By Jeff Sharlet
I’ve been sifting through the Pew Forum’s much-discussed study on U.S. religious affiliation. The big number is 20% — that’s the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, a category sometimes misleadingly but succinctly labeled as the “Nones.” That number is up nearly five points since the last big survey in 2007. So, is secularization at hand?
I doubt it. Believers and nonbelievers have been declaring the end of religion in the United States since before the Revolution. The numbers do change, but they don’t go in only one direction — think pendulum, not “progress.” And they move slowly. Five percent doesn’t seem slow, but then, it doesn’t mean quite what it seems to mean, either. The one theory the study doesn’t seem to consider — and, really, the most obvious — is the economy. I call that obvious not for sociological reasons but for historical ones — the last great unchurched moment in American life was the Great Depression. The fact is that for many, religious affiliation is a luxury — of time and tithing, the donations expected by most houses of worship.
Most of the talk around the study has centered on the implications for the 2012 election, the real “matter of ultimate concern” for the press corps. But just as the election blinds the press to the bigger, enduring story — reality — of massive and growing inequality in the U.S., so the Pew study of the Nones has distracted many from what I think are the most interesting numbers: the largest percentage, 38%, is in the under $30,000 income bracket. Another 34% are below $74,999. Which means 72% are poor, working class, or, for a family of four, lower middle class. Those identifying as “atheist/agnostic,” a much smaller group than the “Nothing in particulars,” skew 62% under $75,000.
Look at the education demographics and you’ll find more evidence for the hypothesis that what these numbers show is economic absence as much as religious absence. 45% of those identifying as Nothing in Particulars (NiPs) have no college, roughly the same as many religious affiliations. The surprising number is the percentage of atheists/agnostics who are college grads: 25%, around 6-7 points higher, on average, than most religious affiliations. Atheists shouldn’t feel too smug about that — in general, it appears, religious affiliation becomes more common as you go up the educational and financial ladders. The key word there being “and” — there are plenty of educated folks out there without a ladder to climb. And an increasing number of them are disconnecting from the other trappings of the traditional stable life, including religious affiliation.
The Pew study offers a number of theories about the rise, two of which, “Broad Social Disengagement” and “Secularization,” might also be called “capitalism.” The secularization theory, that such movement “is to be expected in a generally healthy, wealthy, orderly society,” has obvious problems: In the period during which the Nones grew by a third, we have become sicker, poorer, and more disorganized. “Broad Social Disengagement,” meanwhile, is based on the idea of a “general decline in ‘social capital.’” We might also note the general increase in capital capital among those who have not only remained wealthy but gotten wealthier. The challenge of consumer capitalism to religious affiliation is one fretted over across the religious spectrum, from left to right. So why isn’t it part of this discussion?
Because there’s an election on, silly!
Jeff Sharlet is Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth, the college’s first tenure-track professor of creative nonfiction, and a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and Rolling Stone. He’s the author of several books including THE FAMILY which was a national bestseller in 2008. Sharlet was founding editor of The Revealer from 2003 until 2008.
Image: Coalition for Secularization website
6 comments
Edward Carney says:
Oct 15, 2012
“…there are plenty of educated folks out there without a ladder to climb. And an increasing number of them are disconnecting from the other trappings of the traditional stable life, including religious affiliation.”
Speaking purely personally, that seems to jibe with my experience. Being as I am in fairly abject poverty, things that wouldn’t seem like economic decisions to middle class Americans decidedly are economic decisions for me, and this can certainly include how I choose to spend my Sunday mornings. The thought of parting with a dollar as the collection plate passes is burdensome, as is the thought of suffering the shame that comes of not doing so. And that’s to say nothing of the inability to engage in church functions that would require larger investments of money or time.
It’s also interesting that this piece suggests that something I once thought of as relatively unique to me may in fact be a general trend. I have always been confused by the notion of people turning to religion in times of need. My personal religious sentiments tend to increase in proportion to my overall stability. Of course, for others the response to poverty and lost stability may just be abandonment of affiliation without abandonment of religious belief, which is a distinction that I always perceived to be under-represented in secularization theory. In any event, whether it is mere affiliation or actual religious belief that is mutable with respect to economic changes, the result presents, as you say, obvious problems for secularization.
becky garrison says:
Oct 15, 2012
As I always say, follow the money and there you will find what people really worship. Re the 2012 election, I’d love to see a study comparing how the impact of the SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling had on faith based donations to political campaigns.
Another not measured attribute is the rise of spiritual atheism and other forms of US based belief that sprung up in large part as a justified reaction to the US evangelical interpretation of a God who advances the notion of American exceptionalism whose Son has a thirst for vengeance that would make an OT prophet quake in his sandals.
Per Smith says:
Oct 16, 2012
I have to admit that when I first read this piece yesterday I felt like it all made sense and didn’t dig any further. This was particularly the case because I’m aware of (and have blogged about) a panel study which shows that experiencing economic hardship is strongly correlated with disaffiliation. However, today Kimberly Winston tweeted in reference to this article that disaffiliation did not seem to skew towards poverty relative to to the rest of the population (in Pew’s report), and she is correct. There is something that needs clarification as well. Jeff considers only the “nothing in particulars” to be “nones” while Pew is grouping all the unaffiliated into that category, but in the end that doesn’t matter all that much. Here’s how this plays out when we compare the unaffiliated to the affiliated:
Incomes $75,000 or less:
Unaffiliated 69% (Atheists/Agnostics 62%, Nothing in particular 72%)
Affiliated 71%
Incomes $30,000 or less:
Unaffiliated 35% (Atheists/Agnostics 28%, Nothing in particular 38%)
Affiliated 36%
In general the unaffiliated and affiliated are pretty similar with the former doing a tad better overall. If we look only at the “Nothing in particulars” they are doing *a tad* worse than the affiliated over all. So in the end I don’t think the Pew study sustains the idea that the experience of personal poverty leads to disaffiliation (e.g. the implication of pointing out how costly it is to be religious). Now the other study I mentioned above does support that idea, but that doesn’t mean that Pew does. I wouldn’t discount the notion that some of that might be occurring, and it is a topic that needs further exploration.
All that said I actually agree completely with Jeff that we need to be having a discussion about the role of consumer capitalism in disaffiliation. Just because Pew doesn’t show that personal poverty is leading to disaffiliation doesn’t mean that increased poverty as a social condition isn’t leading to disaffiliation across the economic spectrum. I’m not sure that the Pew survey is set up to test such a hypothesis though, to be fair to them and those discussing the findings. What we need are better studies.
Jeff Sharlet says:
Oct 18, 2012
Per — will look at numbers again. That said, i agree with your “That said,” obviously — the big issue here is that there has been a boom of unaffiliateds corresponding almost exactly with the worst recession since the Great Depression, but economic anxiety is the only issue Pew leaves untouched.
Will atheism/non-belief be illegal in the U.S. in the future? - Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals, Third Parties, Left-Wing, Right-Wing, Congress, President - Page 14 - City-Data Forum says:
Oct 22, 2012
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(Rev.) Jason Poling says:
Oct 24, 2012
From the pastor of a small evangelical church:
As churches increasingly receive donations online and/or through EFT it is less awkward to pass the plate without putting something in it. My colleagues at houses of worship that collect dues tell me that they discount dues for folks with lower incomes. And there’s no shortage of people who participate in religious communities where giving is voluntary whose giving is nonexistent or nominal (parting with a dollar may seem burdensome to you but I assure you it doesn’t go very far towards heating an old church building every Sunday morning).
One aspect of giving dynamics is that working and lower-middle-class households give a larger percentage of their income to charity than do middle- and upper-middle-class households. Religious identification correlates strongly with charitable giving (money and time), but I wonder if there is anything like this pattern among the nones. My guess is the size of the population is growing to the point where we might get some meaningful data.