The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed, Religion Is Dying? Don’t Believe It Many of the ‘Nones’ aren’t secular; they belong to minority faiths. The problem is how to count them, which engages in a lot of sophistry. The co-authors worked with the late Rodney Stark, who died on July 21st of 2022 (seven days before publication). Stark has argued for fifty years that the vibrancy of religion is determined by the offerings that people can choose from. A “religious free market” like the US is optimal for the phenomenon. This is why the secularization of the US over the last thirty years has been disturbing since it goes against their theory.
The authors of the op-ed assert:
Data from five recent U.S. population surveys point to the vibrancy, ubiquity and growth of religion in the U.S. Americans are becoming more religious, and religious institutions are thriving. Consistent with some previous studies but contrary to widely held assumptions, many people who report no religious affiliation—and even many self-identified atheists and agnostics—exhibit substantial levels of religious practice and belief.
The evidence is mostly sophistry. It is probably true that there are more small churches as the big churches collapse, but a lot of small churches may still mean fewer religious people than a few big churches.
Here is belief in God and religious attendance from the GSS (one of their sources), and the trend is obvious:
We’re still mostly a religious nation. But there has been a massive breaking of the uniform religious consensus that was the norm in the 80’s and 90’s, where nominally religious people thought being irreligious was a step too far.
That “attends religious services” chart is especially telling. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed Americans are, to put it bluntly, not regular religious-goers. “Attends several times a year” = “Maybe I go to Christmas and Easter service, especially if my parents are religious, and once in a while I go with them for some special religious event or if I’m visiting them”.
They might still believe in god in some nebulous sense, given the cultural milieu. Hell, sometimes I still believe in god even though I haven’t been a regular church-goer for more than half my life. But that’s about it.
The legend on the second chart says “2-3 times a year” where it should say “2-3 times a month (between “once a month” and “every week”)
Are the attendance figures pre or post COVID?
@Brett Hell, sometimes I still believe in god even though I haven’t been a regular church-goer for more than half my life.
Me too. I haven’t been in a church before Covid and I don’t know if I’ll ever attend regularly again. I still pray and believe though.
There was a warm sense of community and fellowship going to church that was shattered by the lockdowns, and none of the churches in my area seem too interested in restoring it.
It seems that small group Bible studies are rapidly replacing churchgoing.
I don’t believe most humans can be perfect secular-rationalists like what Dawkins or Hitchens wanted. We need myths, stories, some ideology to believe in. Too large a extent, I think woke progressivism is evolving as a de facto religion for middle class and rich whites with its own cast of original sin(slavery), blasphemy(hate speech), martyrs(George Floyd, Michael Brown) etc.
Even the vast majority of new atheists of 2000s and 2010s are now woke progressives. However, most of these people would deny that their ideology is a religion. I think this is because, it is a new phenomenon outside the bounds of traditional religion like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc. There’s a paradigm shift going on. For example, the Romans called Christians, “atheists”. Christianity was so outside the traditonal bounds of Roman religion with its focus on right beliefs rather than right actions(public sacrifice, rituals etc.) that Romans couldn’t put Christianity in the same category as their “religion”. However, modern people would classify both Roman paganism and Christianity as religion.
Similary, I think in the future(at least a few centuries), people would put the current liberal ideology and Christianity(along with other traditional religions) in the same category.
So, is America less religious nowadays? Idk about that. But I do think that the old gods are being replaced by the new gods. Many such cases throughout history!
“most of these people [woke progressives] would deny that their ideology is a religion. I think this is because, it is a new phenomenon outside the bounds of traditional religion like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc.”
Hardly new. The comparison of Marxism to religion is many decades old. A 1949 book of essays by prominent ex-Marxists was titled “The God That Failed”. More recently, Yuri Slezkine’s amazing “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution” makes vividly clear how similar revolutionary Marxism was to apocalyptic Christianity (which was, after all, the original Christianity, traces of which still survive in the Bible: “I come not to bring peace but a sword.” Matthew 10:34 “The present generation will not pass away [before the apocalypse comes]. Matthew 24:34)
@Roger Sweeney
I agree. Communism, ironically is one of the most dogmatic religion. If Theravada Buddhism or Confucianism can be classified as a religion, then Communism should absolutely be classified as one.
The type of survey that asks these type of questions is going to be particularly susceptible to social-desirability bias. You are much safer giving an answer claiming at least some sort of religiosity than none at all.
The second question somewhat goes there, but you also have the issue of how much primacy you give to your religious beliefs.