America’s Coming Godlessness
Notes on the De-Christianization of the United States, its Probable Causes and Effects
Dear Chester,
As you well know, firebrand preachers and atheist intellectuals have been foretelling America’s imminent godlessness since before the founding of the United States. They have always been wrong.
In fact, they always had it exactly backwards. Contrary to popular belief, church-going was rather uncommon in early US history, with less than 20% of the founding generation belonging to a church or other house of worship. Farmers almanacs, based on astrological charts, were more numerous than Bibles. But then, according to the historians Roger Fink and Rodney Stark, church membership rose and rose (and rose) throughout the 19th century, buoyed by the waves of revivals commonly known as the Great Awakenings, and church attendance climbed higher during the 20th century until it reached its apex in the 1950s, and even then membership didn’t hit record highs until the 1980s. A graph of American religious affiliation over time looks like a great rising wave.
So, whether they were rending their garments or rubbing their hands in anticipation, those who have predicted the nation’s coming godlessness have always been wrong.
Until now.
1. Church Going: A Survey of Recent Statistics
The latest statistics are courtesy of Gallup. Between 1937 and 2000, the percentage of Americans belonging to religious institutions hovered between 73 and 68%. Last year it was 47%.
Since the millennium, religious affiliation has been ticking down at the rate of about 1% per year and it shows no sign of stopping. If anything, the decline is accelerating. Each generation of Americans included in the Gallup poll, starting with the “traditionalists” (born before 1946), has been less religious than the last. Last year 66% of traditionalists belonged to religious organizations (down from 77% in 2000), as did 58% of baby boomers and 50% of Gen Xers. Among Millennials, religious affiliation stands at 36%.[1] Although uncounted by Gallup, Gen Z appears to be in line with the Millennials, if not less religious still.1
For a while, observers attributed these declining numbers to the collapse of white mainline Protestantism, and especially liberal Protestantism. Liberal churches shrink, while conservative ones grow—or so the theory went.
Not anymore. The mainline and evangelicals now have similar age profiles. According to numbers from the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life, 20% of Mainline Protestants are millennials, and 36% are baby boomers. Among Evangelical Protestants, those numbers are 23% and 35%. Not much better. Also, consider this chart, made by the political scientist Ryan P. Burge. Between 1972 and 2018, the percentage of Americans calling themselves “Evangelical Protestants” rose from 17% to 22.5%, but what strikes me about the graph is that 22.5% is actually a sharp drop from the mid-90s heyday of the religious right, when evangelicals made up 30% of the American public. As far as Evangelical Protestantism goes, the boom appears to be over. We have entered the bust.
The Catholic Church in the United States is shrinking too. As with the Protestants, Catholics skew older: 22% of its members are millennials, 35% boomers (numbers again from Pew). A 2016 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that over the previous decade the percentage of Americans identifying as Catholic fell from 16% to 11%. And remember, this is at a time when immigrants from historically Catholic countries have been arriving by the millions. To me, this suggests a collapse of white Catholicism akin to white liberal Protestantism.
It’s hard to disagree with political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart’s assessment: The United States is secularizing faster than almost any other country on earth. By his measurements it is no longer an outlier, a highly developed but highly religious country. It is the 12th-least religious nation on earth.
I know I risk becoming just one more fool prophesying America’s imminent godlessness, Chester. But I can’t read these numbers any other way.
2. Bare Ruin’d Choirs
The first question is, why is this happening?
There is no single reason for the decline, single-factor causality being rare in even the most rigorous social scientific investigations (like mine), but some factors are certainly more important than others, and some theories better able to explain the data.2 I can think of four possible causes.
I. Science
This is the old Whiggish theory that as the light of science and reason advances, the darkness of faith and superstition falls back. On this account, religion is primarily an explanatory framework, destined to be supplanted by other, better explanatory frameworks, as in August Comte’s contention that humanity will progress through religious and metaphysical stages on the way to its true goal: the scientific.
Most recently, this theory was re-popularized by the New Atheists. Richard Dawkins insisted that “science will win because it works,” and Steven Pinker told Time that “It’s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.”
I grant that a certain (poor) reading of Biblical creation narratives will bring faith into conflict with contemporary physics, but I doubt it has much to do with recent trends. What were the relevant new facts discovered around the year 2000? What were the new scientific theories unsettling old beliefs? The paradigmatic example of science conflicting with religion, Darwinian evolution, has been taught in public school for decades and in colleges and universities for over a century. When the New Atheists sold millions of books in the 2000s, they were certainly influential but they also found a receptive audience waiting for them. Their popularity strikes me as an eddy moving along deeper social currents.
II. Political Polarization (At Home and Abroad)
For the longest time, political observers worried that candidates’ religion would influence their policies: JFK would take orders from the Pope, George W. Bush from Pat Robertson, Obama from Jeremiah Wright, and so on. Now it appears that the influence is running in the other direction. Americans’ political views are shaping the way they pray (or don’t).
During the post-Civil Rights era political realignment, the Republicans became the party of the Christian right. Then during the 1990s, the Democratic Party started to become the party of the secular. Today 54% religiously unaffiliated Americans identify as Democrats and only 23% as Republicans; this is nearly the reverse of the evangelicals, of whom 56% are Republicans and 28% Democrats. Secular Democrats now make up a third of their party. (If it were not for the historical affiliation between the black churches and the Democratic Party, that number would be even higher.)
Several recent studies have found that when the religious right rises to prominence in a particular area, area liberals become less religious. What’s interesting about this is that the liberals’ political identities appear to be foundational: instead of picking a political party that reflects their religious views, they are picking a religious affiliation (none) that confirms their political identity, and more specifically reinforces their rejection of the other tribe.
That would help explain the precipitous decline of liberal Christianity, but if we’re seeing fewer conservative Christians too, there must be more to the story.
Trump may be part of the answer here. He was famously popular with Evangelicals, winning a higher percentage of them than Romney, McCain, or even George W. Bush during the latter’s 2004 run. It seems to me that the Evangelicals flocked to Trump in large part as a response to America’s ongoing secularization. After opposition to gay marriage flipped from a political winner to a political liability, they realized that they did not constitute a moral majority, but rather (in their own minds) a moral minority, a virtuous people surrounded by a hostile pagan society. What were they to do? They sought the protection of a strong pagan ruler, just like the ancient Judeans allying with Cyrus the Great.
Ironically, this may hasten their tribes’ decrease. It isn’t hard to find Evangelicals sounding the alarm over young people leaving their congregations in droves, unable to stomach the rank hypocrisy of preaching chastity for decades and then embracing a sybarite.
We shouldn’t overlook the importance of international affairs, either. Religious disaffiliation began, slowly but unmistakably, in the 1990s, and then accelerated after the year 2000. What in the world happened in 1991 and 2001? The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the World Trade Center attacks. For a long time, some religious affiliation, any religious affiliation, was an in-group distinction in opposition to the godless commies, whereas after 9/11 America’s enemy was a pack of religious zealots. That certainly helped the New Atheists find a sympathetic audience. If political orientation is drawing religious adherence behind it, then we would expect to see these broad political shifts happen first, with religious adherence following along later. As in fact we do.
I am not saying anything so bald as “the Soviet Union disappeared, and Al-Qaeda showed up, so people decided to stop going to church.” At least I am trying not to. That would be a crude sort of functionalism, in which religious belief is entirely explicable (and usually explained away) as an unwitting cover for this-worldly aims and activities: forwarding your class interests, justifying your tribe, and so on.
What I would say is that religion is in no small part a matter of social identity. Religious belief, though separable from its social aspect, just is easier to maintain in a like-minded community. It was pretty easy for me to maintain in my theologically-minded graduate school, much harder when I was in the New York publishing world. Political identity, too, is both intellectual and a matter of group belonging. But what happens when one’s political and religious identities seem to be at odds? It creates a divided sense of self. Over time, perhaps over decades, some number of people, apparently a rather large number of people, will resolve the tension by letting one of the sides go. Right now, it’s the religious side getting dropped.
III. Falling Birth Rates
The American birth rate has been below replacement level for decades, which would probably shrink church membership on its own, especially in churches that minister to upper-middle-class, professional white folks, whose birth rate is extremely low.
Children are crucial to the survival of any religion. Of course, birth rates matter because children may one day replace their parents in the pews. Almost just as importantly, though, children keep the whole family involved, because while church is usually the same year in and year out for adults, for a child it is a succession of special milestones: baptism, first communion, confirmation, and all of the surrounding activities and classes for the children (and their parents) that these events entail. Consequently, the more children, the more a family’s life and a church’s life weave together.
When young people have fewer children, or especially when they delay having children into their mid-30s, there is a long period between leaving their parents’ houses and baptizing a child. It is easy for their lives to fall out of synch with whatever church they used to belong to.
But the rate of church-going is falling far faster than the birth rate. What would account for that? In his recent Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing It, and What Comes Next Robert Inglehart argues that beyond the birth rate itself, large changes in American attitudes towards family life and sex are the prime movers behind America’s de-Christianization.
First, he points out that large religions and successful religions—successful in terms of their survival and expansion—tend to have strong “pro-fertility norms.” This makes sense. Christianity encouraged childbearing and conquered Rome; its gnostic cousins said it was wicked to have children because it enslaved immortal souls in fleshy bodies. They died out.
Inglehart then reads surveys from around the world and deduces that as societies become more secure, people shift from pro-fertility norms to “individual choice norms.” By secure he means falling infant mortality rates, rising longevity, industrialization, a growing economy, a robust welfare state, good public health—the whole modern development kit and caboodle. Pro-fertility norms encourage women to have more children and stay at home while men go out to earn a living, and they discourage divorce, affairs, and homosexuality. In contrast, individual choice norms encourage women and men to pursue self-expression and personal fulfillment in work and sex. (Children get in the way of that.)
His theory of religious decline is then as follows. In insecure societies, with lots of wars and famines and high infant mortality rates, pro-fertility norms are conducive to the group’s survival, but once these societies become more secure, people no longer need to have as many children, and can experiment with alternative ways of living. This switch doesn’t necessarily lead people to reject religion, but it can put their sex, career, and family lives (foundational elements of their identities) at odds with the traditional teachings of most churches. Currently, this conflict is being resolved in favor of his individual choice norms.
Furthermore, whereas once young people felt pressure to conform to the fertility norms, now the pressure runs the other way. He writes:
Though secularization normally occurs at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, it can reach a tipping point where the dominant opinion in a given milieu shifts sides, and the forces of conformism and social desirability start to favor the outlook they once opposed, producing unusually rapid cultural change.
In the 19th century, the village atheist was a bold intellectual iconoclast. His descendant, also an unbeliever, agrees with the rest of the partners at his law firm, while the Catholic or evangelical who wants seven children is now the odd one out.
Finally, Inglehart thinks that religious affiliation follows a time lag. Rising or falling rates of religiosity reflect not current social, economic, and political conditions, but rather the conditions of a few decades ago. Adults enjoying present prosperity and security keep the religious habits they learned in their less secure childhoods, while their own children, growing up in peace, prosperity, and security, are apt to adopt self-expression norms.
He thinks this explains the relatively recent decline of US church membership. Post-war prosperity didn’t change religious adherence among the children of the depression, but once a few generations had grown up with a booming US economy, they started to move from pro-fertility to individual choice norms, and out of the churches.
IV. Life Is a Businesse, Not Good Cheer
But have the past few decades of American life really been so secure? Yes, the GDP has generally been growing since the 1990s, even accounting for periodic financial crashes; but at the same time the social safety net was falling apart; wages stagnated as income inequality rose; employment became more precarious; the costs of housing, healthcare, and education soared; and the aforementioned drug epidemics were spreading. It’s gotten harder to reach the kind of middle-class security and prosperity that Inglehart says should go hand in hand with declining religious belief. If anything, religious belief has declined as American society has become less secure. Why might that be?
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche offers one more theory of how and why people lose their religions:
Has anyone really noticed the extent to which being outwardly idle or half-idle is necessary for a genuinely religious life (and for its favorite job of microscopic self-examination just as much as for that tender state of composure which calls itself “prayer” and is a constant readiness for the “coming of God”)? — I mean idleness with a good conscience, passed down over the ages, through the bloodline, an idleness that is not entirely alien to the aristocratic feeling that work is disgraceful, which is to say it makes the soul and body into something base. And has anyone noticed that, consequently, it is the modern, noisy, time-consuming, self-satisfied, stupidly proud industriousness which, more than anything else, gives people an education and preparation in ‘un-belief’?
I agree with dear Friedrich. Leisure is necessary for religious life. It requires silence and stillness and time to contemplate the vast tapestry of existence and one’s own little thread within it. While religion can alleviate existential anxiety, it is just as often a cure for self-interest, a means of forgetting oneself and transcending daily cares, or at least putting them into perspective.
Modern life, and especially modern economic life, leaves little time for leisure and idleness. If it is in fact getting harder and harder to achieve and maintain economic security, then everyone—and especially the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts who are still economically lagging behind their parents—must devote more and more of their time, energy, and attention to just getting by, to say nothing of what it takes to get genuinely ahead. It can take all the time and energy you have.
And then there are the daily tasks of living, added on top of economic concerns. Taken one at a time, our daily duties may be trivial—everything from work emails and oil changes to laundry—but they must be attended to, and as attention is paid to each little task one has less and less time for contemplation. It is easy to forget it entirely.
I do not wish to draw an easy opposition between eternity (religion) and the everyday (secular). Most religious contemplation begins as meditation on the everyday. Seeing the world in a grain of sand and all that. The busyness Nietzsche is describing is more like attention paid to the near future, when the car will break down, the client will cancel the contract, and the children will have nothing to wear to daycare but soiled jammies. The industrious modern man lives neither in eternity nor in the present but in a possible future which he is also at pains to avoid.
The internet and social media are relevant here. Although advances in science and technology don’t necessarily make societies more secular, I do suspect that social media and the internet are secularizing forces, not because they expose people to new information or people with opposing beliefs, but because they have a way of seeping into every moment of the day. They fill our lives with more of that “noisy, time-consuming, self-satisfied, stupidly proud industriousness” that Nietzsche described so well. They certainly tear people away from contemplation. How often have I been alone somewhere and, instead of looking up at the sky or into the faces around me, reached into my pocket for my cell phone? It is the nature of this technology to focus us on the immediate and fragmentary. It is the nature of religion to draw us out toward the larger whole. They are at odds.
This is all, I agree with Nietzsche once again, good training for godlessness. Nietzsche is describing the kind of life that never refers to anything beyond itself. Life today is an endless swirl of novelty and activity, and yet, if one looks beneath the ephemera fluttering across our screens or beneath the little tasks that vary from moment to moment, each day is much like the others, a progression of grey mornings, busy workdays, and evenings spent in front of yet another screen. The result is surely the worst of all possible worlds: difficult, busy, and dull. Along with contemplation, religious belief requires emotions like awe, wonder, hope, and joy. The life Nietzsche describes has room for none of them.
A godless life need not be joyless, of course. It might entail exactly the kind of leisure Nietzsche imagines. All I am saying is that I can see how the busy but bare life he describes would tend to unbelief.
3. The Sea of Faith
Summing up, I doubt advances in scientific knowledge have much to do with falling rates of religion adherence, while I suspect both political polarization and changing attitudes towards family life have mattered a lot. As for the Nietzschean possibility, I admit it’s idiosyncratic. I have no survey data for it. I can only feel it on my nerve endings, and I doubt I’m alone.
So then, what’s next?
When polls like Gallup’s appear, two responses generally appear with them. Either the decline of faith heralds the end of superstition and the reign of reason and peace, or it’s the complete collapse of moral values.
Moral anarchy is unlikely. We know of no human society without moral norms, so religious or irreligious, Americans will still make judgments about right and wrong, good and evil, courageous and cowardly, and all the rest. (Will those judgments change as a result of de-Christianization? Harder to say.)
A new era of enlightenment is unlikely too. If traditional religious identities lose their salience, new myths, including political myths, will take their place. This doesn’t mean any particular political movements should be called “religions,” but it may mean that they’re conducted with the kind of zeal we’re used to seeing in religious movements, as if peoples’ whole worldviews were at stake. If so, then I would expect rough political waters ahead.
There is another possibility, of course. I may be just the latest in the long line of fools who prophesied a godless America, only for it to get more religious again. Could that happen? It could. If Inglehart is right, then physical and existential insecurity would spur religious growth. Political volatility could easily lead us down that road, and the generations growing up after the American working classes’ economic and social collapse would make a ready audience for revivals. The middle class is shrinking too, burdened by debt and replaced by automation and gig workers. US life expectancy has fallen for more than three years in a row. That is not security.
The sea of faith could always advance again, Chester, a long, approaching roar.
Paul
The Gallup numbers include all faiths, but I will be discussing Christianity from here on out. Based on some other numbers I’ve seen, the number of American Jews, Buddhists, and followers of Indian religions has remained relatively stable, so the story of religious decline in the US really does appear to be a story about Christianity. I’m sure there are a million interesting things to be said about other faiths, but they will have to wait. Probably for an author who knows something about them.
Theories of secularization are legion, for there are many of them. One must first determine the definition of secularization, as it can mean 1) decline in religious belief and adherence, 2) privatization of religion (think Luther’s division between the inner and outer man), or 3) differentiation of religious and secular spheres (for example, the way religious universities and hospitals become secular in all but name). I will deal with the first, mostly.