God Forsaken American Nones

  

“About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated” 

Title of a December 14th Pew Research Center Report

As the above Pew-generated charts reflect, “The secularizing shifts evident in American society so far in the 21st century show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the religious composition of the United States finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.

“Christians continue to make up a majority of the U.S. populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011. In addition, the share of U.S. adults who say they pray on a daily basis has been trending downward, as has the share who say religion is ‘very important’ in their lives.

“Currently, about three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) are religious ‘nones’ – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religious identity. Self-identified Christians of all varieties (including Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians) make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious ‘nones’ by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered ‘nones’ by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).” Pew Report.

These numbers are particularly significant in the great divide that seems to have Americans at each other’s throats. A political system built and designed well over two centuries ago, out of a mistrust of “city slickers,” continues to place vastly more voting/political power in the hands of rural voters, literally it takes 1.8 urban votes on average to equal one rural vote. We have a Supreme Court (a working majority, appointed by a president with massive evangelical/mostly rural support) issuing rulings that reverse the desires of a majority of Americans. In 1789, 94% of Americans were working farms. Even by 1870, that number had dropped to 50%, and today it is a paltry 2%. Yet half the U.S. Senate, where two Senators are allocated to each state (regardless of population), is now elected by 30% of American voters.  Rural still controls.

That tilted representation favoring conservative rural evangelicals over urban voters has allowed rural states to exercise their purported constitutional rights to suppress urban voters with gerrymandering and limitations on how they can exercise their voting rights, if at all, an antidemocratic anomaly that seems to have been blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Will the United States, which is increasingly racially, religiously and ethnically diverse, survive intact long enough to allow those rapidly changing demographics to nullify an aging evangelical power base? Not if that “base” continues to be able to marginalize those rising voters.

What we think of a super-red states, like Texas, they are typically littered with cities (e.g., Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, etc.) that are bluer than blue… but gerrymandered to be redder than red. At worst, Texas is profoundly purple… but its overall constituency is reflected in elected offices as bright red. Still, as we can see in the above statistics, Christians in general, and particularly conservative evangelicals, are losing their demographic grip on bona fide political support, a fact which has driven their representative political party (the GOP) to push for an autocracy where that rising non-religious and more liberal Christian vote is muted.

Writing for the December 14th Associated Press, Luis Andres Henao expounds on the above noted Pew report: “The religiously unaffiliated were once concentrated in urban, coastal areas, but now live across the U.S., representing a diversity of ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds, [said Elizabeth Drescher, an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University who wrote a book about the spiritual lives of the nones].

“Even in their personal philosophies, America’s nones vary widely, according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. [NORC, once known as the National Opinion Research Center, is headquartered at the University of Chicago.] For example, 30% say they feel some connection to God or a higher power, and 19% say religion has some importance to them even though they have no religious affiliation… About 12% describe themselves as religious and spiritual and 28% as spiritual but not religious. More than half describe themselves as neither.

“Nearly 60% of the nones say religion was at least somewhat important to their families when they were growing up, according to the AP-NORC poll. It found that 30% of nones meditate and 26% pray privately at least a few times a month, while smaller numbers consult periodically with a religious or spiritual leader… ‘There are people who do actually practice, either in a particular faith tradition that we would recognize, or in multiple faith traditions,’ Drescher said. ‘They’re not interested in either membership in those communities formally or in identifying as someone from that religion.’

“Over recent years, the prevalence of the nones in the U.S. has been roughly comparable to Western Europe — but overall, Americans remain more religious, with higher rates of daily prayer and belief in God as described in the Bible. According to a 2018 Pew survey, about two-thirds of U.S. Christians prayed daily, compared to 6% in Britain and 9% in Germany.

“The growth of the nones in the U.S. has come largely at the expense of the Protestant population in the U.S., according to the new Pew survey. It said 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants now, down from 50% a decade ago.” While evangelicals (and their ilk) may still constitute a majority of Protestant faiths, that is the only arena where they have that level of sway. Politically, however, they still seem in control and willing to sacrifice democracy to maintain that control. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and a dying and aging rural demographic’s willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain what is effectively white Christian supremacy just might doom the United States into the “great unraveling.”