I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the continuing trend toward a secular future, in America and other nations.
In most countries, the power and influence of religion declines as the populace becomes wealthier and more educated. As people look toward the future with greater optimism, they feel less need for the illusory consolation of faith. For a long time, the United States was an outlier in this regard: a rich, developed country where religious fundamentalism exerted a powerful political influence.
But those days may be coming to an end. A new poll shows that less than half of Americans say religion is important in their daily lives. This is the first time that this has ever happened, and it points toward a future where religion has waned in cultural influence and power – despite the regressive right-wingers in office doing their utmost to prop the churches up. Their best efforts have done precisely nothing to stop this trend.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
The numbers of atheists, agnostics and generally nonreligious people have been growing for years. As a share of the U.S. population, they now outnumber every single religious denomination. As of 2021, for the first time ever, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or other organized house of worship.
Even among those who still identify as religious, the intensity of their belief is declining. Increasingly fewer people say that religion is an important part of their lives.
There’s a new poll on this topic, and it comes with a whopper of a title: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World.
One thing I wonder about in all this: do any of the surveys or analysts make a distinction between organized/institutional religion and spirituality?
Or considering themselves part of a religious tradition vs. being formal members?
Or even how many active members of a religion are also atheist?
I ask because I currently attend a Unitarian congregation, and a fair number of the people there are openly atheist. I know a number of people who consider themselves Jewish and may or may not observe some of the practices but are not members of any of the established Jewish movements. And I’ve known a number of people who aren’t a member of any church or anything, but instead practice some variety of pagan or new-age religion.
Personally, I could be considered atheist, since I don’t believe in a deity (or rather I believe that if there is a “deity”, she probably doesn’t care much about what we do — we’re entirely on our own.) But I don’t call myself atheist, because most of the prominent capital-A Atheists are not folks I would want to be associated with: I don’t see them as being any better persons than your average fundamentalist Christian. And there’s Libby Anne, of the Patheos blog “Love, Joy, Feminism”, who is an example of someone who doesn’t believe in a god but refuses to call herself “atheist.”
There are general surveys that have looked at the first two questions you pose.
It’s very applicable now because the rate of Christian church attendance is dropping faster then people are giving up on religious beliefs entirely. Some of the people leaving churches are taking up online practice or home bible studies, while others remain religious without any specific practice at all. The number switching to other religions is small.
I have not seen any statistics for shifts in non-Christian religions.
I also attend a Unitarian Universalist congregation, if that matters.
Unitarian Universalism is an odd duck in that they define themselves as a religion while also saying that everyone is welcome, including atheists. That would definitely complicate surveys like this one, except that UUs aren’t numerous enough to make a meaningful difference to national averages.
If you’re an dyed-in-the-wool atheist but attend a UU congregation weekly – or if you’re an atheist who attends a Jewish synagogue or a Catholic church for cultural reasons… should you say that you’re religious or that religion is important to you?
I guess the unsatisfying answer is that it depends on which aspect of your identity is most important to you. If a pollster called me, I’d identify as atheist, because that captures my beliefs in the most accurate way and because that’s the philosophy I’d like to see represented (notwithstanding the behavior of certain capital-A Atheists).
Just in time for the climate crisis to come roaring in like the wrath of god.
How does immigration show in the statistics? E.g. Eastern Asians won’t join Abrahamic congregations. They might not join any other groups either, if there isn’t a suitable temple/shrine/etc. close enough to their new home.
Also there is the mob effect. A supermajority means that you have to join them to be accepted to the community, but when there are many non-members, that motivation disappears.
Christianity has become quite popular in South Korea. And in the US there are plenty of Korean churches. Mostly Presbyterian, at least in my area.
And once you get to Southeast Asia you have Indonesia which is a Muslim-majority country, which also has some active Christian missionaries. I used to know a person from Indonesia whose family of origin converted from Confuciunism to Christianity (while in Indonesia).
Forgive me if I’m skeptical of these findings. Even ignoring the allegations in the OnlySky comments that you are misinterpreting the results and that the secularization trend will reverse itself, even if that is not the case, America can’t be getting less religious because that would have entailed Trump losing the 2024 election, yet he won it by a bigger margin than any other Republican this century. There is absolutely no reason to conclude things are getting better and abundant reason to think they are getting worse.
That would be true if nonreligious people always voted in proportion to their share of the population, which regrettably they don’t.
Granted. But what is your response to the commenters accusing you of misinterpreting the data?
I just read another thoughtpiece on why Americans are walking away from religion. One idea is that the time of the megachurch is coming to a close–if that’s true, than my area is about 20 years behind the times because where I live, they’re building them faster than ever. Another is that as more casual believers walk away from church, the services are geared to the super-believers, pushing more people away.
When I was stationed near Washington DC, I attended a UU church as an atheist. There were a fair number of atheists and also Pagans. As far as I was aware, everyone felt welcome. The typical service consisted of a lector (usually the pastor, but sometimes another person) reading from a text (not necessarily the bible) and giving an interpretation, then the congregation breaking into small groups to further discuss it.
My understanding is that megachurches represent consolidation, not growth. They’re cannibalizing older, smaller churches, but not drawing in people who wouldn’t have gone to those churches.
Right–the article I linked seems to believe the megachurches are themselves withering away, a fact I found suspect because one was built about 10 years ago not a mile from where I live. But the time of massive church building may have peaked in the USA as a whole.