If you are a regular listener of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” you may have heard today’s piece about the “nones,” the roughly 20% of Americans who prefer not to identify with any particular religious tradition. The featured guests were Robert Putnam of Harvard University and Greg Smith of the Pew Research Center. (One of the most widely-read posts on this blog, “The Fascination and Frustration of American Religion,” I discussed the findings published by Putnam in his 2010 book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. That post touches on many of the same themes as this morning’s radio interview.)
Here’s what Putnam and Smith affirmed about the “nones.”
1) Most are neither atheists nor agnostics. Most refer to themselves as “spiritual,” just not “religious.”
2) Most of them are under the age of 30.
3) While some might assume that it is typical of young adults to think of themselves as religiously unaffiliated, and that they will likely become more religious as they get older, the latest data indicates that today’s young adults are far less religiously motivated than previous generations of young adults, and also that religious patterns tend not to change over the course of a person’s life, at least not as much as other factors.
4) The two principle reasons why today’s young adults are so much less likely to identify with a specific religious tradition are a) they are less connected to social institutions in general than any previous generation, and b) they grew up to believe that American religion, in the main, was rules-based, intolerant of differences, and too closely aligned with conservative partisan politics. Here’s how Putnam put it: “These were the kids who were coming of age in the America of the culture wars, in the America in which religion publicly became associated with a particular brand of politics, and so I think the single most important reason for the rise of the unknowns (or nones) is that combination of the younger people moving to the left on social issues and the most visible religious leaders moving to the right on that same issue.”
As I listened to the NPR interview, I was struck by how these conclusions, which have been published now for over a year, are still seeping into the mainstream consciousness. I was also reminded of the huge task of churches like mine who seek to be forthright in our Christianity and also value inclusivity and diversity. Our challenge, simply put, is to prove we exist and that we mean what we say.
Copyright 2013 by J. Mark Lawson
Comments