BELIEF
A Shocking Number of Americans Under 30 Have No
Religion — This Country Is Going to Change
Americans are abandoning religion in droves.
By Amelia Thomson-Deveaux / The American Prospect
January 19, 2015
The following article first appeared in the American
Prospect.
In the two years leading up to his death, the legal
and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin was completing a slim volume with a
weighty title. Religion without God, which began as a series of lectures in
2011, set a lofty goal: to propose a “religious attitude” in the absence of
belief. Dworkin’s objective was not just theological. The book, he hoped, would
help lower the temperature in the past decade’s battle between a group of
scientists and philosophers dubbed the New Atheists and an array of critics who
have accused them of everything from Islamophobia to fundamentalism to heresy.
Although the New Atheists are part of a long and
distinguished tradition, including (but not limited to) philosophers Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bertrand Russell, they are notable because
they have made atheism a pop success in the U.S. Since the 2004 publication of
Sam Harris’s post–September 11 polemic, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and
the Future of Reason, the kingpins of the movement—Richard Dawkins, the late
Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and A.C. Grayling, to name a few—have
launched diatribes against God and belief. To them, religion is at best
superfluous, at worst (in Hitchens’s words) “allied to racism and tribalism and
bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of
women and coercive toward children.” This zealous attitude has earned the New
Atheists high-profile critics, including Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief
rabbi of Great Britain, who recently wrote in a column for The Spectator:
Where is there the remotest sense that [the New
Atheists] have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with
science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the
meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an
objective moral order … and the ability or inability of society to survive
without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain
the social bond?
For a religious leader like Sacks, who has staked
his career on interfaith cooperation, the New Atheists’ antagonism is
obnoxious. But it turns out all the public sparring may have been missing the
point. Thanks to an even more seismic shift, nonbelievers in the U.S. are
already leaving the New Atheists behind.
Americans are abandoning organized religion in
droves. Data from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that while only
7 percent of Americans were raised outside a religious tradition, nearly 19
percent are religiously unaffiliated today. According to the General Social
Survey, the number of Americans who say they have “no religion” has more than
doubled since 1990.
Although they are one of the fastest-growing groups
today, the unaffiliated are just one wave on a sea of religious change.
Minorities are playing a greater role in shaping Christian denominations
traditionally dominated by whites. The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging
followers—by some estimates, 12 percent of Americans today are former
Catholics—but recent immigrants from Latin America have buoyed its membership,
making at least some changes in leadership and emphasis inevitable. Latino
Americans are also converting to evangelical Christianity, which is sure to
jostle the old alliances of the Christian conservative movement. The Christian
right has battened down the hatches for a long tussle with the forces of
secularization. But Christian pollsters warn that evangelical churches are
losing followers, too, in part because Christianity is gaining a reputation for
touting shallow, anti-science, and sexually repressive teachings.
One-third of Americans under age 30, meanwhile, say
they have no religion. This group, though still majority-white, is
substantially more diverse than the older unaffiliated. Many of its members are
choosing other nonbelievers as life partners, raising new questions about
non-religious families and child rearing. Amid this churn, demographers and
sociologists have no reason to believe that Americans’ flight from organized
religion will ebb anytime soon.
The New Atheists are eager to claim the
transformation. In a recent video debate, Daniel Dennett, a New Atheist
patriarch complete with a venerable-looking white beard, declared, “We gave
[the unaffiliated] permission to declare their lack of interest in religion …
and we have significant numbers of converts on our tally sheets. We get
e-mailed from them all the time.” Yet atheists—especially those bold enough to
e-mail Dennett—are only a vocal minority. According to the Pew Forum on
Religion & Public Life, more than two-thirds of the unaffiliated believe in
God; nearly four in ten say they are “spiritual” but not “religious”; more than
one-fifth say they pray every day.
Pollsters and demographers strain to arrange the
swelling numbers of nonbelievers into categories that make sense. But their
rapid growth—and our lack of a language to identify their convictions—makes
every hypothesis feel obsolete before it’s published. After decades of surveys
that use church attendance as the primary measure of religiosity, what can we
say about Americans who rarely set foot in a sanctuary but nevertheless believe
in God? Or who disavow God but call themselves spiritual or say they’ve had a
religious or mystical experience? Pew and others still unsatisfyingly refer to
the unaffiliated as the “nones.” They’re hard to organize (as liberal political
operatives have discovered, to their chagrin) and even harder to
convert—whether those evangelizing are atheists or believers. In fact, the
unaffiliated are blurring the line between religion and atheism.
Online, the intrepid seeker can find secular wedding
vows and baptism alternatives, as well as links to support groups and defenders
of nonbelievers’ rights like the Secular Coalition for America. There is also
an increasing amount of information about how to raise children in a
nonreligious household, how to say a godless grace, and how to grieve without
God or an afterlife. None of this pretends to be definitive. Rather, it’s a
collective effort to grapple with a widely shared set of questions and
anxieties. Among the unaffiliated, the will to create non-religious community
is humming. But rather than being handed down from on high, it’s being
crowdsourced.
Atheist churches are a topic of perennial media
interest—although the media appears more obsessed than anyone else with hyping
this phenomenon. Comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, the creators of the
Sunday Assembly, a London-based weekly gathering for nonbelievers of all stripes,
landed in the news after announcing that they were taking their project global.
Goofy marketing was almost certainly part of the appeal: In one YouTube video
promoting the assembly, Jones promises, smiling manically, that the gathering
will be “livelier than an eel in your underpants.” Pop philosopher Alain de
Botton, the author of Religion for Atheists, takes credit for pioneering the
concept of the “atheist church.” But de Botton’s effort to spell out all the
rules feels out of step with the moment, and his grand plan to raid religious
traditions for source material is a mixed bag. Ultimately, the book reads more
like an ode to his favorite things—museums, Madonnas, Zen Buddhist
retreats—than a replacement for the structures that for centuries have helped
people express gratitude, cope with loss, and search for meaning and purpose.
Nonbelievers’ efforts to create a moral, happy life
in the face of prejudice has created, for some, a kind of angry optimism. PZ
(Paul Zachary) Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of
Minnesota, Morris, and one of the proprietors of the blog Pharyngula—where you
can read his take on science, current events, and cephalopods—is one of the
latest to revel in the “joys of reality” and the folly of faith. His new book,
The Happy Atheist, is a gleeful, self-righteous celebration of life without
belief. Much of Myers’s happiness, at least according to the book, is derived
from mocking the spectacle of religious hypocrisy. But Myers seems distressed
by the outsider’s perception that atheists subsist on glib patter. “What we
atheists are saying,” he writes, “is that we need to turn away from the
powerless rationalizations of the holy books, no matter how poetic they might
be, and recognize that their power and their appeal flows from their humanity,
not from their religiosity.” Far from missing the point, he proposes, atheists
are even more deeply embedded in the sorrows and joys of human experience
because they sidestep the “magical thinking” of religious belief.
Myers won’t win brownie points from those who want
the New Atheists to temper their tone. Near the end, he calls believers
“lazy-minded”—for him, that’s charitable. In his last essay, he seems almost
ready to call a truce: quoting from The Epic of Gilgamesh, he declares that
grief is “the touchstone, the common element that atheists and theists share.”
But he can’t bring himself to admit that the concept of God might be anything
but comical.
Ronald Dworkin is more willing to compromise.
Religion without God is a genuinely thoughtful attempt to expand the categories
of both “atheist” and “religious.” Far from sneering at the supernatural,
Dworkin proposes that religion is too important to be discarded by
nonbelievers. Many atheists, Dworkin writes, “have convictions and experiences
similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious.
They say that though they do not believe in a ‘personal’ god, they nevertheless
believe in a ‘force’ in the universe ‘greater than we are.’ They feel an inescapable
responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of
others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes
inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted.” This
faith—unconnected to God but no less profound because of it—provides the
opportunity for an unrealized communion between believers and nonbelievers.
The premise for Religion without God may be its most
valuable contribution. Elsewhere, Dworkin’s personal and aesthetic obsessions
color the book in a way that is both endearing and frustrating. He explores
physicists’ quasi-religious belief in the beauty of the universe for more than
50 pages. But for all of his reflections on the harmony of the heavens, Dworkin
offers no sense of how mortals can achieve accord with one another.
The book also skirts the ache for ritual and
community among the unaffiliated. Dworkin makes a point of dismissing prayer
and worship as mere “godly convictions.” Yet on a basic level, rituals are
habits that remind people, religious or not, who they are and what they hold
important. Prayer and meditation can help cultivate self-discipline or ease
stress. Rituals are social, not just individual; community members can
participate in grief and help draw the mourner toward a sense of acceptance.
At the end of Religion without God, Dworkin briefly
reflects on death. Religious atheists, he argues, should think of lives well
lived as works of art—accomplishments that constitute an “achievement in just
having been made, whether or not they continue to be admired or even survive.”
The honesty of this section is touching, as is its stark brevity; in his last
paragraph, Dworkin confesses that he knows “that may not be good enough for
you: it may not even soften a bit the fear we face.” But it opens the door to a
faith that does not rely on miracles.
Despite their potential for political influence,
nonbelievers have yet to breach the deep levels of antipathy toward the notion
of nonreligious elected officials. Nearly half of Americans say that the
growing numbers of people who are not religious is a bad thing, while only 11
percent say it is a good thing. Fully two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable
with the idea of an atheist in the White House. In July, a vigorous debate over
whether atheists and humanists should join the Army Chaplain Corps illustrated
the dangers of voicing sympathy with the nonreligious. Republican congressmen,
declaring that such chaplains would “make a mockery” of the institution, darkly
hypothesized that atheist chaplains would tell grieving families that their
sons were “worm food.” Hostility toward nonbelief is still recommended for
lawmakers who want to keep their jobs; since 9/11 it’s become hard to imagine a
speech that doesn’t end with “God bless America.” Nor does it help that the
unaffiliated are one of the most politically disengaged groups in the country.
Dworkin turns his legal eye to this uncomfortable
reality. Historically, he says, courts have assumed that a “religion” must have
a God, or at least something that resembles a deity. But what privileges should
theists receive in a country with a rapidly growing number of religiously
unaffiliated citizens? For Dworkin, the solution is simple: Replace the right
to religious freedom with the right to something he calls “ethical
independence.” This, according to Dworkin, “limits the reasons government may
offer for any constraint on a citizen’s freedom,” without providing a special
right that fixes on a particular subject (in this case, religion). To receive a
religious exemption, in other words, belief in God would be beside the point.
Adjusting the scope of freedom of religion is a
controversial move for any legal scholar to make, and Dworkin’s argument has
its critics. In an article for the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Rafael
Domingo dismisses Dworkin’s view as reductive, unable to encompass “a
conception of religion as a fact and a value.” In a practical sense, Dworkin’s
approach is also a pipe dream. For his proposition to succeed, religious
institutions and individuals would have to relinquish their significant legal
clout and, in so doing, admit that the United States is no longer a nation
“under God.” But the spirit of the argument points toward a laying-down of arms
in the culture wars that Dworkin cautiously hoped might soon be on the horizon.
Even if the right of religious exercise isn’t reframed, transformations in the
country’s religious landscape may convince believers to accept that faith in
God does not give them the moral high ground, at least in the public square.
The next few years will tell whether his optimism was justified.
Atheists may come to see the benefits of compromise
as well. Back in 2013, Juan Mendez, an atheist lawmaker in the Arizona House of
Representatives, standing up to give the daily invocation, asked his colleagues
to look around and take a moment to acknowledge their shared humanity. Mendez’s
action was powerful (one might even say Dworkinian) because it undermined the
notion that the statehouse is a place for Christian prayer but did not insist
that ethical reflection be removed.
Dworkin is right: A broader conception of religion
and values will not result in chaos. This is something that countless
religiously unaffiliated Americans have already discovered. Attitudes toward
atheists and nonbelievers in public office, while still frosty, are thawing
just a little. We have now elected multiple secular lawmakers to Congress,
signaling that Americans can accept political campaigns in which the
candidates’ religion does not play a central role. Meanwhile, the New Atheists’
attitudes are softening, too: Sam Harris, a linchpin of the movement, is
writing a defense of spirituality.
Yet a tension remains between the necessary
loneliness of an individual’s hunt for the secrets of the universe and the
desire for companions along the way. Clearly we’re not all looking for the same
answers. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, an aging preacher contemplates
his relationship with his friend’s estranged son, writing:
Every single one of us is a little civilization
built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own
variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable. … We take
fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us
have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge,
more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just
allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast
spaces between us.
The search for kinship among the unaffiliated will
be an exercise in communication, because no assumptions can be made about
shared values or priorities, at least not at first. But without the shared
language of belief or an ethical script handed down through religious
tradition, the unaffiliated can engage—either together or alone—in exciting
acts of reinvention. We’re hurtling toward a new moment in the American
religious experience—one in which, for many, belief and nonbelief will exist
side by side.
