A new book challenges the narrative of religious decline in the US
Over the past several decades, one of the most notable shifts in American religion has been the emergence of the “Nones”—people who report no religious affiliation to pollsters. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly 29% of American adults now fall into this category, up from about 16% in 2007. The share is even larger among younger generations. Many observers take these figures as evidence of a continuing secularization of American society.
A provocative new book questions this established line of thought. In The Death of Religion? Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith, sociologist Byron Johnson and historian Thomas Kidd argue that surveys greatly overstate the decline of religion in the United States. I spoke with Kidd about the book on the most recent episode of the Legal Spirits podcast.
The book contends that conventional surveys, Pew’s included, provide a misleading snapshot of American religious life. People who identify as unaffiliated are not necessarily unbelievers. Some Nones maintain religious commitments even though they do not have formal ties to a denomination or congregation. A number of Americans belong to religious communities that surveys fail to capture adequately, particularly among racial and ethnic minority groups. Consequently, surveys may systematically underestimate the vitality of religion in the United States.
Of course, there is genuine evidence of decline in certain traditional institutions, such as mainline churches. I asked Kidd about this during our conversation. Yet the authors make a valuable point: religious affiliation and religious belief are not the same thing, and trends in one domain do not automatically translate into identical trends in the other.
For me, the book’s most engaging aspect is its historical dimension. It turns out that Americans have been preoccupied with religious disaffiliation for more than two centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some people without a definite religious affiliation were labeled “Nothingarians” and faced proposals for missionary work among them. Orestes Brownson, the well-known Transcendentalist who converted to Catholicism, argued that Nothingarians constituted the majority of antebellum Americans.
The historical parallels raise an intriguing question. Americans have long distrusted institutions and hierarchies. It would not be surprising if this skepticism extends to religious institutions as well. Might Americans’ enduring preference for personal autonomy and self-reliance help explain why religious disaffiliation persists even among those who retain spiritual beliefs?
Whether or not one accepts all of the authors’ conclusions, their book offers a thought-provoking corrective to overly simplistic narratives about the disappearance of religion in America. You can hear my conversation with Kidd in the latest episode of the Legal Spirits podcast.
