For those of you who have just picked up this series, I highly recommend that you start with the piece, “The Four Types of Nones.” It will help give you a broad overview of the work that Tony Jones and I undertook with The Nones Project. In today’s article, the goal is to try and get you acquainted with the first type of none - Nones in Name Only (NiNos). We admit that this name is overly reductive. Yes, the NiNos are significantly less religious and spiritual than Protestants or Catholics. But at the same time, they have an openness to spirituality and religion that far surpasses the other three types.
One of the problems that we struggle with in social science is to get people to answer our survey questions “correctly.” I don’t mean, “answer them the way that we would like them to.” I mean, “answer them in a way that reflects their actual reality.” That seems to be especially problematic with the NiNos. About one in five non-religious Americans is a NiNo, and as you will see over the next couple of graphs, we could make a reasonably strong case that it’s not appropriate to throw them in the same category as the Dones or the Zealous Atheists. If we think about religion as a continuum from incredibly devout to completely secular, the NiNos would be right in the middle of that range. In fact, they may actually be a bit closer to the ‘religious’ side of things.
Here’s a heatmap showing how NiNos answered questions about religious and spiritual importance.
It’s readily apparent what quadrant of this heatmap is barren: the “not too” and “not at all” boxes on both dimensions. The NiNos are not turned off to religion or spirituality. They are, in fact, fairly open to both. Notably, not a single respondent fell into the bottom-right quadrant (highly religious but not spiritual).
Instead, the top row of the graph is where they reside. In fact, two-thirds of all NiNos say that spirituality is very important to them. But the share who score high on that dimension and low on religiosity is not that large — just 26% of the sample. Instead, the top right quadrant is where you find a huge chunk of them. Their most popular response? Spirituality is very important to me and religion is somewhat important.
Here’s a stunning stat. If you sum together the four squares in the top right for the NiNos, it’s 66%. When you do the same calculation but use the ‘religious’ sample (those who say they are Protestant, Catholic, etc.), it’s 73% of the sample. This is what we mean when we say they’re religious: they look a lot like religious Americans, but that is not how they perceive themselves.
I think I can hazard a guess as to why this group is such a large share of the nones: because they aren’t super familiar with some key religious terms. When we asked our screening question about their present religion, they were given the traditional list of options like Protestant, Catholic, LDS, Jewish, etc. My hunch is that a big chunk of them just don’t know what the word Protestant means.
When we asked about present religion, among those who identified as religious, 31% said that they were Roman Catholic. But the most popular option? “Something else.” This was chosen by 35% of the folks in the religious sample. Protestants were only 21%. And I have some other evidence that backs this thesis up, too.
Among the four types of nones, guess which one has the lowest level of education attainment? It’s the NiNos. There was only one cluster that we created where the share with a high school diploma or less exceeded those with a college degree — the Nones in Name Only. In our sample, 34% of them stopped at high school, while 26% had earned a four-year degree.
For those of us who are working very hard to get the “right” answers when it comes to religion, this should be a major wakeup call in how we ask religion questions. This confusion isn’t new. I explored it in a paper in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion a few years back with the title, “The consequences of response options: Including both “Protestant” and “Christian” on surveys.” The upshot is simple — lots of young people don’t know what the word “Protestant” means, and if we continue to only include that option it’s going to lead to underestimating the share of Christians in the United States.
Setting aside that methodological point, there’s still plenty that we can learn about the contours of non-religion by taking a careful look at the NiNos. For instance, this is religious attendance among the four types of nones compared to Protestants or Catholics.
The finding that should really jump off the screen is the fact that 14% of NiNos report attending a house of worship on a weekly basis. Can someone really be a none and go to church frequently? It certainly stretches the definition. In contrast, just 38% of the NiNos are never attenders. Of course, that’s much higher than Protestants or Catholics. In this sample, about 15% of each group never darkened the door of the church.
But you can also clearly see that NiNos are way more likely to attend a house of worship than the other types of nones. I mean, there’s no other cluster where more than 3% are weekly attenders. And among the other three groups over 70% are never attending. So, from this angle, the NiNos are probably twice as likely to attend compared to the other three types.
What about a question about prayer frequency? This one is even more illuminating in my mind.
In our sample, 35% of Protestants said that they were praying multiple times per day. That was ten points higher than Roman Catholics. (That’s a finding so startling that it probably deserves its own post, which I may do later). But the NiNos stand out—their prayer life is remarkably robust. I actually think it may be appropriate to say that they are more likely to pray than many people who identify as Christians.
In fact, our data indicates that just 1% of NiNos say that they never pray. Among the other three types of nones, 64% indicate that they have no prayer life at all. It’s interesting that the algorithm found this variable to be incredibly helpful in sorting out the four types of nones when doing the clustering. This is a question that is included in a whole bunch of datasets, but I’ve never really thought to analyze it. I just figured everyone would lie about prayer frequency, but this makes me reevaluate that position.
But let me show you one more graph that does a very good job of illuminating just how different the NiNos are compared to the other types of nones. We asked the entire sample this question: “Think of the following scale as running from zero religious behaviors (0) to frequent, routine religious behaviors (10). Religious behaviors might be prayer, worship attendance, fasting, following dietary laws, etc. Where would you place yourself when you were the most religious (noted in the question above) and where would you place yourself now?”
One question that we really wanted to answer for ourselves was if the nones were never that religious to begin with. That would mean that when they started identifying as non-religious, it wasn’t a drastic shift in their overall outlook. Not only did we ask about their level of religious engagement at the peak of religiosity, but also their current level. Here are the mean scores for the four types of nones.
It’s pretty apparent here what we mean when we say that the NiNos are clearly the most religious type of none. The average score for current religiosity was 5 out of 10. That’s insanely high. For comparison, among Catholics the mean score for current religiosity was only 6.1. It was 6.4 for Protestants. The average NiNo is just a click below the average professing Christian.
What should come as little surprise then, is the fact that NiNos reported a higher level of peak religiosity than the other three types of nones. The mean score for the NiNos was 6.5/10. That was about a point-and-a-half closer than the Spiritual But Not Religious (at 5.1). For the Zealous Atheists and the Dones, their peak of religious behavior was only 4.1. As we will see in future posts, those two groups are easily the furthest from religion. This result points to the fact that they were never that religious to begin with.
So, what do we make of the NiNos? Well, it seems like a whole lot of them are Protestants, they just don’t really know what that means. So, if an evangelical is reading this and thinking, How can I evangelize the NiNos? The answer is, just teach them what they already are! Surprisingly, 20% of NiNos self-identify as evangelicals—suggesting they may align with the label even if they didn’t choose it in earlier questions. This is not a group that needs to be converted; it just needs to be informed a bit more about religious terminology.
And for those of us who do religion surveys, let’s make it standard practice to include a “Just Christian” response option. If we do this it will likely have two results. One is that the share of nones will actually shrink just a little bit. The other is that it will give us a clearer picture of what non-religion looks like in the United States.
The code for this post can be found here.
About a year ago, I wrote the foreword for a book called Becoming a Future-Ready Church which was written by Daniel Yang, Adelle Banks, and Warren Bird. The book has won a number of awards over the prior twelve months and the team is hosting a four week online cohort to accompany the book’s success. You can find out more about how to register by clicking this link.
Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
Feels like a branding problem, honestly. Lot of people feeling like they don’t want to identify as Christian because it’s associated with closure and Christian nationalism. But that could be me projecting my experience onto the field.
Is there a way of checking it against political self-identification??
Spiritual and religious are vague terms. I'm pretty well educated and well read, but I'm not sure what each means. Might be better to distinguish 'belief in some kind of god' versus 'willingness to attend church'?