Part of the problem is that nobody ever ASKS the NIPs what it would take to bring us back into the fold. Selling starts with ASKING the customer what's wrong with the product or price. After the salesman understands the objections, he can start working around them.
With respect to religion, if you’re being told that truth and God’s will just so happen to perfectly line up with what you want, you are being lied to. I’m Catholic not because it lines up with what I want to believe or what is easy and convenient for me. I’m Catholic because I think what the Church teaches is true. The product hasn’t changed for 2,000 years, nor should it. Now, can we do a better job persuading people that what we say is true? Sure. But nobody respects or believes a religious leader who panders to the audience, and you can look at the decline of mainline Protestantism for proof of that.
The product hasn’t changed for 2,000 years? You sure about that?
Here’s a few things the Catholic church has changed their position on: capital punishment, usury (lending money at interest), the fate of non-Catholic souls after death, slavery, Latin Mass, and limbo for unbaptized infants who died.
Doctrine - i.e., matters of faith and morals - develops, it doesn’t change. I’d check out the work of St. John Henry Newman on that front. For instance, capital punishment is not an intrinsic evil, but is unjust when the modern era affords so many ways of incapacitating dangerous criminals.
Mr. Graham, Just a thought: while the "product" (truth) hasn't changed in 2000 years, much (MUCH) else has. In addition, no matter what the word/truth is, context is everything.
I recall Aaron Renn talking about a successful evangelical church that started with a survey aimed at the unchurched, to figure out what exactly they might be looking for and what it would take to bring them in the doors. Wish I could remember the name of that church and its pastor, couldn't find it with a quick search.
Other than evangelical churches, which hopefully still mostly have a sincere interest in saving souls, I don't think many other declining institutions really WANT to bring more people in the door. For example, my understanding is that the leadership of the Mainline churches has in some cases even said as much out loud; they are content with decline and have no interest in reversing it if it means having to make changes. There are advantages to being a club with a lot of assets and a declining pool of members.
The Democrats and Republicans want your votes, but they have a lot of tradeoffs to make and in any event they're not really clubs that offer any sense of belonging.
Rick Warren wrote about doing this when he started Saddleback Church. Many have done so since (and probably some before). Saddleback went on to be a huge megachurch, but I don't know that the people they gathered were demographically similar to the unengaged people discussed here.
RE: There are advantages to being a club with a lot of assets and a declining pool of members.
And one of them (perhaps the most important of them?) is that your "voice" carries a lot more weight and a lot further than it would in a packed and growing church... with a future.
Well, for the leadership class, there's also the point that they are compensated with those assets. For them, the wealth of the Mainlines is a permanent endowment with which to compensate themselves in perpetuity. As the church shrinks, so does the number of people trying to reach into that pot, or expressing ideas about how the money should be used.
Thomas....my (somewhat oblique) point exactly. Fewer people amplifies the (self-serving) voice/actions of those who don't desert/leave the sinking ship.
Had in "interesting" discussion with a very long-time, very wealthy member of the Episcopal Church I was going to last summer. Main take-away from the discussion: My church, my money, my way or the highway.
The minister resigned a couple of months later.
Sadly, I (the social historian) think this situation is probably playing out in well-established/well-endowed mainline churches all over the US today.
Dropping out is the inevitable result of the oligarchy in charge of the West “managing” and controlling public opinion in the name of so-called “democracy”. If you have no power at all - and the peasants in the West have very little - then what is the point in participating in the charade?
In the foreword to the George Schwab translation of Carl Schimtt’s “Political Theology”, Tracy B. Strong argues that Schmitt commented on this point:
"Schmitt, with explicit reference to Max Weber, sees danger in the increasing sense of the State as “a huge industrial plant” (PT, 65). Increasingly this plant “runs by itself… [and] the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty is lost” (PP, 48). For Schmitt, this is a developmental process. As he lays it out in the Barcelona lecture, the history of the last 500 years in the West shows a common structure, even though as the controlling force has changed, so also has what constitutes evidence, as well as social elite. Thus in the sixteenth century the world was structured around an explicitly understanding with God and the Scriptures as foundational certainties; this was replaced in the next century by metaphysics and rational (“scientific”) research and in the eighteenth by ethical humanism, with its central notions of duty and virtue. In the nineteenth century economics comes to dominate…and, finally, in the twentieth century technology is the order of the day. And this is at the core of his claim that ours is an age of “neutralisation and depoliticization”: whereas all previous eras had leaders and decision makers, the era of technology and technological progress has no need of individual persons….
The point of [Schmitt’s] analysis of the centrality of the exception for sovereignty is precisely to restore, in a democratic age, the element of transcendence that had been there in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries— Hobbes, Schmitt believes, understood the problem exactly. Failing that, the triumph of non-political, inhuman technologizing will be inevitable."
That's a good question, Lee. It's getting pretty long in the tooth now. The majority of the analysis was conducted 30 years ago. And the book is just a tome. If I recall correctly it's over 600 pages.
I usually assign my students this address that Putnam gave in 1995.
It is a landmark book. The research of Prof Putnam is meticulous. The way he sorted out and tested the possibilities as to the cause of the disaffiliations paralleled lab science reasoning. He includes the testing of his various hypotheses in the text. It's been almost a quarter century since publication but the trends we find now follow the same trajectory that he outlined, with one very important difference, I think. While disconnect from diverse groups or big tents, that is offset by a focus on identity. People still band together but during the later years of Prof Putnam's data collection we start seeing the underpinnings of which group you belong in and litmus testing that requires intersectionality with groups of parallel purposes. That frames our politics today. When Bowling Alone started assessing data, really back to pre-Depression times when neighbors played cards and the iconic institutions of today were founded, the barriers to entry into groups were starting to break down. Anybody could be a Scout, Democrat, or Episcopalian. Not everybody could go to your school or stay at your hotel. His data analysis, though, begins a little later, at the peak of America as universalist, the opening of institutions to people who were previously excluded prior to his 1960s starting point. Despite the length of the book and its technical analysis, it is not that difficult to read.
For anyone interested in a digestible summary, there's a new documentary coming out by one of Putnam's former students called *Join or Die*, which examines the book's legacy and the present relevance of its arguments. It's very, very good. Here's my colleague interviewing the director, Pete Davis: https://unrival.network/unrival-spaces-join-or-die-with-pete-davis/
One thing I wonder is how you teach kids what has even been lost?
I was born in the early 80s. My only memory of the high civic engagement world is from my childhood, seeing the lifestyle of my grandfather and certain other WW2 generation people who had kept up their involvement in so many organizations for 30+ years.
I like to use the example of Fred Flintstone belonging to the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo. Which seems weird to us today but was indicative of how people spent time in those days. The only problem is that now when I bring up the Flintstones with Gen Z kids, they've never even heard of it. Or the Jetsons. I think one effect of the Internet generation, and possibly also ubiquitous cable TV, is that the content they watched growing up was much more current. Meanwhile in the 1980s I was watching a lot of the same Loony Tunes shorts that my parents had gone to see at the kids' matinee in the 1950s.
I am not Ryan, but I am a social scientist who taught for a long time.
I had an exercise that I did with my undergrads: read this book from 20+ years ago and wrote about two arguments that have stood up and two arguments that have not.
If I were teaching today, I would put Bowling Alone on the list of readings that students could choose from.
And, TBH, I would love to see what an aspiring Gen Z social scientist might do with it.
Not a social scientist, just an old-line pastor in a midwestern town. But, I resonate with the title of this article if not the actual content. Post-COVID (as if we are post-COVID, but anyway...), I'm finding it harder and harder MYSELF to engage in socially constructive activities. I have been one of those pastors who is always involved in the community - serving on boards, leading groups in community service, taking youth on mission trips and to cook at the homeless shelter - you name it I was there. It came naturally. But now, it's hard work - I have to convince myself that it's important, when once I just lived and breathed it. I don't know why. I don't fit in the nothing-in-particular category, obviously. In my mind I know collective participation is worth it. But my heart isn't in it anymore. I am literally "dropping out of everything," at least, almost everything. I wonder why. Sometimes I think it's because, as hard as I've worked in the past, it all came crashing down in March 2020. Our church members went to vitriolic war with each other over the most minor inconveniences and took it out on me. Now our congregations are just a shell of what they were - and I suspect it's because those who've gone feel some of the same malaise that I do.
I'm a former health care journalist....covered aging/caregiver issues. I cite my street cred (former profession) only because I've been reading/seeing a lot, lately, about how exhausted people are: it's not just post-pandemic, getting-back-to-the-new-normal exhaustion. It's election coverage exhaustion, what's-going-on-in-the-rest-of-the-world exhaustion; caregiver/multigenerational households exhaustion; doing-the-do/volunteer exhaustion, etc.
A truism (but also putting some of the exhaustion in context): The older we get (which beats the other option) the less emotional and physical energy we have....which may provide at least a partial "answer" to the two above statements....in/of which you are not alone in making.
The share of Americans with no particular religious or political beliefs is still pretty small, even if it is growing fast. If I'm doing the math right it went from 1.2 percent in 2012 to just under 4 percent now.
This does seem like a significant trend but to understand it fully you'd need to oversample this group and get a more granular sense of who they are: gender, race, age cohort, et cetera.
Ryan, I wonder if there is still something going on with the nothing-in-particulars and maybe some reluctance among them to identify as atheists given the old "anti-atheist" social stigma? This is very much spit-balling here, but I'm wondering if well-educated (also probably well-informed, well-read) atheists no longer shy away from identifying as atheists in America (strength in numbers!), while the less educated folks are still in what might be socially unsafe bubbles or maybe even still harbor some of that old "atheist = evil" stigma (I know it took me forever to overcome that having been raised a Southern Baptist)? Probably like so much in social science, I'm guessing there are some folks that fit that bill but who knows how many...
All of this opting out of social situations where you meet other people face to face is really dangerous. Gen Z, when they are political, have this almost sociopathic disregard for the human dignity of the people they disagree with. You see it on the absolutely puritanical left or on the right where old school racism is in style (https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/04/the-new-racist-right-are-uniquely-dangerous). Without some basis for understanding the shared human experience, I think we're in for some really dark decades ahead of us.
My take-away from this, is that there are more amd more people who don't fit into, or don't wish to be put into categories, or be defined by other people's views and opinions. Especially true of the millennial generation. Contrary to your opinion that this is a worrying trend and a reflection of apathy, I see it as a reflection of young people thinking for themselves, finding new ways to describe themselves, and engaging in ways that aren't caught by the type of survey questions being asked. And even older generations will tick a box that comes closest to their the position if there is not a question that perfectly matches their position. An important question often missing in surveys is "none of the above", so a responder will tick the next best option such as "don't know". And there is also the problem that the largest group are those that don't answer surveys, for any of these reasons.
Yeah, that's a good question. I have a bit of data that has questions like: How important is the following to you. And then it has a whole list of stuff like being an American, family, religion, etc.
It's about as close as I can get on this but I remember it wasn't that satisfying. Like, everyone said family was super important. I should try and revisit that.
Fascinating article! You write: Atheists and agnostics report a very high level of educational attainment—"nothing in particulars" do not. That’s actually one of the key findings in "The Nones."
Do you mean religious Nones have significant overlap with nothing in particulars? In other words, they are essentially the same group? Or do you just mean both groups have lower levels of education?
I wonder how much of the definitional decline is defensive obscurity. Particularly by those who are less verbally inclined and less formally educated. "refuse to classify themselves in the traditional way" sounds like a much safer choice when any traditional definition provides an easy standard library of social attacks for ill-wishers or passerbys playing verbal games you default lose based on legibility/eloquence. Sharing pearls with pigs and getting torn apart sounds like plenty of modern discourse for that group.
“Atheists and agnostics report a very high level of educational attainment—"nothing in particulars" do not. “
Maybe because atheists and agnostics are the ones who are educated enough to use the terms “atheist” and “agnostic” in the first place, in contrast to the people in the “I dunno. Your mom?” category?
I think there is a causality problem here. It can't be true that people who became NIPs between 2008 and 2023 also chose not to go to college in that time, unless they were of college age or less in 2008. So a more accurate description is that the people who changed from a stated religious affiliation to NIP after 2008 were far more likely not to have attended college.
And, while religious affiliation has declined across a range of measures, including attendance, political participation, as measured by voter turnout, has grown strongly.
The answer could be a simple as the apparent trend that "there are no absolute truths".... by other people's "tribe" or even your own "tribe". In other words, "I alone am the only source of absolute truth... or that things I "like" are "my truth". Or it could be that people are so busy they only read headlines for entertainment, not information. But the "covid effect" definitely accelerated the "privatization" of socializing to online rather than in groups meeting in person.
Part of the problem is that nobody ever ASKS the NIPs what it would take to bring us back into the fold. Selling starts with ASKING the customer what's wrong with the product or price. After the salesman understands the objections, he can start working around them.
With respect to religion, if you’re being told that truth and God’s will just so happen to perfectly line up with what you want, you are being lied to. I’m Catholic not because it lines up with what I want to believe or what is easy and convenient for me. I’m Catholic because I think what the Church teaches is true. The product hasn’t changed for 2,000 years, nor should it. Now, can we do a better job persuading people that what we say is true? Sure. But nobody respects or believes a religious leader who panders to the audience, and you can look at the decline of mainline Protestantism for proof of that.
The product hasn’t changed for 2,000 years? You sure about that?
Here’s a few things the Catholic church has changed their position on: capital punishment, usury (lending money at interest), the fate of non-Catholic souls after death, slavery, Latin Mass, and limbo for unbaptized infants who died.
Doctrine - i.e., matters of faith and morals - develops, it doesn’t change. I’d check out the work of St. John Henry Newman on that front. For instance, capital punishment is not an intrinsic evil, but is unjust when the modern era affords so many ways of incapacitating dangerous criminals.
Mr. Graham, Just a thought: while the "product" (truth) hasn't changed in 2000 years, much (MUCH) else has. In addition, no matter what the word/truth is, context is everything.
Again, just a thought.
I’m not sure if your point is that doctrine *should* change or that it has changed too much.
I recall Aaron Renn talking about a successful evangelical church that started with a survey aimed at the unchurched, to figure out what exactly they might be looking for and what it would take to bring them in the doors. Wish I could remember the name of that church and its pastor, couldn't find it with a quick search.
Other than evangelical churches, which hopefully still mostly have a sincere interest in saving souls, I don't think many other declining institutions really WANT to bring more people in the door. For example, my understanding is that the leadership of the Mainline churches has in some cases even said as much out loud; they are content with decline and have no interest in reversing it if it means having to make changes. There are advantages to being a club with a lot of assets and a declining pool of members.
The Democrats and Republicans want your votes, but they have a lot of tradeoffs to make and in any event they're not really clubs that offer any sense of belonging.
Rick Warren wrote about doing this when he started Saddleback Church. Many have done so since (and probably some before). Saddleback went on to be a huge megachurch, but I don't know that the people they gathered were demographically similar to the unengaged people discussed here.
RE: There are advantages to being a club with a lot of assets and a declining pool of members.
And one of them (perhaps the most important of them?) is that your "voice" carries a lot more weight and a lot further than it would in a packed and growing church... with a future.
SIGH!!!!!
Well, for the leadership class, there's also the point that they are compensated with those assets. For them, the wealth of the Mainlines is a permanent endowment with which to compensate themselves in perpetuity. As the church shrinks, so does the number of people trying to reach into that pot, or expressing ideas about how the money should be used.
Thomas....my (somewhat oblique) point exactly. Fewer people amplifies the (self-serving) voice/actions of those who don't desert/leave the sinking ship.
Had in "interesting" discussion with a very long-time, very wealthy member of the Episcopal Church I was going to last summer. Main take-away from the discussion: My church, my money, my way or the highway.
The minister resigned a couple of months later.
Sadly, I (the social historian) think this situation is probably playing out in well-established/well-endowed mainline churches all over the US today.
Dropping out is the inevitable result of the oligarchy in charge of the West “managing” and controlling public opinion in the name of so-called “democracy”. If you have no power at all - and the peasants in the West have very little - then what is the point in participating in the charade?
In the foreword to the George Schwab translation of Carl Schimtt’s “Political Theology”, Tracy B. Strong argues that Schmitt commented on this point:
"Schmitt, with explicit reference to Max Weber, sees danger in the increasing sense of the State as “a huge industrial plant” (PT, 65). Increasingly this plant “runs by itself… [and] the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty is lost” (PP, 48). For Schmitt, this is a developmental process. As he lays it out in the Barcelona lecture, the history of the last 500 years in the West shows a common structure, even though as the controlling force has changed, so also has what constitutes evidence, as well as social elite. Thus in the sixteenth century the world was structured around an explicitly understanding with God and the Scriptures as foundational certainties; this was replaced in the next century by metaphysics and rational (“scientific”) research and in the eighteenth by ethical humanism, with its central notions of duty and virtue. In the nineteenth century economics comes to dominate…and, finally, in the twentieth century technology is the order of the day. And this is at the core of his claim that ours is an age of “neutralisation and depoliticization”: whereas all previous eras had leaders and decision makers, the era of technology and technological progress has no need of individual persons….
The point of [Schmitt’s] analysis of the centrality of the exception for sovereignty is precisely to restore, in a democratic age, the element of transcendence that had been there in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries— Hobbes, Schmitt believes, understood the problem exactly. Failing that, the triumph of non-political, inhuman technologizing will be inevitable."
RE: .....the era of technology and technological progress has no need of individual persons….
Perhaps it is the "leaders and decision makers" who think this.....I suspect that "individual persons" are probably thinking the opposite.
Ryan, Is Bowling Alone still a book worth reading now or is there a book that better captures the same kind of data and insights for today?
That's a good question, Lee. It's getting pretty long in the tooth now. The majority of the analysis was conducted 30 years ago. And the book is just a tome. If I recall correctly it's over 600 pages.
I usually assign my students this address that Putnam gave in 1995.
https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS293/articles/putnam1.pdf
It really summarizes the argument in a pretty succinct way.
Much thanks for the link.
It is a landmark book. The research of Prof Putnam is meticulous. The way he sorted out and tested the possibilities as to the cause of the disaffiliations paralleled lab science reasoning. He includes the testing of his various hypotheses in the text. It's been almost a quarter century since publication but the trends we find now follow the same trajectory that he outlined, with one very important difference, I think. While disconnect from diverse groups or big tents, that is offset by a focus on identity. People still band together but during the later years of Prof Putnam's data collection we start seeing the underpinnings of which group you belong in and litmus testing that requires intersectionality with groups of parallel purposes. That frames our politics today. When Bowling Alone started assessing data, really back to pre-Depression times when neighbors played cards and the iconic institutions of today were founded, the barriers to entry into groups were starting to break down. Anybody could be a Scout, Democrat, or Episcopalian. Not everybody could go to your school or stay at your hotel. His data analysis, though, begins a little later, at the peak of America as universalist, the opening of institutions to people who were previously excluded prior to his 1960s starting point. Despite the length of the book and its technical analysis, it is not that difficult to read.
RE:...with one very important difference, I think. While disconnect from diverse groups or big tents, that is offset by a focus on identity.
Is this (the atomization/focus on individual), perhaps, the era/time period when "identity _____________" (fill in the blank) began to take shape?
Not a rhetorical question....btw.
For anyone interested in a digestible summary, there's a new documentary coming out by one of Putnam's former students called *Join or Die*, which examines the book's legacy and the present relevance of its arguments. It's very, very good. Here's my colleague interviewing the director, Pete Davis: https://unrival.network/unrival-spaces-join-or-die-with-pete-davis/
Thanks for this info!
One thing I wonder is how you teach kids what has even been lost?
I was born in the early 80s. My only memory of the high civic engagement world is from my childhood, seeing the lifestyle of my grandfather and certain other WW2 generation people who had kept up their involvement in so many organizations for 30+ years.
I like to use the example of Fred Flintstone belonging to the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo. Which seems weird to us today but was indicative of how people spent time in those days. The only problem is that now when I bring up the Flintstones with Gen Z kids, they've never even heard of it. Or the Jetsons. I think one effect of the Internet generation, and possibly also ubiquitous cable TV, is that the content they watched growing up was much more current. Meanwhile in the 1980s I was watching a lot of the same Loony Tunes shorts that my parents had gone to see at the kids' matinee in the 1950s.
Per Putnam's title, Fred was also in a bowling league. He wasn't bowling alone back in the Stone Age of the 1960s.
I am not Ryan, but I am a social scientist who taught for a long time.
I had an exercise that I did with my undergrads: read this book from 20+ years ago and wrote about two arguments that have stood up and two arguments that have not.
If I were teaching today, I would put Bowling Alone on the list of readings that students could choose from.
And, TBH, I would love to see what an aspiring Gen Z social scientist might do with it.
Not a social scientist, just an old-line pastor in a midwestern town. But, I resonate with the title of this article if not the actual content. Post-COVID (as if we are post-COVID, but anyway...), I'm finding it harder and harder MYSELF to engage in socially constructive activities. I have been one of those pastors who is always involved in the community - serving on boards, leading groups in community service, taking youth on mission trips and to cook at the homeless shelter - you name it I was there. It came naturally. But now, it's hard work - I have to convince myself that it's important, when once I just lived and breathed it. I don't know why. I don't fit in the nothing-in-particular category, obviously. In my mind I know collective participation is worth it. But my heart isn't in it anymore. I am literally "dropping out of everything," at least, almost everything. I wonder why. Sometimes I think it's because, as hard as I've worked in the past, it all came crashing down in March 2020. Our church members went to vitriolic war with each other over the most minor inconveniences and took it out on me. Now our congregations are just a shell of what they were - and I suspect it's because those who've gone feel some of the same malaise that I do.
Just my 2 cents....
RE: "I don't know why....I wonder why."
I'm a former health care journalist....covered aging/caregiver issues. I cite my street cred (former profession) only because I've been reading/seeing a lot, lately, about how exhausted people are: it's not just post-pandemic, getting-back-to-the-new-normal exhaustion. It's election coverage exhaustion, what's-going-on-in-the-rest-of-the-world exhaustion; caregiver/multigenerational households exhaustion; doing-the-do/volunteer exhaustion, etc.
A truism (but also putting some of the exhaustion in context): The older we get (which beats the other option) the less emotional and physical energy we have....which may provide at least a partial "answer" to the two above statements....in/of which you are not alone in making.
PS. Thanks to Louis (below) And I'm adding here "there are no absolute truths" exhaustion, perhaps the hardest exhaustion to deal with.
The share of Americans with no particular religious or political beliefs is still pretty small, even if it is growing fast. If I'm doing the math right it went from 1.2 percent in 2012 to just under 4 percent now.
This does seem like a significant trend but to understand it fully you'd need to oversample this group and get a more granular sense of who they are: gender, race, age cohort, et cetera.
It's my impression that these "Dropouts" are the least likely to answer survey questions making it a monumental task to collect data from them.
Ryan, I wonder if there is still something going on with the nothing-in-particulars and maybe some reluctance among them to identify as atheists given the old "anti-atheist" social stigma? This is very much spit-balling here, but I'm wondering if well-educated (also probably well-informed, well-read) atheists no longer shy away from identifying as atheists in America (strength in numbers!), while the less educated folks are still in what might be socially unsafe bubbles or maybe even still harbor some of that old "atheist = evil" stigma (I know it took me forever to overcome that having been raised a Southern Baptist)? Probably like so much in social science, I'm guessing there are some folks that fit that bill but who knows how many...
All of this opting out of social situations where you meet other people face to face is really dangerous. Gen Z, when they are political, have this almost sociopathic disregard for the human dignity of the people they disagree with. You see it on the absolutely puritanical left or on the right where old school racism is in style (https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/04/the-new-racist-right-are-uniquely-dangerous). Without some basis for understanding the shared human experience, I think we're in for some really dark decades ahead of us.
Wonderful phrase, your "sociopathic disregard." Definitely nails "that" attitude.
,"
My take-away from this, is that there are more amd more people who don't fit into, or don't wish to be put into categories, or be defined by other people's views and opinions. Especially true of the millennial generation. Contrary to your opinion that this is a worrying trend and a reflection of apathy, I see it as a reflection of young people thinking for themselves, finding new ways to describe themselves, and engaging in ways that aren't caught by the type of survey questions being asked. And even older generations will tick a box that comes closest to their the position if there is not a question that perfectly matches their position. An important question often missing in surveys is "none of the above", so a responder will tick the next best option such as "don't know". And there is also the problem that the largest group are those that don't answer surveys, for any of these reasons.
Ryan, pieces like today make me question my own objectivity in following you. 90% of what I read feels like fodder for my own confirmation bias, lol.
With that caveat: Have you seen any work that decomposes group affiliation by what people stand for vs. what they stand against?
Proscriptive norms are great and all, but they are really hard to build a consistent and healthy community around.
People need something to believe in, not just to believe against, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that's a good question. I have a bit of data that has questions like: How important is the following to you. And then it has a whole list of stuff like being an American, family, religion, etc.
It's about as close as I can get on this but I remember it wasn't that satisfying. Like, everyone said family was super important. I should try and revisit that.
Excellent (glass half-full or half-empty) observations.
Ryan, Is there anyone responding to this? This apathy or hopelessness is indeed troubling. Who would you suggest we read to dive into this deeper.
I'm wondering if the NIPs just don't have any time to spare to get involved in anything other than surviving.
Fascinating article! You write: Atheists and agnostics report a very high level of educational attainment—"nothing in particulars" do not. That’s actually one of the key findings in "The Nones."
Do you mean religious Nones have significant overlap with nothing in particulars? In other words, they are essentially the same group? Or do you just mean both groups have lower levels of education?
There are three groups that make up the Nones: atheists, agnostics, and nothing in particulars.
Did you mean "religious Nones," or something else?
I wonder how much of the definitional decline is defensive obscurity. Particularly by those who are less verbally inclined and less formally educated. "refuse to classify themselves in the traditional way" sounds like a much safer choice when any traditional definition provides an easy standard library of social attacks for ill-wishers or passerbys playing verbal games you default lose based on legibility/eloquence. Sharing pearls with pigs and getting torn apart sounds like plenty of modern discourse for that group.
“Atheists and agnostics report a very high level of educational attainment—"nothing in particulars" do not. “
Maybe because atheists and agnostics are the ones who are educated enough to use the terms “atheist” and “agnostic” in the first place, in contrast to the people in the “I dunno. Your mom?” category?
I think there is a causality problem here. It can't be true that people who became NIPs between 2008 and 2023 also chose not to go to college in that time, unless they were of college age or less in 2008. So a more accurate description is that the people who changed from a stated religious affiliation to NIP after 2008 were far more likely not to have attended college.
And, while religious affiliation has declined across a range of measures, including attendance, political participation, as measured by voter turnout, has grown strongly.
Just a thought re: .. .political participation, as measured by voter turnout, has grown strongly.
Partisan fear (i.e. both parties) could be responsible for some of that turnout...and the absence of real/actual political activity.
Thanks. Sometimes I wonder if I'm overthinking things I read on Rev/Dr. B's always insightful posts.
The answer could be a simple as the apparent trend that "there are no absolute truths".... by other people's "tribe" or even your own "tribe". In other words, "I alone am the only source of absolute truth... or that things I "like" are "my truth". Or it could be that people are so busy they only read headlines for entertainment, not information. But the "covid effect" definitely accelerated the "privatization" of socializing to online rather than in groups meeting in person.