The Nones Project: Religious Upbringing

For those of you who have joined the subscription list of this newsletter, let me get you up to speed. Tony Jones and I won a Templeton Grant titled Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America. The centerpiece of that project was a large survey of the non-religious in America. We managed to ask about 12,000 of them all kinds of questions about religion, spirituality, and their approach to a wide range of matters relating to faith. We ended up using artificial intelligence to generate four categories for the nones:

Nones in Name Only (NiNos) – These folks are easily the most closely attached to traditional religion.
Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNRs) – Individuals who score very low on measures of conventional religiosity but much higher on a spirituality index.
Dones – Folks in this category are about as far away from religion and spirituality as one can possibly get.
Zealous Atheists – These folks are also pretty far from traditional religion, but they are also a lot more hostile to it, and they are actively trying to get people to leave religion behind.

Each of the hyperlinks above will take you to a much longer post that describes each group in quite a bit of detail.

When we present these data, one thing we are constantly asked is: how did these folks grow up? Did a bunch of Dones and Zealous Atheists grow up in deeply religious households and spend their adult years trying to run away from that as much as possible? Are those NiNos really just folks who have always been fairly religious? Well, we did ask a nice little battery of questions designed to help us understand the religious history of these four types of nones.

For instance, we asked them, “At any point in your life, would you have described yourself as a ‘born-again’ or evangelical Christian, or not?”

In our entire sample, just 15% of folks said that they were evangelical at any point in their lives. This is an important point to emphasize: the idea that a huge portion of the nones in modern America are really exvangelicals is empirically false. In fact, exvangelicalism represents only a very small sliver of the non-religious in the United States. And if the nones are about 30% of the population, and only 15% of them would have ever said that they were evangelical, that means the share of all Americans who are exvangelicals is about 4–5%. That’s lower than the share who say that they are atheists.

But when I break that down by the four clusters, what you find is that a whole bunch of NiNos would have identified as evangelical at one point in their lives (almost one-third, in fact). Here’s another wild fact about the NiNos: 20% of them said that they were currently evangelical. Which is even stronger evidence of a point we have been making about the nones for a while now—the current survey approach of asking about religious affiliation is not working. There is a small but significant share of folks who say that they are non-religious but then look a whole lot like religious people on other metrics. It’s a real problem.

The other groups are pretty much in line with what I would have expected, though. Among the Zealous Atheists, about 15% were once evangelicals (which is where they learned how to proselytize). But the cluster of nones who are the least likely to have ever been evangelical are the Dones. Keep that one in the back of your mind, because I am going to come back to it a bit later.

Not only did we ask whether the respondent would have ever said that they were evangelical, we also asked folks whether their mother or father would have said that they were evangelical when the respondent was growing up.

Given what I described in the first graph, this result pretty much tracks with what we would expect. The NiNos were easily the most likely to have grown up in a deeply evangelical household. About 17% of them said that both parents were evangelicals. The group that was next in line were the Zealous Atheists, with 12% saying that both their mom and their dad were born-again. This aligns perfectly with the order in the first graph, and the conclusion is clear: people who grew up with evangelical parents were more likely to identify as evangelical at some point in their lives. Your childhood religious environment matters a whole lot.

The two groups that were clearly not growing up in strongly evangelical households were the SBNRs (85% said that neither parent was evangelical) and the Dones (89% said neither parent was evangelical). Again, that Done result really does jump off the screen. These are folks who had almost no evangelical influence at all during their formative years. Only 9% said that they were ever evangelicals, and only 6% grew up in a household where both parents were evangelical.

Just to make that clear, I calculated the share who grew up “all the way” evangelical—both parents said that they were born-again, and so did the respondent.

For those wondering, less than 6% of our entire sample of non-religious folks grew up in a household where evangelicalism was pervasive. So, again, that’s really strong empirical evidence that kids who grow up with two deeply devout, born-again parents are not that likely to join the ranks of the nones in adulthood. I know those narratives seem like they are all over social media and in bookstores, but in reality those people are statistically rare.

These numbers track pretty closely with what one would expect from the prior bits of analysis. NiNos were the most likely to grow up in households that were consistently evangelical. But even among this cluster, it only represented about one in ten of them. Zealous Atheists were a bit further behind at 7%, and both the SBNRs and the Dones were at the bottom (4% each). But again, notice that the Dones are at the bottom of the list. They were the most likely to grow up in secular spaces.

But here’s where poking around in this data for hours comes in handy. I know an interesting fact about the Dones that is really worth thinking about: they are the oldest cluster of the four.

In terms of a generational breakdown, 35% of all the Dones were Boomers. That’s nine points higher than any other group. Another 24% of them are members of Generation X, which means that almost 60% of the Dones were born before 1980. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of American religious demography knows that this was a time when the nones were an incredibly small share of the population. The overall non-religious share of the country didn’t move above 7% until the early 1990s.

So think about that for a second. The prototypical Done is a Boomer who has almost nothing to do with religion right now. But they were also raised in a household that was very loosely tied to born-again Christianity as well. That’s definitely not what I would have guessed when we started this research project. I would have assumed the opposite: that older nones grew up in deeply devout homes and then spent their adult years trying to rid themselves of any religious attachment.

I know that all the previous measures have been about evangelical identification. But there are other ways that households could be very religious while having nothing to do with born-again Christianity. We also asked our respondents to indicate how often their mother and father attended religious services when they were growing up. This should give a more complete picture of the religiosity of the household.

In some ways, this comports with what we’ve already discussed. For instance, the cluster that was most apt to grow up in an environment where both parents were religiously active were the NiNos. Again, that tracks with our understanding of this group—they are still very close to religion as adults. That’s a finding that shows up over and over again across multiple data sources: religious adults grew up in religious households.

But I want to go back to those pesky Dones again. Notice that 21% of those folks indicated that they grew up in a household where no one went to church very much. The only group that was higher than that were the Zealous Atheists at 26%. But then here’s where the picture gets muddier. Among the Dones, one-third said that both parents were highly religiously engaged. That was a larger share than among the SBNRs and the Zealous Atheists. So, if the Dones were the least likely to grow up in a deeply evangelical household, but a sizable share grew up with parents who attended weekly, how can that be possible?

Well, I think age plays a role here again. Evangelicalism wasn’t that pervasive during the childhood of Baby Boomers. Remember, this was the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve written about this before, but membership data from the late 1950s indicate that half of Americans were on the rolls of mainline churches. That’s a key thing to keep in mind—the Dones weren’t surrounded by a born-again culture, but they also were not raised in an environment devoid of religion. It was, more than likely, mainline Protestantism that was pervasive in their youth.

To finish up, I wanted to provide a single bit of analysis that answers the question: what percentage of each cluster was raised in Christian households where both parents were going to church on a regular basis? So this is the percentage who had a mother and a father who identified as Protestant or Catholic and were both attending weekly.

In the full sample, 21% of the nones were raised in “very active Christian households.” Again, the idea that lots of Christian parents end up raising a whole generation of nones is not empirically accurate. The ranks of the nones swelled because a lot of marginally attached folks just stopped the charade of calling themselves Protestants or Catholics and started saying that they were nones.

But what is interesting about this graph are those Dones, again. Remember that they were easily the least likely to grow up in deeply evangelical households. Only 4% said that both parents were born-again and so were they when they were kids. But here, 26% of Dones said that both parents were Christians who went to church frequently. This is strong evidence of my earlier hunch—these Dones were raised in a period of American history in which Christianity was pervasive, but not evangelicalism in particular. It was more mainline Protestantism that carried the day.

But then compare the Zealous Atheists here to the earlier graph. Only 13% of ZAs said that they were raised in very active Christian households, compared to 7% who grew up in an environment that was deeply evangelical. You know why? Because this is the youngest cluster of the four. Only 14% of this group are Boomers, compared to 35% of the Dones.

This is why I think that Zealous Atheists are the modern evolution of the Dones. Lots of Dones were raised in a religious environment, but it was the milquetoast world of Methodists and Episcopalians. That’s the religion that they rejected. But they aren’t mad about it, and they aren’t spending their time trying to convince others to leave religion. On the other hand, if ZAs were raised religious, it was more than likely in an evangelical space. That’s why they are so mad about religion and why they are spending so much time trying to deconvert others. A passionate upbringing lends itself to a passionate backlash.

It’s not just whether you were raised religious or not—the kind of religion also seems to matter a great deal as well.

Code for this post can be found here.