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??
American Christianity has a HUGE "branding problem."
I am not suggesting every church community should hire a PR team, a social media manager, and embrace the "seeker-sensitive" movement. But they should realize that a (relatively) small fraction of American Christians are defining publicly what it means to be Christian for the rest of the country, and are doing so along increasingly narrow political and socio-economic lines (and not so much theological ones). This has been somewhat true since the 80s, but has really ramped up in the last 8-10 years.
e.g. "If you're a Christian you must also think ______, you must also support _______, you must be against _____ ." A small sect of Christians are dictating what "Christianity" means in the eyes of the public, and they are (CLEARLY) alienating many many Christians in the US.
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'?
Interesting, my daughter is in college and she has to fill out an information form at the beginning of each year. They have a long drop-down list for religion and there was not one thing in there that described my daughter so she had to choose "other." We go to a non-denominational, evangelical church and my daughter goes on Sunday, Monday and Thursday and she is very engaged but there was no category for her in the survey, so the data isn't capturing a highly engaged Christian.
In reading this its hard to wrap my head around the idea that a significant number of people are unfamiliar with the term protestant. I would be curious to learn if there is any survey data around Christian beliefs or is what we are talking about more like an American civic religion.
My sense is that there is a divide between Protestant denominations and community churches which are theoretically Protestant. The former have a history and a defined set of beliefs. The latter may have beliefs but it is much more about a feeling -- I guess you could call that spirituality --the sense of being connected to the divine. But in these places people seem rather uninterested in Church history and long standing debates about theology (debates I might add that once were the source of war).
There's the "does a fish know what water is" theory of people that live in very homogenous communities where it is really odd to meet someone that isn't Protestant.
Ryan, your picture of the NiNo's as church-going, praying and ranking spirituality high leads me to wonder: are NiNo's sitting in church, but not "buying" what they are hearing from the pulpit? (I don't mean political or practical messages, but theological/doctrinal claims.)
Are they experiencing a sort of epistemic disconnect? Could that be assessed?
Thank you so much for this analysis! As one raised Roman Catholic and, ultimately, became a mainline Presbyterian minister with three earned academic religion degrees, my high school and young adult years were all about being non-denominational evangelical. And I was riding the rapidly expanding wave of church participation. We hated "religion" as evidenced by the massive sales of the 1970s book ,"How to Be Christian Without Being Religious." Most all of us non-denoms were in church three or more times a week, and yet were counted in the Nones., since we were neither Catholic nor Protestant ("Protesting what? I'm just a Christian. I love Jesus"). Tragically, the non-denoms have largely fueled the Christian nationalism movement. And every post-national-election analysis has left all news commentators baffled by the red wave they hadn't seen coming. It was driven by fervent non-denominational "nones "
Please help the other analysts to come up with a new category(ies), as you have suggested here.
At what point do you stop including NiNos with the "nones," and just including them as another category within Christians? Surely it is skewing any data on non-religious people when 30% or more are actually religious but just claiming not to be.
“My hunch is that a big chunk of … [NiNos] just don’t know what the word ‘Protestant’ means.
…
lots of young people don’t know what the word ‘Protestant’ means, …”
My university classroom experience (1981-2022) with over 15,000 students - most of them juniors or seniors in STEM majors at a southern US R1 state university - and the results of various surveys of knowledge of religion (e.g., PRRI, Liggonier, Baylor Institute, Pew, ARDA) provide me with strong evidence that a lack of consistent understanding of many terms used in surveys is very common. A small sample of relevant terms: “spiritual,” “God,” “sin,” “soul,” “faith,” “physical,” “thought,” “miracle,” “supreme,” “perfect,” “Hell,” “Heaven,” “science,” “religion,” “Christian,” “Jewish,” “Buddhist.” When such terms are used in connection with others, the uses interact to create even greater difficulties in interpreting results. The terms are often used not primarily (or sometimes at all) to express concepts but to signal attitudes that align respondents with certain groups and/or to reject alignment with (other) groups. Of course, someone might use a term to express a concept and to indicate alignment.
This makes interpreting survey results very difficult if not infeasible. So, some sort of check on respondents’ usages of key terms within surveys would seem always to commend itself - unless one knows in advance that relatively stable, shared uses are dominant. I very much appreciate your attempts to do some of the needed checking.
[On the use of “spiritual” to express a concept, this article offers useful considerations:
[Christian Smith, _Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters_ (Princeton University Press, 2017) argues that “God” is best understood in the sociology of religion to include any being with superhuman powers; Santa Claus, Superman and Marvel Comics superheroes would qualify. Some do hold such an elastic notion of what “God” means. In what ways would that matter to any given survey's results? That would seem to be worth investigating if the meaning is likely to matter.]
I think this is all very interesting when compared to Pew Research and the religious typologies they came up with in 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/08/29/the-religious-typology/. It would seem like most Dones would fall into their "Solidly Secular" category, while many SBNRs and Zealous Atheists would fall under "Religion Resisters". NINOs might be harder to pin down -- I would think at least some would fall under the "Spiritually Awake" category. And for anyone who's interested, you can take the quiz for free here if you want to know where you land: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/quiz/religious-typology/.
But I do see Ryan's larger point about the problem of religious classification. Is a NiNO who attends a non-denom church every week and engages in other religious practices any more of a "none" than, say, someone who identifies as Catholic but almost never goes to worship or prays much?
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??
American Christianity has a HUGE "branding problem."
I am not suggesting every church community should hire a PR team, a social media manager, and embrace the "seeker-sensitive" movement. But they should realize that a (relatively) small fraction of American Christians are defining publicly what it means to be Christian for the rest of the country, and are doing so along increasingly narrow political and socio-economic lines (and not so much theological ones). This has been somewhat true since the 80s, but has really ramped up in the last 8-10 years.
e.g. "If you're a Christian you must also think ______, you must also support _______, you must be against _____ ." A small sect of Christians are dictating what "Christianity" means in the eyes of the public, and they are (CLEARLY) alienating many many Christians in the US.
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'?
Interesting, my daughter is in college and she has to fill out an information form at the beginning of each year. They have a long drop-down list for religion and there was not one thing in there that described my daughter so she had to choose "other." We go to a non-denominational, evangelical church and my daughter goes on Sunday, Monday and Thursday and she is very engaged but there was no category for her in the survey, so the data isn't capturing a highly engaged Christian.
In reading this its hard to wrap my head around the idea that a significant number of people are unfamiliar with the term protestant. I would be curious to learn if there is any survey data around Christian beliefs or is what we are talking about more like an American civic religion.
The top of this post may be helpful: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/my-religion-is-something-else-504
My sense is that there is a divide between Protestant denominations and community churches which are theoretically Protestant. The former have a history and a defined set of beliefs. The latter may have beliefs but it is much more about a feeling -- I guess you could call that spirituality --the sense of being connected to the divine. But in these places people seem rather uninterested in Church history and long standing debates about theology (debates I might add that once were the source of war).
There's the "does a fish know what water is" theory of people that live in very homogenous communities where it is really odd to meet someone that isn't Protestant.
Ryan, your picture of the NiNo's as church-going, praying and ranking spirituality high leads me to wonder: are NiNo's sitting in church, but not "buying" what they are hearing from the pulpit? (I don't mean political or practical messages, but theological/doctrinal claims.)
Are they experiencing a sort of epistemic disconnect? Could that be assessed?
Thank you so much for this analysis! As one raised Roman Catholic and, ultimately, became a mainline Presbyterian minister with three earned academic religion degrees, my high school and young adult years were all about being non-denominational evangelical. And I was riding the rapidly expanding wave of church participation. We hated "religion" as evidenced by the massive sales of the 1970s book ,"How to Be Christian Without Being Religious." Most all of us non-denoms were in church three or more times a week, and yet were counted in the Nones., since we were neither Catholic nor Protestant ("Protesting what? I'm just a Christian. I love Jesus"). Tragically, the non-denoms have largely fueled the Christian nationalism movement. And every post-national-election analysis has left all news commentators baffled by the red wave they hadn't seen coming. It was driven by fervent non-denominational "nones "
Please help the other analysts to come up with a new category(ies), as you have suggested here.
--Jack Haberer
At what point do you stop including NiNos with the "nones," and just including them as another category within Christians? Surely it is skewing any data on non-religious people when 30% or more are actually religious but just claiming not to be.
"it just needs to be informed a bit more about religious terminology."
Maybe they just don't want to align with a label like "protestant" because it is unnecessarily divisive?
“My hunch is that a big chunk of … [NiNos] just don’t know what the word ‘Protestant’ means.
…
lots of young people don’t know what the word ‘Protestant’ means, …”
My university classroom experience (1981-2022) with over 15,000 students - most of them juniors or seniors in STEM majors at a southern US R1 state university - and the results of various surveys of knowledge of religion (e.g., PRRI, Liggonier, Baylor Institute, Pew, ARDA) provide me with strong evidence that a lack of consistent understanding of many terms used in surveys is very common. A small sample of relevant terms: “spiritual,” “God,” “sin,” “soul,” “faith,” “physical,” “thought,” “miracle,” “supreme,” “perfect,” “Hell,” “Heaven,” “science,” “religion,” “Christian,” “Jewish,” “Buddhist.” When such terms are used in connection with others, the uses interact to create even greater difficulties in interpreting results. The terms are often used not primarily (or sometimes at all) to express concepts but to signal attitudes that align respondents with certain groups and/or to reject alignment with (other) groups. Of course, someone might use a term to express a concept and to indicate alignment.
This makes interpreting survey results very difficult if not infeasible. So, some sort of check on respondents’ usages of key terms within surveys would seem always to commend itself - unless one knows in advance that relatively stable, shared uses are dominant. I very much appreciate your attempts to do some of the needed checking.
[On the use of “spiritual” to express a concept, this article offers useful considerations:
Doris Reisinger, “What is spirituality? The challenges of a philosophical definition,” _Sophia_ (2025) 64:117–131 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-024-01034-w.]
[Christian Smith, _Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters_ (Princeton University Press, 2017) argues that “God” is best understood in the sociology of religion to include any being with superhuman powers; Santa Claus, Superman and Marvel Comics superheroes would qualify. Some do hold such an elastic notion of what “God” means. In what ways would that matter to any given survey's results? That would seem to be worth investigating if the meaning is likely to matter.]
I think this is all very interesting when compared to Pew Research and the religious typologies they came up with in 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/08/29/the-religious-typology/. It would seem like most Dones would fall into their "Solidly Secular" category, while many SBNRs and Zealous Atheists would fall under "Religion Resisters". NINOs might be harder to pin down -- I would think at least some would fall under the "Spiritually Awake" category. And for anyone who's interested, you can take the quiz for free here if you want to know where you land: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/quiz/religious-typology/.
But I do see Ryan's larger point about the problem of religious classification. Is a NiNO who attends a non-denom church every week and engages in other religious practices any more of a "none" than, say, someone who identifies as Catholic but almost never goes to worship or prays much?