Paul L. Caron
Dean





Sunday, July 16, 2023

NY Times 5-Part Series: Americans Are Moving Away From Organized Religion

Five New York Times op-eds by Jessica Grose:

1.  Lots of Americans Are Losing Their Religion. Have You? (Apr. 19, 2023):

Beyond DoubtIn their forthcoming book, “Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society,” the sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman and Ryan Cragun describe a change in the built environment of St. Louis that is “emblematic” of the ebb of organized religious observance in America. What was once a Gothic-style beauty of a Catholic church built in the 19th century by German immigrants had been turned into a skateboard park.

“In the United States,” the authors tell us, “somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches close down every year, either to be repurposed as apartments, laundries, laser-tag arenas, or skate parks, or to simply be demolished.” ...

It’s not just the frequency of churchgoing or temple membership that’s declining in our country: Last month, The Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago surveyed around 1,000 American adults about the importance of different values to Americans, including the importance of religion. In 2023, only 39 percent of respondents said religion was very important to them, compared to 62 percent who said that in 1998. ...

Because this topic is so much more complicated than “Americans used to be religious and now we’re not,” I’m making this the first newsletter in a series where I’ll explore the contours of our current relationship with religion, and try to unpack how we got here and what’s changed over the past several decades.

2.  ‘Christianity’s Got a Branding Problem’ (May 10, 2023):

The Nones“Christianity’s got a branding problem,” Phil Zuckerman, a professor at Pitzer College who researches atheism and secularity, told me. It is seen by many as the religion of conservative Republican politics, he said, and there are otherwise believing people out there who “don’t want to be associated with that.”

Zuckerman shared that thought with me before I asked readers about declining religious observance in America and got nearly 7,500 responses within about 24 hours. Until I started reporting this series, I’d never really thought of religions as brands. I’ve always thought of them in the context of personal, somewhat private beliefs — or in the way that I, as a Jew, think of Judaism as a value system passed down from previous generations.

Among my questions, I asked readers why they became less religious over time, and the responses were as varied as they were profound. Many said that while they no longer attend church or ally themselves with a particular faith tradition, they still believe in God, miss the sound of the choir and find transcendence in nature. And one trend that stood out bolstered Zuckerman’s assertion: Hundreds of respondents mentioned what they perceived to be the political drift of their churches (or, in a few cases, temples or mosques) as the reason for their disaffiliation or move away. Some who were part of more progressive congregations specifically mentioned the association of the word “Christian” with conservative political views as the root of their alienation.

While New York Times readers probably aren’t a demographically representative sample of Americans, there’s a convincing body of research showing that the connection between right-wing politics and some Christians that drew closer in the 1980s and early ’90s pushed other liberal and moderate Christians away from religion.

Political polarization, however, isn’t the only reason for the rise of the “nones” — a catchall term for atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no religion in particular. Nones went from 0 percent to 2 percent of the population in the 1950s, according to Gallup, to somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of Americans today, depending on which survey you look at.

Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, is the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going.” In it, he acknowledges: “I can’t point to one single causal mechanism for the nones’ astronomically growing numbers, and no other academic can either.” But there’s enough consensus around the broader trajectory to tell a reasonably coherent story about the past half-century or so. ...

The Christian “brand” problem feels most critical in our current political era, because what nones are responding to goes beyond what’s happening in their own churches. Despite the pop-cultural perception, Burge says, it’s unusual for Christian clergy to express partisan political views during church services. He surveyed over 1,000 Protestants in 2019 and found that “just a quarter of churchgoers said that they had heard a sermon about gay rights or abortion, and only 16 percent had ever heard Donald Trump’s name invoked from the pulpit.” He told me that “most pastors are not political because they don’t gain anything from being political”; they only risk alienating their flocks.

So what moderate and liberal Christians are responding to might not be explicit conservative messaging from pastors and priests. Some may feel their fellow congregants have moved so far right that they no longer feel the sense of community they once did.

3.  Why Do People Lose Their Religion? More Than 7,000 Readers Shared Their Stories. (June 7, 2023):

Secular SurgeNones” — the term of art for those who say they have no particular religious affiliation — is an unsatisfying label. I’m not the first to notice that it sounds like “nuns” when said aloud, and that, as a result, it can confuse people who aren’t steeped in sociological jargon. But more crucially, “nones” obscures the diversity of backgrounds and beliefs among the millions of Americans who fall into this very broad category.

Perhaps the blankness of the term comes from the fact that it attempts to describe a group that has grown significantly in the past half-century (by some measures, nones are around 30 percent of the population). Previously, nones had been defined by what they aren’t — adherents to a religious tradition — rather than who they are or what they believe.

In an effort to better differentiate the ways we relate (or don’t) to religion, some scholars, like David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman and John Green in their book “Secular Surge,” have come up with new language to distinguish Americans by their beliefs, sorting us into four groupings: religionists, non-religionists, secularists and religious secularists. ...

Compared to “nones,” those four categories are useful, but they still don’t quite capture the range of experience when it comes to summing up many of the stories of the 7,000-plus readers who responded to my question, in April, about why they had moved away from organized religion. ...

When I followed up with these readers, three trends emerged. Several had switched religious affiliation more than once; I’ll call them seekers. Others had an abrupt break from church in their youth, after which they became atheists or agnostics; I’ll call them skeptics. And there were others who drifted away from religion fairly late in life; I’ll call them slow faders, because their religious evolutions took time.

4.  The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway (June 21, 2023):

The Great DechurchingIn previous newsletters about Americans falling away from religion, I’ve talked about why so many Americans’ religious identities now fall in the category known as “nones” when, just a half-century ago, nearly all Americans had some kind of affiliation. (It’s complicated and multifaceted, but to summarize, it’s largely a combination of Christianity’s association with far-right politics and the fact that being unreligious has become more socially acceptable over time.)

But it’s not just how Americans identify that has greatly shifted. In their new book “The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?” Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan Burge argue that the most dramatic change may be in regular attendance at houses of worship. “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” they postulate, because “about 15 percent of American adults living today (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church, and most of this dechurching has happened in the past 25 years.”

While the authors find that there is some variation in the rates at which different demographic groups are dechurching (Hispanic Americans are dechurching at the lowest rate, for example), every group is trending away from traditional worship. As Davis, Graham and Burge put it: “No theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, education level, geographic location or income bracket escaped the dechurching in America.”

The authors focus on Christians in part because there are far more Christians in America than there are people of any other faith background. But the book also has an aim that I don’t have: It argues for bringing dechurched Americans back to regular worship. (The three men who worked on the book are all pastors.) The data they shared with me suggests that “dechurching” is particularly prevalent among Buddhists and Jews, with nearly half not attending worship services regularly, and around 30 percent of most Christian denominations and around 20 percent of Mormons and Orthodox Christians. (There weren’t enough Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in the sample for statistical certainty.) ,,,

One of the main qualifications readers seem to be looking for in their new spiritual communities is something that is less exclusionary than the denominations they were raised in. But it’s precisely the more “dogmatic” denominations and religious sects that are better able to keep adherents, according to Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at Syracuse University who has studied five generations of the same Southern California families since 1971. Mormons and evangelical Christians were able to recreate themselves more strongly across generations in their sample than Jews, mainline Protestants and Catholics, Silverstein said. Meanwhile, “the secular, the anti-religious or nonreligious people are producing nonreligious, anti-religious children,” Silverstein told me. It’s creating a new and more polarized religious landscape in our country than what we’ve had before.

Graham, a co-author of “The Great Dechurching” and a program director for the Keller Center, used the analogy of a wall: If you have a “high wall” tradition, it’s a higher barrier to entry, but also a higher barrier to leave. He thinks the religions with clear visions of the kinds of ethics they expect, clarity of doctrine and strongly encouraged in-person worship will be stickier.

I asked whether he thought the trend of falling away from regular attendance at traditional houses of worship would continue at its rapid clip. He said he thinks it eventually has to slow down, because so many people will become dechurched that there won’t be enough traditionally observant Americans left to keep up the pace. And he agreed with Silverstein that dechurched Americans will have “unchurched” or fully irreligious children. He summed it up this way: “I think the religious disaffiliation as a cultural phenomenon will continue.”

5.  What Churches Offer That ‘Nones’ Still Long For (June 28, 2023):

Bowling Alone 2I started this series because I felt that the rise of “nones” — Americans who say they have no formal religious affiliation — was one of the biggest, most complicated and most misunderstood changes in society in the past half-century. And my sense was that the subject had been discussed mostly among people who had strong, polarizing opinions about this change: either atheists who cheered it or the religiously observant who decried it.

As I started my reporting, my own feelings about the rise of nones were somewhat ambivalent; I’m Jewish and still have a strong cultural identity, but I’m not observant. I don’t miss shul and have little desire to return, yet I feel a bit heartsick about not passing down Jewish rituals with more consistency for my children.

After months of reading about this massive change, and having had quite a few deep and very moving conversations with some of the over 7,000 readers who responded to my initial call-out about becoming less religious over time, the one aspect of religion in America that I unquestionably see as an overall positive for society is the ready-made supportive community that churchgoers can access.

When I say “churchgoers,” of course, I mean those who attend a church, temple, mosque, gurdwara, friends meeting or any of the many traditional houses of worship in America. The idea of community connects them all. ...

I asked every sociologist I interviewed whether communities created around secular activities outside of houses of worship could give the same level of wraparound support that churches, temples and mosques are able to offer. Nearly across the board, the answer was no.

Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College, put it this way: “I can go play soccer on a Sunday morning and hang out with people from different races and different class backgrounds, and we can bond. But I’m not doing that with my grandparents and my grandchildren.” A soccer team can’t provide spiritual solace in the face of death, it probably doesn’t have a weekly charitable call and there’s no sense of connection to a heritage that goes back generations. You can get bits and pieces of these disparate qualities elsewhere, he said, but there’s no “one-stop shop” — at least not right now. ...

As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whom I spoke to for this series and who wrote “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” has been preaching for decades, increasing social isolation is bad for all of us. ...

Burge told me a story about his church that illustrated organized religion at its best. He described a section of the service where they asked for “prayers of the people,” where members of the congregation would describe a tough situation and ask for prayers. A young man, probably in his early 20s, with a baby, said he had just lost his job and wouldn’t make rent that month, and asked if the congregation would pray for him. Burge said an older man in the congregation went up to the young man after the service and said, “Son, if you need a job, you can come work for me tomorrow.” While that might sound like a scene from a Frank Capra movie, church really does wind up being one of the few places that people from different walks of life can interact with and help one another.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to the faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/07/americans-are-moving-away-from-religion-the-nones.html

Faith, Legal Education | Permalink