Are Today's Nones Less Religious Than Nones From the Past?

I know that I could never be the President of the United States for a bunch of reasons. One of the biggest is: I can’t stop being a professor. When reflecting on his presidency in 2022, Barack Obama said in an interview,

Look, I used to get into trouble whenever I got a little too professorial. There were times where I'd sound like I was giving a bunch of policy gobbledygook. And that's not how people think about these issues

Yeah, I can never break that habit. I just like to teach people stuff. Devoting years of your life to thinking through all the nuances and angles on a specific subject, distilling into a digestible form and communicating it to an interested audience is about the coolest thing on Earth.

And I think that’s why a lot of you decided to subscribe to this newsletter. So, here’s the angle - a growing number of people indicate that they have no religious affiliation, but that dimension is a pretty blunt instrument. You are either religious or you aren’t. I wanted to look at those people who identify as non-religious and see if they are actually further away from religiosity on other metrics. Put simply: are the nones nonier today than they were a few decades ago?

For those who have been following along with my work for a while, they know that academics typically view religion through three dimensions (behavior, belief, and belonging). Here, I am holding belonging constant (by only looking at people who claim no religious affiliation) and focusing on belief and behavior.

Let me start by showing you data from the last fifty years of the General Social Survey. Among people who claim no religious affiliation, here’s the percentage who report never attending religious services.

Here’s a fun fact, in the 1970s, about a third of non-religious people reported attending a house of worship at least a little bit. The trend line tells an interesting story, because the share of never attending nones rose about ten points between the 1970s through 1990, but then it dipped just a little bit before rising again. The share of non-religious people who were never attenders was the same in 1990 as it was around 2010. There has been a clear increase in the last few years, though. By 2014, the percentage of never attenders reached an all- time high and it continued to trend upward. Now, about 70% of the non-religious indicate that they never attend religious services.

I wanted you to get a sense of where the increasing number of never attending nones is coming from in terms of other attendance categories, so this is four categories of religious attendance.