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The rise of religion, the decline of belief

god-is-backLong-time readers of my content know that about 10 years back I used to make fun of a book by two writers for The Economist, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World. It was a sexy thesis, but really it was meant to appeal to paranoid liberals who were scared, as well as reassure religious conservatives worried about “a secular age.” The basic idea was that religious views and values were ascendant again, not a totally crazy thesis on the face of it. The problem is that the data in some regions were already suggesting major changes in the direction of secularism, in particular in the United States. This change took most people by surprise unless they were looking closely. Samuel Huntington’s last book, Who Are We?, was written unfortunately in the late 1990s just before the release of multiple academic surveys which chronicled the rapid de-Christianization of vast swaths of the American populace. In it Huntington took for granted the thesis that America would become more, not less, Christian, as more Asian Americans converted to Christianity, and the Hispanic Catholic fraction increased (contrary to visible evangelical Asian-American Christians, this is the least religious of America’s ethnic groups, and Hispanics are secularizing very fast).

Even though the data are pretty clear, and were for a long time, people tend not to update. And timing is always an issue. For example, the last major wave of secularization in the USA happened in the late 1960s, before which Time Magazine published Religion: Revival’s Crest in 1963. In the early years of my blog I kept having to remind people of facts when they relied on impressions. In 2009 I corrected The New York Times’ John Tierny, who stated that “As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the European trend as a harbinger of a general move toward secularism as societies become richer and more educated. But you don’t see that trend in the United States, where church attendance is still robust….” I happen to know his email address and I sent him my post. He wasn’t convinced that I was right even then. I bet now he would admit that the data were robust.

PF_15.05.05_RLS2_1_310pxI suspect that a new survey from Pew (very large sample sizes) is going to change resistance even from holdouts who don’t want to read the writing on the wall, America’s Changing Religious Landscape. The major “shock result”, which has been prefigured elsewhere, is that huge numbers of younger Americans are not religiously affiliated, and larger fractions are now admitting to being atheists and agnostics. The change over the generations has been enormous, going from a nation that’s over 85 percent Christian, to 70 percent Christian, mostly driven by defection. Before the 1990s religious adherence was a matter of social conformity. Far less today when 25 percent of the population does not have an affiliation, and even less so in regions where religious adherence may even be a subculture, rather than a norm. The fraction of the unaffiliated who are atheists and agnostics is also increasing, suggesting that the taboos around these terms are declining (I doubt I’d get as many shocked expressions saying I’m an atheist today in Red America as I did in the early 1990s).

agcover165.jpgWhat does this portend for the future? Over 1/3 of those born in the 1980s and 1990s have no religion. These are people who will be retiring in the 2040s and 2050s, the grandparents of that era. The trends, which are not guaranteed, mind you, indicate then that future generations may be even more secular, so that the electorate of that period may be extremely polarized in terms of religious culture (as the fractions of evangelicals is holding its own better than other Protestants and Catholics). This result was already evident in Robert D. Putnam’s American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which received far less attention than Bowling Alone. But it was an important finding. Basically, the association of religion and right-wing politics has been having a secularizing effect on non-right wing Americans, and making ostensibly right-wing individuals more religiously identified. In other words, socially binding cross-cutting institutions are unraveling.

I believe this is more important than the coming “white” minority of 2050. The reasons are manifold. In the early 2000s some Democratic strategists saw an emerging majority from the coalition of minorities. On the other side many on the Right feared the rising tides of color, implicitly or explicitly. Nearing the end of the Obama era we now see how this story did not turn out to be so neat, with one of the proponents of demography-as-Democratic-density now recanting. Obviously we need to be cautious about over-reaction. The white Protestant conservative demographic core of the modern Republican party, and American conservatism, is going to decline somewhat over the generations. But the basic thesis that all non-white populations will vote Democratic indefinitely for generations seems unfounded. And definitions matter. Many Americans of mixed backgrounds may be assumed by Left-liberals to take the black tack of hypodescent, but they may actually simply exhibit more flexible self-identities which do not disassociate them so much from the mainstream (people who are visibly white, but have non-white ancestry, do not react well to racism against non-whites for obvious reasons, but neither are they anti-white, and often identify as white).

In an America where racial boundaries are fuzzier and more malleable, the strictness enforced by social-cultural categories in theory may actually be appealing and bracing. This goes to the heart of genetic vs. cultural distance in variation. Genetic variation rapidly diminishes due to the constraints and conditions of biological inheritance. Cultural inheritance is theoretically more powerful and airtight. As the ethno-biological categories melt on the edges, religious-cultural ones may emerge to more fully demarcate various tribal-political coalitions. And this is part of the reason why religion may increase in salience, despite the rapid expansion of a non-religious population. Confessional politics may come to the United States in an explicit fashion with the decline of implicit normative convention.

Postscript:

51KXqRwj+gL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Some of you may wonder as the Americo-centric focus of this post, especially light of another recent Pew survey which highlights religion’s international robustness, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 (as well as books I’ve blogged such as The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?). First, international projections are dicier than national ones. More variables are on the move. You can’t predict easily the rapid secularization you saw in Quebec in the 1960s, in the United States in the past 15 years, or, the glimmers of change on the horizon in the Arab world. Second, what happens in the developed world matters more. The huge numbers of African Christians will result in change. But, Catholicism will still be based out of Rome, and intellectual currents out of Western Christianity will likely shape Sub-Saharan African Christianity more than the reverse. Philip Jenkins in his work celebrating African Christianity nonetheless observes that over time indigenous religious traditions begin to align themselves with world-normative practices, often to standards established in Western societies.

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