What does the future of American religion look like? It’s a question that I don’t think about that much - I’m more focused on describing what it looks like right now. But I can understand the urge, especially for folks who are intimately involved in a major religious institution. If there’s a decent chance that religion will see a rebound, then it makes sense to not make huge budget cuts. However, if the trend lines are going to point downward for the long term, then that should lead to some real soul searching about how a lot of denominations and religious organizations are going to survive when the share of Americans who are religious is twenty, thirty, or forty points lower.
Well, let me try and back into an answer to that question a bit today. Let me just show you a graph that I made that I was thinking about a lot over the holidays - it’s the response to a simple question about religious importance. But I broke it down into the three types of non-religious folks: atheists, agnostics, and those who claim no religion in particular. It’s a phrase that I feel like have typed a thousand times in my life but - all nones are not created equal. There are huge differences on just this single question.
It should come as no surprise that atheists are the furthest away from religion based on this single question. Over 90% say that religion is not at all important and another 6% say that it’s not too important. Basically, atheists are done with religion. Okay - that makes sense. But look at agnostics. Only 70% say religion is not important at all. That means nearly a third of agnostics say that religion is at least a little bit important. Then, you have the ‘nothing in particular’ group. Just 40% chose the ‘not at all important’ option, and a quarter said that religion was not too important. In the latest data, 22% of this group say religion is somewhat important and 12% say it’s very important. Again - not all nones are the same. Atheists are significantly further from religion than nothing in particulars.
But what if I compare young atheists to older atheists? Or do a generational analysis of nothing in particulars? I mean, it’s possible that older nones may have a bit of a stronger attachment to religion because they grew up around it. Or maybe it’s the opposite - they were surrounded by so much religiosity that they moved as far away from it as possible. Let’s test those theories.
I broke the sample into three types of nones and then into five age categories. This is the share of each subgroup that says that religion is “not at all important.”
You can see a pretty clear progression in both the atheists and the agnostics. The older respondents in the survey are significantly further from religion than their younger counterparts. Among atheists who are at least 65 years old, 98% say religion is not at all important. It’s twelve points lower among the youngest atheist adults. For agnostics, it is 77% of those who are retired compared to just 63% of those between the ages of 18 and 29. I do need to point out that agnostics are somewhat more open to the idea of religion compared to atheists - it’s about a 15-20 point difference when comparing across age brackets.
But then we have the ‘nothing in particulars’. They just don’t look like the other two types of nones at all. The first thing that jumps out is that a much smaller percentage says that religion is not at all important - about 40% across the entire sample. But what is also striking is that there’s really no age gradient to speak of in these results. It’s 40% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 and 38% among those ‘nothing in particulars’ who are at least 65 years old. For this group only - age doesn’t matter.
But what about other measures of religiosity, like religious attendance?