As reported in yesterday’s New York Times, a South Carolina chapter of Habitat for Humanity prohibited a group of Secular Humanist volunteers from wearing their “Non-Prophet Organization” T-shirts; a Charleston-area teacher “came out” as a nonbeliever after years of church dinners and demurrals; and Humanist Loretta Haskell struggled over her role as a church musician. While such stories remain commonplace, a related story with a substantial bearing on these anecdotes is one of America’s best-kept secrets.
A recent Newsweek cover—in a bid to (finally) match the celebrated 1966 “Is God Dead?” cover of Time—read, in the shape of a cross: “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Editor Jon Meacham’s story highlights Newsweek’s latest poll results showing that 10% fewer Americans identify as Christian today than twenty years ago. But more importantly, and mentioned only in passing, is the growth among atheists and secularists of all stripes.
According to the latest American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of more than 54,000 adults, between 2001 and 2008 the number willing to identify themselves as atheist and agnostic has gone from under 2 million to 3.6 million. Small numbers compared to the whole, of course, but most notably it’s a rise of 85% of those willing to describe themselves as living without God during the years of our most overtly religious presidency!
Even more newsworthy, when the widely-scorned labels “atheist” and “agnostic” are replaced with specifics about beliefs (“There is no such thing” as God, “There is no way to know,” or “I’m not sure,” and added to those who refused to answer) it turns out that over eighteen percent of Americans do not profess belief in a God or a higher power.
According to ARIS, then, there could be as many as 40 million adult nonbelievers in the United States!
Personal God Going the Way of the Dodo?
Consider: If these numbers are correct, nonbelievers amount to more than the highest estimates of African Americans or gays. Secularists are one of America’s largest minorities. It is no longer possible to proclaim, as the Gallup Poll announced fifty years ago: “Nearly all Americans believe in God.” That is today’s most significant change.
So what explains the impressive increase among those willing to identify as atheist or agnostic? For those who think that books and ideas simply don’t matter, it is dramatic tribute to the success of the “new atheist” writers—including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. To paraphrase the title of Dennett’s book, their goal has been to “break the spell” of religion—and they have evidently helped more Americans “achieve” that goal.
If a new confidence is in the offing it is also visible in the American Humanist Association’s scandalous Christmastime bus ads in Washington DC (“Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”). No less striking is the “Out” campaign (“Come Out,” “Reach Out,” “Speak Out,” “Keep Out,” “Stand Out,”) especially among students and young people.
One of the few writers who has paid attention to these phenomena, Konstantin Petrenko, writing for Religion Dispatches, does so in order to dismiss them [see “Godless America? Say Hello to the ‘Apatheists’,” March 19, 2009]. He stresses the discrepancy between those embracing the “atheist” or “agnostic” label and those who describe themselves as not believing in God. “It appears that most of the unaffiliated individuals are not atheistic or anti-religious in any activist sense, but are rather apathetic toward organized religion and reluctant to join any particular denomination or sect.”
True enough, but the same can be said of most religious believers. This is no reason to downplay the fact that so many have clearly fallen away from religion—that is, they live their lives without any sort of God. Nor can we ignore ARIS’s statement that the six percent of Americans who refuse to answer the question about their beliefs “tend to somewhat resemble ‘Nones’ in their social profile and beliefs.” Which means, according to ARIS’s most striking conclusion: “The U.S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one in five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.”
Furthermore, among those who do, over 12% of the total sample describe their belief in ways that ARIS concludes are “deistic (a higher power but no personal God).” One in eight American believers are as religious as... Thomas Paine. Those who continue to believe in a traditional Jewish, Christian, or Muslim personal god have dropped to under seventy percent of the American population. Despite all efforts to ignore or minimize this, it is big news.
Moments of Prayer into Moments of Silence
And the discrepancy between those willing to be public and open about their religious disbelief and those who are not is also big news. Among nonbelievers, judging from my discussions with hundreds of them over the past several months, many are not “new atheists” (militantly doing battle with religion) but are, in Peter Steinfels’ terminology, “new new atheists.” These people are not primarily concerned with arguing against the belief in God, but are trying to find ways of coexisting in a society in which both nonbelievers and believers can expect to be around for a long time to come. They shy away from labels as they seek their own bearings and their own comfort zone in today’s America.
Secularists welcomed President Obama’s shout-out to nonbelievers during his inaugural address, but are painfully aware that when launching his campaign he criticized them for trying to keep religion out of the public square, but not the religious right for its attempts to erase the line between church and state.
They worry, along with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, that Obama’s renewal of the Bush Faith-Based Initiative in the new Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships has not ruled out proselytizing and discriminatory hiring for religious social service programs that are granted Federal dollars. And they wince when recalling that he subjected himself to the informal religious test of being drilled like a catechism pupil by Rick Warren on his own particular way of believing in Jesus Christ (the same Rick Warren who announced that he would never vote for an atheist for president).
Above all, rather than combating religious belief at every turn, many nonbelievers would cheer if the President initiated a genuinely multicultural approach to both believers and secularists in today’s America. This might entail, as was not done at the Democratic National Convention last August, inviting secularists as well as believers to platforms that normally exclude the irreligious (i.e. the “values and unity” event preceding the Convention that was exclusively for religious believers). It might entail as much political attention being paid to nonbelievers as believers at public events—transforming moments of prayer into moments of silence. In other words, it would mean abandoning the implicit assumption of so much of American public and private life that religious values, norms and practices apply to everyone—and show respect to American’s enormous nonreligious minority.
Tags: agnostic, aris, atheism, christopher hitchens, daniel dennett, habitat for humanity, new atheists, richard dawkins, secular humanists, secularists
As you note,"Editor Jon Meacham’s story highlights Newsweek’s latest poll results showing that 10% fewer Americans identify as Christian today than twenty years ago."
But, Meacham's citation distorts the ARIS poll data, which shows that the bulk of that 10 percent shift occurred from 1990 to 2000. Only .7 percent of the decline occurred from 2001 to 2008.
Meanwhile, the ARIS poll researchers appear unaware they have been polling the Christianity of the 1940's or 1950's - the changes in Christianity since then have been nothing less than profound.
The most significant changes - the Charismatic Movement that swept across the Mainline Protestant denominations in the 1960's onward, the Third Wave which erupted out in the 1980's, and since 2000 the New Apostolic Reformation, teach doctrines that may undermine the validity of the current ARIS poll methodology.
Specifically, one of the doctrines often taught those movements is the notion that institutional religion itself is suspect. One way this is expressed is through the idea of the "religious spirit," a spirit said to inhabit and corrupt the authenticity of established religion.
As described by the authors of the 2008 ARIS report, "The 2001 and 2008 [ARIS] surveys are replicas of the 1990 survey, and are led by the same academic research team using an identical methodology of random-digit-dialed telephone interviews (RDD) and the same unprompted, open-ended key question “What is your religion, if any?”
However, a growing segment of Christians are being taught that being "religious" is a bad thing. The idea has been promoted by none other than the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals Ted Haggard via the concept of the "religious spirit."
Haggard has described battling a "religious spirit" called "control." Haggard's use of the concept tracks that of C. Peter Wagner, whose work at the World Prayer Center Ted Haggard supported.
Haggard, Wagner and other leaders of Third Wave and New Apostolic Christianity hold that the "religious spirit" is a manifestation of a demon spirit which subverts Christianity, and the religious impulse, with legality, empty ritual, and fear of spontaneous spiritual manifestations.
So, Christians under the influence of such doctrines who were asked by the ARIS researchers "what is your religion, if any?" may well have answered "none" because it's inherent to their belief system, which seems not to even be on the ARIS researcher's radar screens, that 'religion' is a dirty word.
“'deistic (a higher power but no personal God)'. One in eight American believers are as religious as... Thomas Paine."
Modern Deism actually is a movement that seems to be gaining traction, but is also a dogma-free belief system. We, and I do consider myself a Deist, have a wide variety of beliefs, from those who believe in a personal Deity and prayer, and those like myself who do not. Some Deists believe in an afterlife, some do not. (Though I personally do not know any Deist who believes in the devil!)
The unifying belief of Deists is that God is the God of Nature, and all that God reveals to us is revealed in Nature. We do not believe in prophets, holy books nor divine revelation. The corollary to this belief is that the highest gift of the Creator is Reason. We embrace science, but see no disconnect between science and a "first cause".
In a sense, we are a bit like the Humanists, since we do not have a set of commandments sent from on high to regulate our behavior. We see morality and ethics from a common sense point of view, and that which has been a cornerstone of most religions: "Do unto others..." I would also say that Deism is more of a philosophy than a religion, much like Buddhism, but with even less dogma. There is considerable overlap between Deism and Unitarianism, and probably not coincidental that many early American Deists were Unitarians.
The idea that Deism disbelieves in a "personal" God, however, is not exactly accurate, and comes from an early split between the English (personal God) and French (no personal God) views of Deism during the Enlightenment. The view of Deism as only encompassing the "French" school is leaving out a fair number of Deists who still embrace the "English" school.
I am not a religious scholar, but the information is available online for anyone who would like to learn more about Deism. The most common comments from newcomers to Deism are something like, "Oh! I didn't realize that there was a name for my beliefs!" or, "I've been a Deist all my life and didn't know it!"
I truly don’t get the uproar over the fact that the numbers of “believing” Americans is dwindling. Is this any surprise? We live in an age of science where scientific facts are answering the questions that the “God” answer seems to always leave blank. We are also in an age where SELF expression is becoming more important than conforming to social norms.
Religions over the centuries have been used for a number of reasons; the biggest of these being control, but for recent past generations (those from the 50’s and 60’s) religion gave a person a definition of who they were. Now we are defining that for ourselves, thanks.
Why does it matter so much that the believing number is going down? That’s been the trend around the world for awhile now. America is just catching up.
I can remember just in the 90’s alone that everyone thought that their Jesus was better than everyone else’s Jesus and even recently I have engaged in conversations with those who feel that their gospel is best suited for my spiritual needs. The simple fact of the matter is that through history, it seems, religion has done more harm than good. Society has gained its greatest advances from those who have differed in popular opinion rather than from those who have agreed. Let the “unbelieving” come out of their closets. Perhaps things in the world just might go a little better.
Some years ago I taught at a liberal theological school. Like most students at every other type of seminary, most of our students were quite comfortable with their beliefs. Comfortable, that is, and unreflective. Then we hired, to teach philosophy of religion, a Buddhist--who took his non-theistic religion very seriously, and could say why in quite convincing ways. And then things changed. Students began to think much more responsibly about why they were theists, what they meant by theism, why they were Christians and what they meant by Christianity.
As a Christian theologian, I am delighted by the (re-)emergence of public non-theistic voices, for several reasons. First, there are non-theists and they should speak out and be appreciated when what they say is thoughtful. Of course, some of their views are not very well informed. (I won't expand on this point here.) But, as the current "Is Jesus God" blog reminds us, not a small amount of what theists, including Christian theists, have to say is baseless drivel, too. Non-theists exist. They should speak and they should be heard.
Second, as indicated above, the debate prompted by the non-theists should call into question unreflective theism. We have no right to religious beliefs if we cannot give some reason for them. By "reason" I don't mean "explanation"--saying how and why we have come to think as we do. By reason I mean providing some kind of sharable evidence that others who disagree with us can nevertheless respect and understand. Unreflective beliefs are dangerous, but unreflective religious beliefs--because of the unique power of religion--are the most dangerous of all types of belief.
Third, the challenge to belief in God might move us to a more substantive discussion--what does belief mean, and what kind of God? And these issues might push us to consider, not abstractions, but concrete examples, i.e., real religions, not arguments divorced from the way believers actually live their lives, and the specific conceptual frameworks that support and guide their ways of life.
"I believe in God" says nothing at all until you say what kind of God you believe in, how it shapes your life, and what reasons you have for believing in this God.
It's great to see that Deism is growing! I think it will eventually replace the "revealed" religions and win over many Atheists and Agnostics. Antony Flew is a great example of a strong Atheist evolving into a Deist. I'm the director of the World Union of Deists and I receive emails and correspondence from both sides of the religious spectrum saying how happy they are to learn that there is such a thing as Deism and that they're not alone in their beliefs.
I can't understand why so few people are aware of Deism, especially in the US where many of America's key founders were Deists. Thankfully, it seems that is starting to change.
Progress! Bob Johnson
http://www.deism.com
Thank you so much for this article. It really helps in my cases on religious liberty under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
How wonderful to know that the religion of non-belief is so active in America. I know that the religion started by the prophet Marx has been established here in America since 1913 and that I have been doing all I can to refuse to live by Marx commandments and it has been very hard. So thank you so much for you assistance in my case.
Interesting article. 40 million is a very high estimate, but possible. The percentage of American adults that identify as agnostic or atheist on surveys is more like 5% (which would be far less than 40 million), but social desirability biases against those labels may keep people from choosing them. The ARIS survey chose to ask less directly, and it seems to have bumped up the percentage. Other surveys might want to try something similar.
The drop in the percent of Americans identifying as Christian has to do with two things. Liberal and mainline Protestants disaffiliating from religion over the last few decades (particularly in the 1990s) and the growth of non-Christian faiths. But it's not an alarming trend to me. I'm happy to see religious diversity in the U.S., and I'm happy to see that nonreligious and weakly religious Americans are feeling more comfortable saying they have no religion.
The rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s has somewhat polarized politics along religious lines. The Republican Party saw its base become conservative Christians, while the Democratic Party became more secular over the same time.
And just a bit of praise for nonbelievers - surveys consistently show that nonbelievers are the most progressive people in America when it comes to racial attitudes, political attitudes, civil liberties, and more.
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