airing every week with the sole purpose of spreading Christianity in our country.

If he thinks atheism’s growing popularity is responsible for there being more people who don’t believe in God, and is willing to say that out loud, then you already know how poorly his mind works.

9. Weirdly, his ninth reason actually does the opposite of what he thinks it does. He says tolerance of others’s beliefs is partly to blame. “It is now impossible to rationally critique any belief or behavior without a backlash of criticism.” First, it has almost always been the case that if you critique a belief that’s valuable to someone else, you can expect some “backlash”. (Try telling a pet-owner: “It’s immoral to own animals” and see if they mutely accept your critique. Ha.) Secondly, it has almost always been religion that is most protected from healthy criticism. If anything, this protection from criticism should help Christianity retain members. (What he didn’t say, but what I think he meant, is that he wants to criticize every other belief besides his own, and get away with it, but he’s frustrated that our pluralistic society protects all the beliefs.)

10. Unable to come up with any “reasons” more sensible than the previous ones, McFarland falls back on the angst of youth, the “desire for autonomy felt in young adulthood”. I mean, yes? Young folk freshly released into the world from underneath the authoritative thumb of evangelicalism very often try to run their own lives. But this can’t possibly explain the increase in younger generations leaving the church. (And he needn’t worry about this one; it’s been happening for thousands of years, and statistically most of the younger “nones” are likely to return to the same religion they left.)

2020 Addition: Asking The Wrong People

More than five years later, as Christians still try to come to grips with the phenomenon, I was startled to see them asking each other why people have left the church (instead of the more obvious solution of asking those who left). I found this column at The American Conservative, in which the author first tries to guess for himself and then blockquotes a long letter from “an Evangelical reader”, giving his own reasons why people are leaving Christianity. (On Twitter, the magazine’s post was rightly criticized for taking the word of someone who is still in the church rather than asking people who left. Many replies from former Christians provide plenty of reasons.)

Some of the reasons provided in that letter are similar to those above. One was startlingly absurd: churches are too user-friendly — they aren’t any longer teaching the “hard” Gospel, but instead simply focus on the “God loves you” parts. This makes zero sense to me, given that I likely would have stayed in Christianity if that’s all it taught. He also (without explanation) claims that going to college and getting a good job are “hostile to traditional Christianity”.

Final Thoughts

The 2014 study (plus the 2016 Gallup survey), when contrasted with previous studies shows striking trends, though it’s difficult to extrapolate longer-term trends. Will the rise in “nones” reach a plateau, or grow at a sharper rate? Will certain slices of Christianity shed only the “weak identifiers” and then level off, or begin to grow again? Will Muslims double again? We don’t know.

More useful, I think, are the discussions of why, even if most of it is only speculation and even if a lot of it is ridiculous.

Though each individual who walks away from religion has her own explanations, certain factors likely affect the bulk of the new nones: (1) “weak identifiers” are now more likely to say “no affiliation”; (2) stronger ties between right-wing politics and various branches of Protestantism ends up forcing out those with more liberal tendences, especially if they were on the fence about religion anyway; (3) today’s hot-button political issues often provoke truly terrible reactions from prominent Christians; (4) widespread access to the internet — including information and relationships with people outside one’s belief system; and (5) an increasing level of skepticism, perhaps encouraged by the above, which causes more people to question more of what they were expected to blindly believe.

 

Some other findings in the Pew survey:

• Ethnic diversity has increased among Christians, which mirrors the increasing diversity in the overall population.
• Inter-religious marriage has increased — more than doubling since 1960 — reflecting that marrying into the same group isn’t as important as it once was.
• The median ages of Protestants (52) and Catholics (49) are higher than before, while the median age of the unaffiliated has dropped to 36. (The median age of the overall population is 46.)
• The adult population of the U.S. increased from 2007 to 2014. The 78.4% in the earlier survey reflected 178 million Christians, while the 70.6% in the newer survey represents 173 million Christians, a net loss of 5 million. (Between 2.8 million and 7.8 million, when including both surveys’ margin of error.)
• The greatest loss of Christian adherents came from “mainline Protestant” groups, which include Methodists, some Baptists, Evangelical Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopals, among others.
• Historically Black Protestant church populations have remained relatively steady.
• “Evangelical Protestant” groups (including other Baptists, pentecostal groups, Churches of Christ, other Lutherans, etc.), appear to have actually grown slightly in number during this same time period, while declining slightly as a percentage of the adult population.
• The “nones” (22.8%) are now the second largest group in the U.S., behind Evangelical Protestants (25.4%).