Some Religious Right activists believe that were it to be accepted as a fact that pre-1800 Americans were deeply Christian, a new light would be cast on current debates about where (if anywhere) to draw a line between Church and State today. In the sense of the Supreme Court’s search for “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, Christian dogma would be an originalist justification for, say, reintroducing prayer into schools. But the story of Early American religion is, in fact, a quite different one.

* * *

The impression of great piety among the settlers is a common view of the past, probably rooted in the outsize role that the Puritans play in our mental pictures of Early America. The Puritans, however, were an odd lot in America—the exception, not the rule. (They are a prominent exception, thanks to the cultural power of their New England descendants and the voluminous records they left. One historian has complained that we “know more about the Puritans than any sane person should want to know.”)

Over the wider American landscape, however, colonists were notably “unchurched” and “un-Christian.” Scattered around in separate households (unlike the Puritans who concentrated in villages), most Americans had no church to go to and little connection to what we would call organized religion. Even where there were churches to attend, many went either irregularly or simply because the church was one of the rare places—along with the tavern—to see people in a sparsely-developed society.

Stepahnie Wolf, in her study of Revolutionary-era Germantown, Pennsylvania, estimated that only about half of the residents attended church, and that is probably a high watermark, since the community was urban and well-off, and the period was one of religious enthusiasm.

Such waves of enthusiasm (“Awakenings”) in some places and at some times rallied some people to faith, but the clergy generally despaired of the heathens who had settled the new continent. One minister trying to save souls in the American heartland in the early 1800s wrote that “there are American families in this part of the country who never saw a bible, nor heard of Jesus Christ [. . .]  the whole country, from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico, is as the valley of the shadow of death.”

Most early Americans were not believers in the sense that affirming Christians are today. They were likelier to understand spells, potions, and omens than theological doctrines. Almanacs sold briskly in part because they provided guides to the occult. It took a lot of hard missionary work to displace magic with Christ.

The colonial elites, some of whom became Founding Fathers, themselves tended to be vaguely Christian. Even John Adams, a cultural conservative who struggled against the radical Thomas Jefferson, was “only” a Unitarian.

Evangelical movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sent preachers out to Christianize the unorganized settlers.  They competed against religious ignorance, but also against each other and the established churches. Their message of a democratic faith, in which the poor, the uneducated, and even the fallen, not just the pre-elected elite, could someday sit at God’s throne eventually brought the upstart Protestant movements, such as Methodism, Baptism, and others, like Mormonism, increasing success.

Later, over the course of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans in great numbers formed and joined churches and by the twentieth century, they had made church-going a norm. Importantly, it was around 1900, give or take a generation, that religious fundamentalism took form in reaction to the growing role of science. That “old time religion,” ironically, may be only about a century or so old.

The “normal” religious life many Americans seem to remember is the life of the 1950s, when church-building and church-attending boomed—not coincidentally, along with the Baby Boom. Those years were the peak of church membership and attendance in American history—much higher than in Early America—but not that much higher than today.

We err if we project that 1950s culture back to the early days of America. And we underestimate the accomplishment of legions of traveling ministers who eventually, rural hollow by rural hollow, Christianized America.

* * *

This story, well-known to historians of religion, casts light on current controversies.

For example, Michael Hout and I have pointed out the growth since about 1990 in the proportion of Americans who answered “none” when asked in surveys what religion they were. Some readers were led to cheer or to bemoan an increase in atheism and agnosticism. That is not what is happening. What may be on the rise is a reorientation away from standard, organized religion. What many people mean by their answers of “none” is that they have no religion in particular, or that they prefer their spirituality outside the walls and rules of an organized institution.

In the history of American religion, such developments would be no more radical than the sorts of orientations Americans of earlier generations had. Many in the nineteenth century, for example, were of whatever faith happened to be preached at this season’s camp revival. Others insisted on combining elements of Christianity with theologically incompatible folk beliefs and superstitions. The history of religion in America puts the perturbations of today’s religious activities in perspective. And thus, also, the debate over Christian Early America.

If people want to justify a larger role for religion in the public square, there are grounds to do so. But appealing to an “original” Christian America is inaccurate and probably unnecessary.

* * *

Another version of this post appears at http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/. Expansion on these points can be found in Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.—ed.

The “Nones” in American society and political life

As Hout and Fischer note here on The Immanent Frame, “the fraction of American adults with no religious preference doubled from 7 to 14 percent during the 1990s. Data from this decade show that the trend away from organized religion continues, albeit at a slower pace.” In revising some of their earlier work, Hout and Fischer remark that this trend began before the 1990s, perhaps between 1985 and 1987, and thus the rate of change may not have been as rapid as previous estimates indicated. Or, if we turn to the ARIS data as our source, the percentage of “no religionists” escalated from 8.1 percent in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2001 to 15 percent in 2008. So, with more than 15 percent currently reporting “no religion” in 2009 and the growth continuing, albeit more gradually, what explains the dramatic shift toward “none” status in the mid-to-late 1980s through the 1990s and how can we best understand the subsequent slowdown in the current decade?

There is no one compelling answer. Clearly there was and still is an ongoing transition toward a general pluralization of religious beliefs with, in part, a secularizing tendency. Hout and Fischer point us toward two components of generational and age cohort shifts that explain elements of this trajectory and provide a provisional set of answers. As they state, first, “People who were raised without religion from the 1960s onward are less likely than previous generations to acquire a religion in adulthood.” Second, there “is a trend away from organized religion among people raised with religion. People who were raised with religion from the 1960s onward are also less likely than previous generations to stay with religion in adulthood.”

Most recently, though, the drop-off in the rate of transition to “no religion” as a self-assigned identity points to something beyond demographic and age-related drivers of change. Again, the ARIS data show that approximately 1.3 million adults moved from one religion or other into the “no religion” category each year during the 1990s. However, the annual shift since 2001 stands at approximately half that total, with 660,000 or so Americans reporting as “nones.” While this still represents a vast growth of the bloc reporting “no religiosity” each year, it is far below the annual highs of the 1990s. How can we assess the causes of this change?

I have discussed this question and proposed several points in previous work, which I condense here as falling under three rubrics.

Catholics. Building on Kosmin and Keysar’s work, we can say that because some of the worst sex scandals and other tumult in the American Catholic Church have abated, the rate at which Catholics (still the largest religious group making the shift) become “nones” is lower now than in the late 1990s. Still, Hispanic Catholics are the fastest growing demographic, both in the U.S. population generally and among the self-designated “nones.” Catholic Hispanics will thus be a crucial determinant of future national religious propensities.

Culture and the market. An alternative explanation lies in culture and its complicated relationship to religious and intellectual markets. How many people can make any major transition in religious values at a given moment? It is almost a truism of moral philosophy to note that, for the vast majority of citizens, there is great difficulty in moving beyond the norms inculcated by family and community. No matter what the circumstances, there are limits on how many individuals or groups can make such a shift in belief at any given time; thus, there are natural limits to the liquidity of the intellectual marketplace. Or, taking a different perspective, the “marketplace” for faith in America itself is doing a solid, perhaps a better, job of holding market share by using new techniques for outreach and to improve sociability, as Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have discussed. Sociologists of religion also have explained that since the mid-1990s America’s organized religions (particularly certain Protestant denominations) started to adapt, first at the local level and then at the national level, by incorporating innovations in media for religious services and by embracing new methods to enhance social events and communal environments. In short, over the past ten-to-fifteen years many organized faiths in the U.S. became more efficient in retaining members and gaining new members.

Context and challenges. The historical context, together with new national challenges, help us to understand the continued movement toward “none” status, as well as the slowdown in the rate of growth. I hypothesize that three challenges have pushed Americans to seek greater stability in faith: the catastrophic events of September 11th, 2001; the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the geopolitical uncertainties related to the global war on terror); and the massive recent economic downturn. Such crises have historically led individuals and groups toward traditional sources of meaning, community, and security. In uncertain times, calls for individualism seem weaker, and the claims of skepticism associated with secular, atheist, agnostic, and humanist worldviews seem less persuasive. Journalist Jeffrey Weiss has hypothesized that this may be another example of the old “no atheists in a foxhole” phenomenon, often invoked to explain why religiosity flourishes in times of crisis.

Thus, while there are no clear or singular answers to the rise of the late 1980s through 1990s, and then the slowdown since 2001, these explanatory categories illuminate some of the crucial drivers propelling this set of transitions.

I. What Difference Do the Trends Make for American Society?

Let us consider a few of the most hotly contested implications of the increase in “no religionists.”

Their rise over the past two decades underscores a familiar dynamic in American history: fears of godlessness are often deeply entangled with fears concerning the moral decay of the polity.  But, of course, how increases in the “no religion” demographic will influence the goals, forms, and institutional spaces of civic engagement in the United States remains to be seen. I suggest that the growing tendency of people who are not necessarily atheists to reject a religious identification reflects, and is likely to continue to affect, three political and cultural transitions.

Polarization. Over the past few decades there has been a marked trend toward sharper polarization amongst religious outlooks. With the decline of membership in the so-called liberal churches, explicitly and unabashedly faith-centered “conservative” political factions have grown and have brought their views to bear in the public square on an array of social, political, legal, and economic issues. Most prominent has been the electioneering of evangelical Christians, whose ascendance to power since the 1970s was epitomized by the presidency of George W. Bush. These developments have prompted outcries from liberals and, increasingly, from moderates as well. Having promised a deepening of the role of faith in American politics, this conservative Christian movement has splintered in the wake of divisions regarding its desired means and ends, corruption-related scandals, and the unsuccessful elections in 2006 and 2008. Further, in polls and surveys before the 2008 election, many Americans affirmed the need for a liberal, religious “vital center” (to borrow a phrase from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) and expressed a more apolitical (that is, non-partisan) aim to push back against the rise of religiously inspired and directed political blocs.

Recent evidence of cultural polarization also appears quite persuasively in the bestselling appeal of works by “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. The unexpected sales and brisk public discussions generated by these works underscore how well received such torrid critiques of religion have become, particularly in the face of the politically oriented invocations of faith by conservative politicians and pundits. What we do know is that the religious center seems to have shrunk. Survey data reveals that “no religionists” firmly believe they can still be spiritual without claiming a formal religious affiliation, and they seem to be part of a wide swath of American society that does not favor the thorough intermingling of religion and politics. (The desired “mix,” however, is an intensely debated subject.) Still, the data on what Americans want from their politicians and presidents mirror these contests and contradictions. When polled, Americans reject “atheistic” presidential candidates in the abstract and want their politicians to affirm faith.  Is this a “Goldilocks” phenomenon—they want faith, but not too hot?

Historical and current international relations. Diverse changes on the geopolitical stage have had profound historical ramifications for new “prophesies of godlessness” and movements away from formal, public religious beliefs. From the 1930s through 1989, Americans imagined their enemies as deeply “godless”—first Germany and Japan, then the avowed atheism of the communist Soviet Union. The apparent “opponents” of the U.S. in the twenty-first century, most notably Islamist terrorism, are suffused in religiosity and the languages of political theology. This represents quite an inversion and could be the most significant factor shaping the future of the “nones” in American politics and society. If totalitarian godlessness encouraged American views of the importance of godliness throughout much of the twentieth century, what might this switch mean for the twenty-first? Now that America is well beyond the bipolar world of the Cold War, and particularly given a growing minority of the population that no longer believes in any of the organized religions, what will happen to civic culture when affirming America’s godliness no longer seems to be the best way to distinguish “us” from “them”?

If irreligion abroad encouraged identification with religion at home—perhaps even greater religiosity, at home—then defining the foreign “other” more explicitly in terms of religious extremism may encourage even more U.S. citizens (and civic culture as a whole) to increase their personal and ideological distance from formal religious affiliations. In turn, such a distancing might heighten other sources of religious alienation in the future. Indeed, disaffection from organized religion has been growing for other reasons, too varied to discuss here. But those forces highlight the voluntarism with which people increasingly view religion, along with the widely held belief that one can be “spiritual” without being “religious.”

Shifting partisanship and politics. One fascinating question is: what exactly are the beliefs under the surface of “no religion”? Two stand out: political orientation and views on evolution.

The former converges with and supports the recent trend of religio-political polarization and the apparent alignment of Republican politics with more orthodox Judeo-Christian values. In the ARIS data for 1990, 12 percent of Independents identified as having “no religion,” along with 6 percent of Democrats and 6 percent of Republicans. As of 2008, however, 21 percent of Independents claim “no religion,” as well as 16 percent of Democrats and only 8 percent of Republicans.

As Kosmin and Keysar  explain, a “plurality (42%) of the “nones” consider themselves Independents; 34% are Democrats; and 13% are Republicans. In the general population, only 29% consider themselves Independents, 34% Democrats; and 24% Republicans.” It is difficult to discern whether the “no religion” growth since 1990 was more of a politically-motivated movement away from the Republican Party toward Independent status, or is better explained as part of a general social shift in the direction of decreasing party affiliation. No matter what the social pattern, the underlying political trends seem clear: “nones” are growing; they are less likely to favor or identify with the Republican Party; and, in a parallel but probably separate trend, the number of Independents is growing in the American political sphere. These developments constitute a serious present and future challenge to Republican electioneering, barring a transformation of the party and its positions.

Views on evolution offer a vivid example of how “nones” are outliers in American life. “No religionists” are one of the largest demographic slices of the populace who hold to the definitude of human evolution. Further, “nones” apparently agree with the importance of teaching evolution as settled science; on this point the survey data is a bit more mixed. “Nones” report believing in human evolution at rates twice that of the general population (61 percent to 38 percent). Generalizing from their self-reported beliefs, then, “no religionists” seem to be skeptical and independent-minded, frequently objecting to rigid doctrines of either secular or religious origin. They also seem to prefer empirical, often scientific data as a primary source of belief to faith. Such a worldview suggests that “no religionists” will be predisposed to object to the more overtly religious rhetoric and to some of the “received wisdoms” of recent Republican politics at the state and national levels. This may be most predictive at the local and school board levels where behavior and belief will continue to shape battles over the teaching of creationism alongside evolution and related religiously derived curriculum initiatives.

II.  Speculations

These last points lead me to a few concluding speculations about “no religionists” in American political life. If one purpose of this discussion series is to foster novel interpretations of the growth of the “no religion” population—both its causes and its transformative potential with respect to the discourse and conduct of politics in the United States—then I take up that mission by concluding with several historically oriented observations.

The marked increase in these numbers since the 1980s appears to be explained in part by changing domestic and international politics and related cultural transitions, as well as the long-standing pervasiveness of voluntarism as a characteristic of American democratic practices. The voluntarism attached to American democracy and the so-called “marketplace” of religion is central to an extraordinary social chemistry in American life that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed nearly two centuries ago. Yet there is a new facet to the voluntarism that inheres in present-day American liberalism: its pluralist commitments are fundamentally different from those of its early nineteenth century variant.

Today, as Charles Mathewes and I found in researching our book Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day, contemporary voluntary religion entails a “common-sense” epistemology that in some ways is strangely unaware of its own limits. Today’s widespread deference to a liberal voluntarism is so radically “open,” for example, that it can lead to intransigence, and to an inability to imagine that “others” see things differently from the way you do.  A parallel development over at least the past three decades is the power of explicitly and unabashedly faith-centered political factions to bring their views to bear in the public square, to exclaim against imminent moral decay in American life, and to rail against rising unbelief.

One interpretation of what is going on, as we suggested in Prophesies of Godlessness, is that this tenuous, conflicted state of crosscurrents is virtually a permanent constituent of American belief. In the early nineteenth century Thomas Jefferson believed all Americans would become Unitarians. Most twentieth century social scientists believed that secularization was an unstoppable force, that it was an Americanizing power, replacing immigrants’ traditions with much-needed pragmatism and materialism. Neither prediction came to fruition. Every generation seems to have given rise to new claims of “godlessness.” Yet the developments of the past half-century hint at a fundamental difference. There has been a demonstrable shift toward spiritual “no religion”—a view that is far from “godless”—that has altered the landscape of American religious life.

This history is cold comfort in at least one important way. The intolerance of outlier religious groups, along with heated claims heralding a looming decay into godlessness, is not harmless. In their most zealous and alarmist forms, these intolerances and predictions, and the fracases they provoke, obstruct democratic dialogue and hinder religious understanding. The conflicts and noise distort pressing political issues. They also obscure genuine and fundamental changes in the nature of religion in America. It seems that contemporary public religion is more often marked by extremism and, as Hout and Fischer rightly observe, politics and religion have become increasingly publicly “intertwined.”

Americans take and have historically taken astonishingly diverse (ir)religious paths, but they continue to measure their lives and times by what many say are religious values and standards. What is happening may well be another pivotal moment in history: we appear to be seeing the limits of a faith-based model for liberal pluralism. That is, though more Americans are reporting “no religion,” simultaneously there appears to be less tolerance of irreligion in American political life and in the public sphere.

While some see the rise of “no religiosity” as a calamity heralding impending godlessness, that need not be the case. On the contrary, could the nation be close to a revival of religion? If so, perhaps this is no contradiction at all. Combined with the slowdown in the growth of “nones,” the new spirituality of “no religionists” may be part of a revival, just as the major revivals of faith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the U.S. assumed remarkably new shapes, surprising most contemporary observers. Many of today’s Americans who profess faith, however, seem to have not yet awakened to the possibility that “no religionists” could in fact be believers of a new sort. Even if there is no revival imminent, I suggest that the resiliency of religion in American life has been a profound continuity in U.S. history and should not be underestimated. Today’s predictions of an impending collapse of American faith, like the myriad other historical predictions of godlessness, appear premature if not entirely mistaken.

To provide a final piece of context, consider that today there are more Americans professing “no religion” than there are Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans combined. Because the number of “no religionists” probably will continue to increase, so will their influence.

More and more Americans say they have no formal religious affiliation. National surveys, scholarly findings, and media coverage make that clear. Those identifying with “no religion”—often termed “nones,” “no religionists,” or the “unchurched”—jumped from 8.2 percent of the public in 1990 to just over 15 percent in 2008.

This trend causes some observers to cry out in alarm and others to rejoice. But the transition is far more complicated than a mere movement from faith to non-belief implies. For instance, increases in the number of “nones” were most dramatic in the 1990s and have slowed significantly since early in this decade. In addition, while the proportion of those professing “no religion” continues to rise, Americans seem to be praying more, and the vast majority continues to profess belief in God. The United States still remains at or near the top, by many measures, in the rankings of the most religious developed nations. In contrast, however, the single fastest growing “religious” group in America is the “no religionists.”

Yet these historic developments have not garnered enough scrutiny. The premonition of America becoming more godless is a kind of third rail for politics and churches everywhere. So, who are the individuals who with increasing regularity identify to pollsters and social scientists as having “no religion”? What do they seem to believe? And what are we to make of the implications of the rising number of “nones” in American society?

My purpose in this essay is to build on a spate of recent studies to reconsider the historical and contemporary rise of “no religionists” in America. In the following subsections I will address this in three ways: by laying out the contours of the recent developments, by posing preliminary answers to the above questions, and by exploring other perspectives related to the longer historical view.

My interpretations are greatly indebted to the earlier and current work of superb scholars. Several recent analyses shed significant light on the subject of this essay: Barry A. Kosmin and Ariel Keysar’s exceptional “American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population” [pdf], Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer’s outstanding “Unchurched Believers: Political Tension and Generational Succession,” and Tom Smith’s impressive “Religious Change around the World” [pdf]. All three studies present a great deal of data and their own (sometimes conflicting) explanations. Nevertheless—as the organizers of this discussion have rightly noted—despite a plethora of data and opinions, our knowledge of the actual contours and of the potential impact on public life of the “no religionists” remains nebulous and speculative. These three reports, however, are an excellent place to start our exploration of this topic, and I will draw on them throughout my analysis. If you are interested in more detail, see the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and the General Social Survey, as well as various local and national media polls and professional surveys.

I. Demographic Profiles

Who are the “no religionists”? They are a heterogeneous group, and more so than in the past. The category includes those identifying as atheists, agnostics, humanists, seculars, or simply as having no formal religion. This group also represents a vast array of beliefs and comprises members of every ethnic, regional, urban/rural, educational, socio-economic, and generational demographic category.

A few commonalities do emerge, however. “No religionists” tend to live in the West or in New England.  They are often younger Americans. The single largest bloc is comprised of young males; nearly one quarter of all men between 18 and 34 identify as having “no religion.” Indeed, “no religionists” are five years younger on average than the aggregate adult American public. As Kosmin and Keysar note, “Whereas Nones are presently 15% of the total adult U.S. population, 22% of Americans aged 18-29 years self-indentify as Nones.” One peculiar characteristic about the group is its significant gender imbalance. As of 2008, 60 percent of no religionists were male (while only 49 percent of the population as a whole was male).

In terms of race, the “no religion” collective is similar to the population at large, although it skews white. Self-identified “white” Americans tend to be more likely to claim “no religion” than other ethnicities, while those who identify as “African-American” tend to be less so. As of 1990 the racial breakdown of “nones” was as follows: 80 percent white, 10 percent African-American, 6 percent Asian, and 4 percent Hispanic.  In 2008 the “nones” group was 72 percent white, 8 percent African-American, 12 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian, and 5 percent other. Perhaps surprisingly, 33 percent of “nones” identify as of Irish ancestry (a section of the report by Kosmin and Keysar is devoted to this subject).

The most dramatic change in the racial breakdown of “no religionists” since 1990 has been highlighted widely. In 1990, self-defined “Hispanics” constituted 6 percent of U.S. adults, while only 4 percent of them identified as having “no religion.” By 2008 self-defined “Hispanics” had doubled their percentage of the U.S. population to 13 percent and tripled their proportion among no religionists. As Kosmin and Keysar observe, this eighteen year trend demonstrates that “Hispanics are not only the fastest growing racial group in America in general, but are the fastest-growing minority group among Nones.” Indeed, because so many Hispanic-Americans are Catholic, if there is a connection between the explosive growth of Hispanics in the population and increasing movement away from Catholicism, then the implications are significant for the future of the Catholic church in America. As of 2008, Catholics, in fact, continue to switch from their religious affiliation to “none” status in large numbers and 35 percent of “nones” are former Catholics, the most by far of any “switching” group. So, if Hispanic Catholics continue this trend their ranks may help to swell the numbers of “non religionists.” (For more detail on this, see Kosmin and Keysar.)

Contrary to one persistent assumption, higher education is not strongly correlated to a “no religion” affiliation. While there are still more university graduates who are “nones” than there are in the overall population, the gap has narrowed significantly. In 2008 31 percent of “no religionists” had college or advanced degrees, compared with 26 percent of the overall adult population with college or higher educational attainment levels.

Another finding contravenes the public caricature of “nones” as individuals who express “no religion” is that they are bold atheists who espouse such clearly defined views as “God is dead” or “there is no God.” In contrast, fully 45 percent of the group “strongly agree” that God exists and another 22 percent “somewhat agree” with that proposition. Overall, more than 50 percent of “nones” count themselves, or have been classified by social scientists, as either “deists” or “theists.” Thus, the relation of “no religionists” to certain recognizable forms of religious belief is more complex and perhaps closer than it might at first appear, but remains far from the traditional formula for organized religious belief and practice.

To sum up, these “no religionists” are an expanding demographic, particularly among the young. They will likely have a powerful influence on politics and society in the near future, given their estimated growth to as much as 25 percent of the American population within another two decades. Ultimately, other than modest regional, age, and gender imbalances, and a skewed racial distribution, this group is basically no different from America’s aggregate population in terms of socioeconomic standing, education, and a wide range of behaviors and opinions.

II. Origins and Trajectories

Where did the “no religionists” come from? How has “no religion” changed over time?

As an historian considering the latest reported increases in the numbers of no religionists, I must add that there is much excellent scholarship regarding the rise of alternative religions, secular thought, and predictions of godlessness in America. Here I dramatically abbreviate this work. Stipulating that we have little reliable long-term survey data and limited source bases regarding personal religious beliefs by which to benchmark the apparent novelty of recent developments, I nevertheless believe we can establish a few baselines to make sense of the developments over at least the past half-century.

Census and government-compiled information (particularly the off-year Census of Religious Bodies, or CRB) forms an excellent empirical resource for discerning longer trends in the religious affiliations of Americans. This data is imperfect and the best of it derives from the post-WWII period. Sources support the conjecture that earlier in the twentieth century more coherent and influential denominational and community-religious structures in public life combined with a sense of cultural conformity to religious norms to undercut the reporting of “no religion.” In turn, these cultural factors appear to have contributed to respondents assenting to be measured by denomination (e.g., Southern Baptist) or faith (e.g., Catholic). These forces seem to have persisted with overwhelming influence at least through the 1960s, when societal changes lifted some barriers to explicitly expressing a “no religion” preference, which coincided with new social scientific scholarship on questions of religious identity and the effects of cultural liberalization.

Historical data, while incomplete, suggest tantalizing similarities to current demographic patterns. Younger men, for example, have been and continue to be the most likely to report “no religion.” This was anecdotally true in nineteenth century American accounts of heretics, unbelievers, and freethinkers; it certainly has been confirmed since social scientists and pollsters began to ask the question of religious affiliation. One interesting, if unanswerable, question is whether many in the current generation of “nones” will “find” religion as they age.

The best historical example of earlier polling of “no religionists” arose in the process of testing an explicit religion question for the 1960 national census. A 1957 nationwide survey to test religion questions was undertaken by Robert Burgess, director of the Bureau of the Census, and demographer Conrad Taeuber. The poll found that 2.7 percent of respondents expressed “no religion” (75 percent of whom were men), while another 1 percent did not reply to the question.  After a substantial battle waged by religious as well as secular groups, no such question was placed on the national census and, as historian Kevin Schultz has shown, the 1960 census was the last time there was a serious debate over measuring religion on a national basis via the census. (For more, see Kevin Schultz’s “Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Last Serious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the United States Census” in the Journal of American History [sub. req.].)

Overall, a look at the longer view from 1957 to the present reveals the more modest—and more recent—character of the trend toward “none” status. From 1957 to 2008 the total increase was 13 percent of “no religionists” in the adult American population. The most significant historical upsurge, however, occurred since the mid-1980s (from 7 to 15 percent of the population). In total numbers this group made enormous recent gains: it comprised roughly 14.3 million Americans in 1990 and stood at over 34 million by 2008. (See both Hout and Fischer and Kosmin and Keysar for additional analysis of this data and the trends since the 1990s; see especially Smith on these transformations in a global perspective.) Although future increases are likely to continue at a slower pace, the underlying trend appears stable; yet it also depends on deep cultural transitions that are difficult to discern with analytical precision though they clearly have laid the intellectual groundwork for individuals to publicly reject formal religion in ways that previously were virtually unthinkable.

III. Categories and Labels

Now let us consider terminology. Shall we call this group the “unchurched,” the “nones,” or the “no religionists”? Or something else altogether? Each of the terms obscures at least as much as it illuminates.

To classify individuals who state “no religion” status as “unchurched” implies that they were or could become “churched” and that they are only temporarily without a “church” affiliation. Since the surveys reveal that most of this group considers their current status unchanging and many of those less than fifty years of age claim that they were raised by parents who were not religious (32 percent of “nones” identified as such at age 12), to call them “unchurched” is to adhere to an a priori binary understanding of faith as either “churched” or “un-churched.” Judging by the ambiguity of their stance toward religious belief and institutional affiliation, it would seem that those reporting in this way do not want to assent to a church-centric model of faith.

In addition, and without pushing the point too far, properly pluralist or ecumenical language would dictate that in the very least we consider “un-synogogued” and “un-mosqued” among other possible formulations of this nomenclature. We should be far more cognizant of the myriad attendant concerns related to which faith or faiths should be the terminological de facto alternative in American religious life. When possible I believe faith-neutral language should be selected. Given all of these problems, I find “unchurched” to be the most problematic of the terms.

“Nones” is shorthand for “no religionists,” so I shall treat them together. The central conceptual problem with the terms “nones” and “no religionists” is similar to that with “unchurched.” In this case, it is misleading because it homogenizes a diverse group and implies a concordance of opinion when, in fact, there is little such uniformity. It implies that all “no religionists” share a negative belief, that is, their “no religion.” Such an assumption or implication is patently false, as survey after survey has shown that most “nones” do believe in God or at least consider themselves “spiritual” without being “religious.” In some ways their religious differences divide them as much as unite them, given that the category covers a belief spectrum that ranges from deist to humanist, from agnostic to theist, and including atheists. Still, if we must lump this group under some rubric, “no religionists” works passably well.

Furthermore, something else is at work here beyond mere “non-belief.” Hout and Fischer hit the conceptual nail on the head when they observe that the “combination of affiliation and unbelief used to be quite common, but is far less so these days.” To this they add a temporal comparison: in the “early 1970s 20 percent of American adults had a religious preference but did not believe in life after death; in 2006 and 2008 this figure was 12 percent.” [See Hout and Fischer's "Unchurched Believers."] Developments have outstripped our categories. A new hybrid has emerged in which individuals declare no formal religious affiliation, but adhere to some (or mixed) spiritual beliefs.

This brief critique of our current labels reveals a more subtle flaw in our epistemology. Namely, many of our contemporary modes of analyzing religious engagement confound traditional understandings of the nexus of belief, practice, and identity. Religious change is a complex and variegated phenomenon for which simple explanations and descriptions such as “secularization” and “believing without belonging” are inadequate. In short, scholars and citizens need a clearer lens to examine and understand the beliefs that approximately 34 million Americans hold. How do we designate the group of people who are spiritual in certain and richly varied ways, but do not adhere to organized or other recognized formal (or even informal) religious faiths? The old categories and binaries that pit belief versus unbelief in a zero-sum game get in the way of making sense of these recent trends and what I see as the Jamesian pluralities of religious experience thriving in America today. I leave explicit theorizing for another time and welcome thoughts on better terms for and methods of interpreting the data.

We identified political tension and generational succession as the main sources of the trend away from religious affiliation. In the most recent data—collected in 2006 and 2008, and combined to improve statistical precision—28 percent of political liberals answered “no religion” when asked what their religion was, compared with 15 percent of political moderates, and 5 percent of political conservatives—a gap of 23 percentage points from left to right on the political spectrum. From these contrasts and other supporting tabulations we concluded that the growing identification between organized religion and a conservative social policy agenda was pushing liberals and moderates with weak attachments away from organized religion.

Generational change has two parts. People who were raised without religion from the 1960s onward are less likely than previous generations to acquire a religion in adulthood. For examples, the majority of the small group of people who were born in the 1930s and raised without religion stated a religious preference when they were interviewed as adults, while 24 percent remained without a religious preference through adulthood. In contrast, among people born in the 1960s and raised without religion, 58 percent preferred no religion as adults; among people born in the 1980s and raised without religion, 79 percent prefer no religion now.

The other part of generational change is a trend away from organized religion among people raised with religion. People who were raised with religion from the 1960s onward are also less likely than previous generations to stay with religion in adulthood. Looking to the same cohorts as before, only 4 percent of people born in the 1930s and raised with religion had no religious preference when they were interviewed as adults. In contrast, among people born in the 1960s and raised with religion, 11 percent preferred no religion as adults; among people born in the 1980s and raised with religion, 21 percent prefer no religion now.

These changes have more to do with organized religion in particular than with religion more generally. While affiliation and identification with organized religion has waned, religious belief has not. American adults are as likely to believe in god and life after death now as they were twenty years ago. In 2008 62 percent of American adults entertained no doubts about the existence of god, compared with 64 percent in 1988; 3 percent do not believe in god in any way, compared with 2 percent in 1988. In both 1988 and 2008 88 percent of American believed in life after death.

We call the people who believe in god or an afterlife but do not have a religion “unchurched believers.”  In 2008 11 percent of American adults were unchurched believers, compared to 4 percent twenty years earlier. There is a complementary category of “churched unbelievers”: people who state a religious preference but do not believe in god or life after death. Very few of those who prefer a religion do not believe in god: 3 or 4 percent in any given year. Many of them used to prefer a religion but not believe in life after death. That combination of affiliation and unbelief used to be quite common, but is far less so these days. In the early 1970s 20 percent of American adults had a religious preference but did not believe in life after death; in 2006 and 2008 this figure was 12 percent.

Liberal and younger Americans distanced themselves from organized religion over the last twenty years without giving up their traditional beliefs in god, an afterlife, and other spiritual matters.