Last fall Pew updated its religion survey. It showed that Christianity had declined even further over the 2010s. And, it illustrated that that decline was universal over all demographics, but particularly noticeable among the young.
This is pretty interesting, though no longer shocking. It illustrates the reality that the future of religion is hard to predict. In 1994 Barry Kosmin in One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society reported findings from an early 1990s survey that the United States was a very religious nation amongst other developed nations, and that the 1960s decline in church attendance had trailed off. In fact, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the newsweeklies would publish credulous stories about the revival of American religion. Samuel P. Huntington’s last book, written in the early 2000s, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, assumes the general findings of Kosmin’s earlier work, and extrapolates it forward, arguing that America’s foundational Protestant religion would remain a unifying force.
Huntington was wrong. In the early 2000s, Kosmin’s group began seeing evidence of the second wave of secularization. The Robert D. Putnam book, American Grace, written at the end of the 2000s, offers up a reason for this dynamic. In short, Putnam and his coauthor argue that the association of religion with conservative politics turned off many liberals from religion as an institution. Obviously this cannot be the total answer, as Republicans have also become more secular of late. But I think it gets to some of the issues that religion has as a “brand” in the United States. Religion is not about religion as such, but a whole lifestyle.
Pew’s data shows that the process continued after 2010. Whereas when I was a child ~10% or so of the American population had “No Religion,” today that figure is closer to ~25%. Pew reports that there are modest increases for the proportion in the 2010s.
What would the New Atheists from the period between 2005-2010 think about all this? Some of them are still around. Do they see a world lit by rationality? I don’t think the world is rational at all. We’ve seen a collapse of Christianity, but not the rise of scientific materialism.
The religious instincts are still there. By this, I mean basic religious instincts, not the details of religious phenomenon.
In the 1990s many of us thought that the internet would open up a whole new world of information, a world of enlightenment and communication. You could talk to the whole world!
Actually, it turns out that 33.3% of the internet is furious masturbation, 33.3% forwarding conspiracy theories, and 33.3% responding to and reading emails. Similarly, the New Atheists suggest that we just imagine there is no god, a world without Jesus. We are not in that world, but far closer than we might have expected in 2006.
I will finish with a comment from a reader:
One point I want to make is that Woke Religion has zero chance to sustain any kind of cohesive society. It champions a lack of emotional regulation and a regression to raw tribal dynamics in an extremely diverse and multi-ethnic environment. As soon as it triumphs (which appears to be almost here), it will tear itself to pieces. After the purges…
This gets at something real. The 2020s will be “interesting.”
When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.
This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts’ book “The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton” (1937) in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in “The Oracle of the Dog” (1923): “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.” Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: “‘It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.’ The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: ‘And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'” Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts. Nigel Rees is credited with identifying this as the source of the misattribution, in a 1997 issue of First Things
As Umberto Eco wrote:
“G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
“The “death of God”, or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church …”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3621313/God-isnt-big-enough-for-some-people.html
Razib, what’s your take on secularization in the Muslim world? Any good research out there on what those trends look like?
Nature abhors a vaccuum
“true Atheism” will never take off.
A true Atheist needs to be like a professional poker player, learning how to deal with uncertainty, estimate the odds, accept them, devise a strategy, & plan for losses along the way.
It is much easier to *believe* in some sort of ideology to deal with uncertainty/randomness than all of the above.
My observation has been that conversion to atheism often entails the conversion to liberalism, especially with regards to LGBT-related topics. To many, this is obviously part of a package, which explains
phenomena like Atheism+.
Any conservative or reactionary must feel deeply alienated on a place like r/atheism (on Reddit). Atheism has become woke and is not even opposed to belief in the supernatural, just to conservative Christians.
I do not see wokeism failing, though. What do you think the next schism will be? The white leadership of the Democratic people will soon be extinct and can be replaced with a much more “diverse” (i.e. not both white and male) group drawn from colleges and activists. With meritocracy on the decline and no racial solidarity among the ever-dwindling share of white voters, who would you expect to stage a coup?
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Emphasis added
lol at “furious masturbation.”
When I got sent home from work for protesting my pronoun indoctrination workshop I angrily spoke with my older, very Left-wing neighbor about this whole thing and he didn’t seem worried “it comes in waves” he said. Hope he’s right. I know from living it that it’s not sustainable but, you never know, they might find a way. I try to reassure myself by remembering that once something in cool…soon it’s *not* cool.
@Robert Ford: “I try to reassure myself by remembering that once something in cool…soon it’s *not* cool.”
Or as the Tower of Power song goes: “What’s hip today / Might become passé”
Razib writes: “But I think it gets to some of the issues that religion has as a “brand” in the United States. Religion is not about religion as such, but a whole lifestyle.”
It seems to me that in the world outside Western Christianity, religion is so closely tied to nationality and ethnic identity that it is impossible for it not to be a brand or lifestyle. But we are so immersed in the modern Western Christian milieu that we are shocked when we’re reminded of this fact, and (for many people) we are put off when Western Christianity takes its profession of faith into the public square.
@Robert Ford
It doesn’t seem like a wave this team. This woke religion is here to stay. Literally everybody I know is virtue signaling. I know for a fact half of them don’t give a shit.
“It champions a lack of emotional regulation and a regression to raw tribal dynamics in an extremely diverse and multi-ethnic environment. As soon as it triumphs (which appears to be almost here), it will tear itself to pieces. After the purges…”
Well, there is the segmented mega sprawl that could surge out of it. Held together by some “socialisty” hive.
I really want to read Laureline and Valerian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oTziHKM_c (yes, a youtube link to the openning sequence of the movie adaptation).
IIRC the authors depicted a possible future where a giant space mega city connecting different worlds exists. I gotta look into it.
At least it will be fun watching Communist furries interact with Decolonisation activists.
It seems to me that in the world outside Western Christianity, religion is so closely tied to nationality and ethnic identity that it is impossible for it not to be a brand or lifestyle.
this is false. not true in much of Africa or east Asia. and the Islamic world is often not true. it is true in India tho.
“What would the New Atheists from the period between 2005-2010 think about all this? Some of them are still around. Do they see a world lit by rationality? I don’t think the world is rational at all.”
This was my main objection to their message back in the 2000’s. I suspected that simply not going to church would not make the bulk of humanity into a bunch of Von Neumanns, and I guess I was right. Yay?
Is there anybody out there in need of a god?
In need of help? Okay.
But is there anybody out there having been helped by a god?
I assume life is not about god, it’s about a community, a helping hand, a style of feelgood as Razib said.
Lifestyles a historic phenomenons, changing structures in time. All.
In my country, god, in the meanwhile, is the same guy in all religions. I mean everybody is figuring out his personal favourite and declares him (some say: her) his champion. So it will go on.
It’s curious, not a tragedy.
It will not destroy mankind.
I think the world is overall more scientific-materialist than it ever has been before. Even in America, where the number of atheists has risen and atheist books can become bestsellers. The world will never become a rationalist’s paradise, but it’s closer to it than the last time we had a global pandemic. America will never reach Scandinavian levels of disbelief, but it has crept closer. On the other hand, if the current recession turns into a depression, there will be a return to old time religion.
I doubt the Woke (who are generally hostile to the New Atheists) will fill the place of conventional religion (just as New Age claptrap failed, pace Chesterton). The nature of Woke politics means the Woke will eat themselves the way French revolutionaries did. And Wokism is transmitted by the cultural elite and stems from a posh university degree. It’s not a mass religion—if it was Biden would never have won the Democratic nomination.
@Relevator
How do you explain Biden likely crushing Trump in November though?
We’re underestimating the woke crowd. There might be more of these idiots than we think. Just about everybody I know is virtue signaling on this issue.
The police are about to be defunded in Minneapolis. In NC white people were groveling at the feet of black people and cleaning their feet. in KY the governor is trying to get black people free insurance. The founder of reddit stepped down and is mandating that a black person take his place. Most school are going to be giving out black only scholarships. How much longer before African Americans get 13T in reparations (300k-350K each!!!)?
Goodbye America.
badhistorian said:
“I do not see wokeism failing, though. What do you think the next schism will be?”
@bh- We have already seen the first major schism of the Woke coalition. Last year, hundreds of Muslim parents held their children out of a United Kingdom school in protest over LGBTQ sex education. The Woke priests backed down.
Europe has substantially more muslim immigrants than the US, and my sense is that Europe’s Islam is far more robust than America’s Christianity. With modern-age mass immigration you are almost certain to have less assimilation and greater persistence of culture from the home country. I think Islam can resist the Woke religion far longer than American Christianity.
Revelator said:
“The nature of Woke politics means the Woke will eat themselves the way French revolutionaries did. And Wokism is transmitted by the cultural elite and stems from a posh university degree. It’s not a mass religion—if it was Biden would never have won the Democratic nomination.”
I agree. Wokeism is most intensely promulgated at the pinnacles of Western power- the Ivy Leagues, the elite media (New York Times), the elite corporations (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc). Sure, it offers nice clergy positions to selected minorities, many of whom themselves came through elite universities. Every major corporation has “Diversity” officers, just as every major Chinese corporation and every major Soviet institution has/had embedded Communist Party officials.
Woke religion also does a good job of inflaming racial tensions among the plebs. That’s a key cog for its operation of power. The Evergreen State College gave us perhaps the clearest preview… The college president George Bridges and his allies whipped up racial animus amongst the students to a fever pitch, and then used the power of the mob to bully any recalcitrant faculty who were resisting full and public commitment to the instantiation of the new religion.
Most studies of religious decline in the US only look back a few decades, which gives a misleading picture. Religion got an artificial boost in the US after World War II because Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from “godless commies.” But genuine religious fervor seems to have declined sharply in the US long before that time. Much of the air had already leaked out of the religious balloon by the end of the 1920s, as Frederick Lewis Allen discusses in _Only Yesterday_, his entertaining book about that decade. A Gallup poll from 1940 found that only 37% of people had attended religious services in the past week (roughly the same percentage as in 2016) — though in 1940, many more people claimed membership in a church or other religious body (perhaps because that was a social expectation at the time) https://news.gallup.com/poll/200186/five-key-findings-religion.aspx The old line about religion in America is that it’s “a mile wide and an inch deep.” I wouldn’t expect secularism to be any less shallow.
Another recent schism in the Woke coalition is between trans activists and feminists, especially in the UK. Douglas Murray talks about some of these dynamics, where the gay male, lesbian female, and trans communities in fact have little in common.
@ginger
I tend to agree that American religion has long been “a mile wide and an inch deep.” On the other hand, I think there is likely a genetic contribution to religious/spiritual predisposition, and early America basically got all the religious extremists from Europe…
While I don’t think Woke Religion is sustainable, that doesn’t mean it can’t hold for decades (not saying it will, though.) Communism in Russia lasted 70 some years. I think they are sister ideologies/religions, both with an ostensible fundamental value of equality. Of course, that value is at odds with Nature itself, so it quickly gets deformed.
“All animals are equal. Some animals are more equal than others.”
Ryan,
COuld you explain how equality as at odds with nature? What does that have to do with western countries?
COuld you explain how equality as at odds with nature?
I suspect he means that people are naturally unequal. Some are taller, smarter, prettier, etc. Positing as a moral law that “everyone should have equal incomes, etc.” will run up against the natural inequality.
ryan,
There are always tensions within a coalition. One way to keep people together is to have a common enemy. Thus, the Steve Sailer KKKrazy Glue theory: the woke coaliton is kept together by the idea that straight white males are the origin of most of what’s wrong with the world. Everything else pales in comparison and should be set aside for the fight that really matters.
“Wokeism” difficultly could be a stable equilibrium – the point is “to defend the oppressed and excluded minorities” , then it has to discover new opressions and exclusions to stay alive, meaning that each new generation of “wokes” will have to rebel against the former (or even against the wokes of the last year – look to prostitution, were the “woke” position changes between “prostitution is violence against women” and “sex work is work” almost each six months)
Thanks Roger, you got it.
And what I mean by the Girardian scapegoat idea is basically Sailer’s KKKrazy glue theory.
Human ingroup cohesive forces and levels of cooperation have historically been supplied in large measure by an external enemy and an internal scapegoat in some combination.
The West lost a major external enemy with the fall of the Iron Curtain, and it’s elites have grown extremely selfish since then.
About atheism, I suspect that many atheists are, in first place, people in the extreme end of the “mechanistical thinking” continuum.
Them, don’t expect them to be particularly skeptical, or evidence-based, or open-minded… the reason because they reject religion is because they like systems that could explain everything, and religion is to mysterious and chaotic to their taste (the whole point of having gods instead of impersonal and mechanistical forces is to introduce in the world something similar to human subjectivity).
one “X factor” that wokeness has going for it, and it is genius, is how many people will adopt one of more of its tenets without even knowing what wokeness *is.* The number of times I’ve had to explain *to a Left wing person* or to a person who actually works at a school where critical theory is taught what wokeness even is in the first place is absolutely amazing. They have no idea what critical theory is, microagressions, etc. They have only adopted the pronouns part or the anti-whiteness part or whatever. However, this is the feature but it’s also the flaw because they assume it’s about inclusion when it’s really not at all so you just wait for the other foot to drop:)
Wokeness is pretty much just anti whiteness. White liberals are the only group with negative in group bias. This has got to be revolutionary. Usually evolution breeded out such stupidity.
I think wokeness exists till whites become a minority in America and Europe. Maybe it goes away then but does it really matter at that point?
I think a lot of different elements of modern culture have supplanted portions of religion. For example, if you take a deep dive into any fandom of fictional worlds, it shows incredible similarities to theology. There’s the same concern with explaining away inconsistencies in “canon” (a term which started describe fictional universes in the 1970s with Star Trek. There’s also a familiar debate about whether authorial intent is paramount, or whatever personal interpretation you come away with from the text, etc. Obviously people don’t – except in extreme cases – get any sort of spiritual affirmation from being Harry Potter fans or something. But there’s the same extreme over-analysis of the world within the text that occurred with biblical stories across the centuries.
Most of the comments have to do with “wokeness” – so I will make a brief comment here. The interesting aspect to me is honestly the total absence of any “whitelash” nationally. Many polls have come out showing a clear majority (in some cases nearly a 2/3rds majority) support the protesters. Opinion has shifted rapidly over the last few years in favor of BLM, and even more rapidly in opposition of cops. It seems like a plurality of white Americans now support the cause, and one recent poll even had more than 50% of Americans saying the burning of a Minneapolis police station was at least partially justified. This flies in the face of the predictions of many commentators, who seemed to sincerely believe that as the nonwhite U.S. population grew, whites would naturally become more white-identified, and more “racially conservative.”
While several elements undoubtedly played a role, I am going to point out one in particular – Donald Trump is not a good tribune for the right-wing faction in America. While he commands fealty from his base, he’s completely inept politically. This is true both on a personal level (he has alienated many traditional conservatives – particularly those who have to deal with him on a personal level) and in terms of messaging (he is clearly a man who likes to have his ego stroked rather than being given an accurate map of reality to deal with, and as a result has been surrounded with yes-men who will not give him the advice he needs). There have been many prominent anti-Trump conservatives who have gone “all in” on supporting Black Lives Matter, and I think a large part of this is honestly because of Donald Trump’s opposition (or at least their own exile from the right, and now having woke neoliberal peers instead). To put it more simply, Trump supporting something at this point is probably good enough to make 51%+ of the U.S. public oppose it, even if many of them had no strong feelings to begin with.
There is a group in America that do not want a unified society. They consist of on average 60% of top media execs, pay more than 50% of all political contributions and dominate the elite US universities. They are the majority of prophets(pundits) who have the voice. They are promoting very successfully a type of secular Wahhabism, to say the past was pagan, it must be destroyed and forgotten. Their woke soldiers must commit jihad to bring the true religion so that when the world is completely woke the Messiah/Mahdi may come.
Removing fear/revenance for God in a vain, hedonistic,image obssessed, consumerist place like America was always a recipe for diaster. Xtianity was some kind of bulwark, or dam against the unrushing idiocracy extremes. The New Atheists never got this. They just saw the conservative, dinosaur denying, anti-gay Prot extremes, it was a myopic view of its role in America as a temperer to its worst desires. The NAs were detached from cultural forces that are now proving irresistable. Of course in academia the far-left theorists have always been waiting in the background for a gap to charge through. They now have it, because without Xtianity there is less courage in the conservative convictions to resist them.