[& Public Life]<\/p>\n\n\n
Now, you have the speakers\u2019 biographies in front of you in the packets, so I won\u2019t go into great detail, but because scholars and journalists are sometimes less familiar with each other than they should be \u2013 and because one of the purposes of these luncheons is to bring the two communities together \u2013 I will say what everyone in the academy already knows, which is that professors Michael Hout of New York University and Claude Fischer of the University of California at Berkeley have had a very great impact on the field of the sociology of religion in the United States. One of their seminal papers way back in 2002 in the American Sociological Review noted a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who do not identify in surveys with any particular religion. The size of that group, sometimes colloquially called the \u201cnones\u201d \u2013 N-O-N-E-S \u2013 had at that time doubled from about 7% to about 14% of the U.S. public, and in all of our surveys \u2013 in GSS, in Gallup and in Pew Research surveys \u2013 those numbers have continued since then to climb. Mike and Claude, in their paper, very persuasively, I think, showed that the increase in the size of this religiously unaffiliated population had both a generational component and a political component, and they offered the hypothesis that politics might actually be one of the factors driving the rise of the \u201cnones.\u201d Now, a few months ago, Mike told us in an email that he and Claude re-examined \u2013 using the GSS and more recent data \u2013 looked deeper at the causes of growth in the unaffiliated, and they have promised to share their latest thinking on that with us today.<\/p>\n\n
Now, you\u2019re all undoubtedly familiar with the Gallup poll and with its editor-in-chief, Frank Newport. In addition to overseeing all of Gallup\u2019s surveys, which is an enormous endeavor, Frank has a particular interest in religious trends, as he showed in his book, which came out last December, \u201cGod Is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America.\u201d Frank\u2019s book took a different perspective on religious trends in America, that is, I think, in many ways a valuable counterpoint or corrective to the emphasis on the \u201cnones,\u201d and we look forward to hearing more about that. And, of course, we at the Pew Research Center also have some interesting data on religion in America, and I can\u2019t think of a better person to discuss it than Greg Smith, our director of U.S. religion surveys.<\/p>\n\n
So our format for this event is simple: Mike and Claude are going to speak for about 15 minutes on their research on religion using the General Social Survey, and then Frank will offer his insights on trends on religion in America in Gallup surveys, also for about 15 minutes. Then Greg will follow by briefly discussing the Pew Research Center\u2019s findings on the rise of the religiously unaffiliated and other important trends. Greg has the home-court advantage, so he gets less time. Then we\u2019ll invite the rest of you around the table to join us in the conversation. I should point out, this event is on the record and we are taping it. You are free to live tweet it, if you like. We\u2019re taping this event. We expect to have a transcript on our website in a week or two. With that, I\u2019ll turn it over to Mike and Claude.<\/p>\n\n[laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
OK, let me put this trend \u2013 this increase from 7% to 14% and we will see on further \u2013 into context. Four comments here. One, Americans have long been, and still remain, the most religious people among the peoples of the Western nations, both in faith and in practice, especially compared to Western nations that are predominantly Protestant, as the U.S. is. Second, church membership and religious activity have waxed and waned and cycled over American history, but over the long run, over two centuries, both membership and activity have in net increased. Americans\u2019 level of religious involvement peaked in the 1950s. Despite recent downward tendency, religious involvement is still higher than it was a century ago. Third, Americans\u2019 relationship to their churches exemplifies the volunteerism that is central to our culture; that is, it is not that Americans are individualistic, they do believe in community, but it is a community that is voluntarily chosen and rechosen every day. When Americans are disappointed in their churches, they exit and usually look for another church. Recently, for many nonconservatives, it is organized religion as a whole that has disappointed them, and many of the disappointed now opt for labeling themselves as \u201cspiritual, but not religious.\u201d Finally, politics and religion have long mixed. Typically, Americans\u2019 religious identities drive their politics, but often it is the other way around. We know that to be true in other countries, such as when the Irish embraced the Catholic Church as a way of expressing their opposition to England, and the Poles did the same with respect to Soviet rule. There are signs that now, in the United States, we are seeing political polarization starting to drive people\u2019s religious identification. A question for future research is whether it will also end up driving faith itself. Now, I\u2019ll turn it over to Mike.<\/p>\n\nMICHAEL HOUT, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY:<\/b> Thank you, Claude. I\u2019m also very happy to be here today, and the agenda is pretty simple. We\u2019re going to update the trends through 2012 \u2013 the most recent GSS data that we have \u2013 and then to try to begin a discussion of what is behind the generational change, which we identified in the 2002 paper as accounting for about 40% of the overall trend, and we\u2019ve now \u2013 We\u2019re going to update that estimate to about 60%, actually, of the total trend \u2013 as that has to do with the fact that the so-called greatest generation is passing away and being replaced by millennials who have much less attachment to organized religion and organized anything else, as near as we can tell.<\/p>\n\n
First, on the trend, the blue is what we had under observation in the 2002 data, that is to say they trend up through the year 2000. The little dots are the actual percentages in a survey; the vertical bar showed the 95% confidence interval around that; and what we see here is a trend line that we estimate using a kind of moving average called a \u201clocally estimated regression.\u201d<\/p>\n\nIn contrast to that \u2013 The little \u2013 the line here with the dashed lines \u2013 skinny, tight \u2013 are the estimates that we published in 2002, and we probably over fit the data a bit \u2013 we ran the flat line too far and thus, put this line too steep. If you just make a projection of this upward, we should see about 27% of Americans had no religion in the 2012 survey and, in fact, what we observe is closer to 19%. So what the new estimates provide is, first of all, an earlier starting point and, most importantly, a much more gradual trend over time than we saw in the other one, and that gradual trend is one of the fingerprints of generational trend and is \u2013 generational change and generational succession \u2013 and is therefore part of the basis for our decision that \u2013 or our estimate that the generational trend accounts for about 60%, rather than our previous estimate of 40% of the secular trend over time. This is what we had in the way of a political gap to look at the \u2013 in the year 2000, that was in the 2002 paper.<\/p>\n\n
Since then it has continued to widen. There\u2019s still not much of a trend toward no religion among people who describe themselves as politically conservative, whereas for those who describe themselves as politically liberal, it is continuing upward and is in the neighborhood of 40% now.<\/p>\n\n
The trick here \u2013 and I think everybody can understand that. All right. That\u2019s the politics, and Claude articulated our argument on that pretty clearly just a minute ago. Without a Ph.D. in demography, the generational argument might be a little hard to fully understand. If generations account \u2013 generational succession completely accounted for the trend over time and the fraction of Americans who have no religious preference \u2013 now when we break out Americans by the year in which they were born, what we would see would be a bunch of flat lines, the ones where the oldest cohorts ending at some point, when there aren\u2019t any longer enough of them who are \u2013 and they\u2019re being replaced by people who initially are too young to talk in a survey of adults, but we start to hear from, and that\u2019s \u2013 If cohort completely explained everything, these lines would all be flat. In fact, we see a lot \u2013 to a first approximation, these for older people are, in fact, flat. For the baby boom generation, we actually saw a movement toward religion as they married and started having kids. We all quit church in college, but then it came time to maybe baptize that kid and some of us made the move back, but there is, net on that, a slight upward movement after about 1986 for the baby boom cohorts showing a movement away from organized religion; we call that a period of vet.\u00a0 It\u2019s much stronger for the so-called Gen X\u2019s born 1966 to 1975. This, we actually had very little data on this cohort, 1976 to \u201985; if anything, it was moving away \u2013 toward religion, maybe echoing some of this life cycle stuff.<\/p>\n\nWhat we see now in the \u2013 oh, and that explained 40%. Flat lines would\u2019ve explained 100%; because they dip and rise, it\u2019s only 40%. What we see since is a lot of flatness for the baby boomers and the millennials, and a movement away again among the so-called millennials and this group that we have born since \u201985 that we have very few observations on. We\u2019ve simply plugged in their average to show that the average is higher, but we really can\u2019t estimate a trend for them.<\/p>\n\nMeanwhile, we lose track of those born 1900 to 1915, and we\u2019re starting to lose track of the 1916 to 1925 cohort, and so the new estimate is that this generational succession, the fact that these people are replacing these people in the population, accounts for 60% of the overall trend away from organized religion. What explains these cohort differences, they are \u2013 it\u2019s just another clock. We\u2019ve replaced the clock that runs in real time with one that tracks people\u2019s birth rate. We really have \u2013 there\u2019s no substance to birth \u2013 we give them all these names: greatest generation, millennial, and so on, but there isn\u2019t much in the way of substance behind that.<\/p>\n\n
[in 2012]<\/p>\n\n\nYounger people do have doubts about whether God exists, although there\u2019s not much of a trend toward atheism or agnosticism among them to the extent to which there\u2019s any going on; it\u2019s for people born since \u201975, that baby boomers moved away from \u2013 well, in the earliest cohorts, half of people thought the Bible was literally the word of God. By \u2013 those born in the \u201950s and \u201960s, it was one-third, and there\u2019s been no change since then. So we\u2019ve combined all this information into a secularization index and put that in our statistical model as well. So our statistical test consists of \u2013 We control for standard demographic characteristics, putting dummy variables for each single year of the General Social Survey, and then a thing called the \u201ccohort random effect\u201d that I\u2019m not going to tie you down with here; I could put you all to sleep right after lunch \u2013 but it\u2019s a way of marking how big the cohort\u2019s succession factor is. Then we refit that that model with cultural attitudes, the values measured having to do with whether people think it\u2019s more important to parents to instill thinking for themselves in children rather than obedience in children, and our secularization index, and if these things account for the cohort difference, then a coefficient representing how spread out these cohorts are will trend toward zero and be replaced by these three factors. Also, they\u2019ll get a regression weight, a coefficient that represents how important it is and we\u2019ll \u2013 we can talk about that. Oh, yes, there\u2019s one important point about it, that\u2019s why I\u2019m in this slide.<\/p>\n\nThese are just \u2013 we\u2019re just measuring differences between cohorts; we\u2019re not entering a person\u2019s actual answer to a question about \u201cDo you think it\u2019s more important for a kid to think for himself or obey her parents?\u201d or \u201cDo you think that gay sex is always right or always wrong?\u201d but rather the cohort\u2019s representation. So these are zeitgeist measures as a way of getting away from the prospect that having a religion is going to influence how people answer this question, but the cohort\u2019s average is going to reflect the overall view of people of that generation. So when we run a statistical horse race, here is what we get. First, in the null model, the measure of the spread of the cohort random effects is substantial and statistically significant. When we enter our three explanatory factors, it\u2019s still statistically significant, but only 20% is big. So we\u2019ve accounted for about 80% of the cohort with our three variables \u2013 actually, with two of the three. It\u2019s just the countercultural attitudes regarding sex and drugs, and the value on thinking for oneself, rather than obedience. The secularization, even though we have leaned heavily over and cherry-picked a couple of indices that are really strongly indicative of secularization, comes through with absolutely no effect; the standard error and the coefficient are the same size to a first approximation.<\/p>\n\n
[laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> That\u2019s very, very provocative. I\u2019m sure there\u2019ll be a lot of questions about it, but let\u2019s hear from Frank, from Greg, and then we\u2019ll open up the discussion.<\/p>\n\n[Research]<\/p>\n\n\n
Part of what I\u2019m looking at here takes off from a comment that Claude made in his introduction there, which is to keep in mind that we\u2019re talking about, in religious identification, one measure of religiosity, but it is not necessarily correlated with or the same as many other possible measures of religiosity. We\u2019re talking about a self label in a question in a survey, which is, \u201cWhat is your religious identity?\u201d We have our question wording in this panel here \u2013 excuse me, in the paper. We\u2019re talking about one question where the respondent is asked to choose among those labels to self-report for themselves to a survey interviewer, and although all the other questions of religiosity that we measure in a survey context are also self-reports, they can be different, because some of them were asking a respondent to self-report on past behavior, most notably, church attendance; others were asking respondents to access cognitive states like importance of religion; and then there is another series of measures that we saw on Mike\u2019s chart there of belief in various aspects of religion, which are the same thing, asking people to assess what\u2019s going on up in the brain. But when we asked religious identity, in some ways it\u2019s different because we\u2019re asking people to publicly put a label on themselves in a given arena, and I think that there \u2013 and that\u2019s what I want to talk about here, is that part of what we may be seeing here is a change in the way that people choose to label themselves, rather than something which represents a more fundamental change in some of the other measures of religiosity that we can look at.<\/p>\n\n
Now, I give as an example, LGBT status, which without resorting to data \u2013 this is a hypothetical \u2013 it\u2019s certainly possible that the underlying percentage of Americans who on a variety of personal measures would be LGBT, the percentage who would self-identify as LGBT, over time could rise for no other reason than the social and normative environment in which people are asked to self-label could change. In other words, it\u2019s much easier, we can presume, in this hypothetical situation, for a person to say, \u201cYes, I\u2019m LGBT,\u201d today than it might have been in the \u201950s or \u201960s, even though that same person in terms of personal behavior and lifestyle was exactly the same. So that\u2019s kind of what I want to look at here, based on some data, and see if we can get some preliminary interest in and focus on some aspects of this labeling hypothesis.<\/p>\n\n
I\u2019m using a telescoped microcosm of data, which may or may not be legitimate. We have longstanding Gallup data, but we don\u2019t ask questions \u2013 GSS, of course, has the tremendous virtue that it\u2019s been held quite constant in many of the ways questions are asked over time, and although a lot of what Gallup has asked had been quite constant \u2013 like \u201cDo you approve or disapprove of the performance of the president?\u201d \u2013 a lot of religious measures have varied over the years, and they\u2019re not always in the same survey and in the same context as other measures of religion, so it\u2019s somewhat more difficult to go back in our data \u2013 two decades ago, \u201950s, \u201960s, and \u201970s \u2013 and replicate a wide variety of questions asked in the same way that we might be asking today. But starting in January \u2013 Jan. 2, 2008 \u2013 Gallup began its daily tracking program. For a variety of reasons, we\u2019re very fortunate to be able to do it and basically, we interview 1,000 people a day, which means we\u2019ve now interviewed up through the end of last year more than 1.7 million people and luckily, we were able to embed in that survey, among a variety of other questions, several \u2013 not a huge battery, but several \u2013 questions on religion which we can then look at and analyze. So what I\u2019ve chosen to do here is look at about 300,000+ interviews that we conducted in 2008, fast-forward to the exact same questions asked using the same methodology in 2012, a five-year period, and saying, Aha! If we can look at some changes over this five-year period, maybe we\u2019ve provided some insights into what might be happening had we been able to go back to the \u201950s or \u201960s, and compare it to where we are now, which we\u2019re not, because we didn\u2019t have the same battery of questions back then.<\/p>\n\n
[Laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n[laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n[The chart below has been updated to reflect the correct percentages for \u201creligion not important.\u201d<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n[it\u2019s]<\/p>\n\n\n
So I\u2019ll pause for a moment. I\u2019m going to show you the other indicator, but this is probably the heart of the matter as far as what I\u2019m talking about here today \u2013 is that the change came in self-identification is a \u201cnone\u201d among people who in both surveys were already not very religious. So the suggestion is \u2013 the hypothesis is, if what we\u2019re seeing here is a change in labeling, rather than a change in underlying religiosity \u2013 at least to some degree, that\u2019s what seems to be contributing to it \u2013 phrased differently as I did a moment ago in my LGBT example, it can be hypothesized that these people for whom religion wasn\u2019t important now feel freer to tell a survey interviewer that they don\u2019t have a religious identity. Or there are other cultural forces at work which make it easier for them to say, \u201cYeah, I don\u2019t have religious identity\u201d in 2012 than they did in 2008, even though underneath it all, they were \u2013 religion was not important in both samples. In other words, if it had been a panel holding constant for the moment, test, retest and all that, we would have supposed exactly the same \u2013 people wouldn\u2019t have changed in religion \u201cimportant,\u201d but they did change, in fact, in labeling. So that leads us to the conclusion that we are seeing the change in self-labeling on religious identification that is not consistent with a change in self-reports and other measures of religiosity.<\/p>\n\nNow, I\u2019m showing you the same thing; this is a \u2013 just to show you what happened overall, there was very little change here, only 0.2% in the percent of the sample who said that religion was not important between the two samples.<\/p>\n\n
[in each group]<\/p>\n\n\nSo again, it\u2019s a second piece of evidence along the same route that the first piece of evidence on religion\u2019s importance led us to, and that is that we are seeing the change in this microcosm five-year period of time along people who are not religious in either sample. It\u2019s just something about \u2013 and as I say, at the end of the paper \u2013 I\u2019m not sure exactly what that is, and that\u2019s room for additional exploration and probably taps into a lot of the other things that the other scholars here have been looking at. Something has changed over time which makes these people who never attended church to begin with feel freer to tell a survey interviewer, \u201cYeah, I don\u2019t have a religious identification.\u201d In other words, in \u201908, 7% more of them said, \u201cI\u2019m Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Baptist,\u201d whatever it was, than was the case in 2012. Now, over this period of time, we had a slightly higher change in the religious attendance, but not much. This was fairly constant. The \u201cnevers\u201d went up slightly, but none of these changes in religious attendance approximated as we saw in that first chart, the 3.2% that we found in \u201cnones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Just to reinforce the same thing, this is our Gallup grouping of people. It\u2019s just a restatement of what you\u2019ve seen because these categories are based on an algorithm with those two \u2013 not a fancy algorithm \u2013 but an algorithm of those two questions on religious importance and church attendance, and by grouping these people, we see the same thing among the people we classify as very religious. Basically, these are people for whom religion is personally important and who are frequent religious service attenders \u2013 very little change in the percent \u201cnones\u201d \u2013 the percent change \u201cnones\u201d as we would imagine \u2013 because you\u2019ve just seen previous slides \u2013 came among those people who are unreligious.<\/p>\n\nSo all of this compounds to the same basic conclusion, that we have seen the change \u2013 at least in these five years \u2013 in the already unreligious who are just changing the way they label themselves rather than changing the labels.<\/p>\n\n
Now, there\u2019s a lot of issues here that we can talk about, and just because I don\u2019t go to church and say religion is not important doesn\u2019t mean that I couldn\u2019t have shifted even more to not going to church or religion was even less important in those two times, because these are not highly refined categories, they\u2019re broad categories. But what we can say is that we did not see the change in these broad categories of religiosity over time. We did see the change in the \u201cnones,\u201d and the \u201cnones\u201d came for the most part among people who are unreligious both in \u201908 and in \u201912, but for some reason in \u201912 felt \u2013 or just to say it behaviorally, for some reason in 2012, told survey interviewers \u2013 300,000 of them \u2013 that they had no religious identity to the tune of about 7.5% more than they did back in 2008.<\/p>\n\nNow, because the data here, I wanted to show \u2013 this is very little change in these over time. I wanted to show you just a couple of other things here that may get at these \u2013 food for thought before my time is up and I get the hook here, OK? We wanted to look at the change in \u201cnones\u201d just in these five years \u2013 change in religious affiliation. Basically \u2013 and I think you all will agree if you\u2019ve looked at it \u2013 when you look at the change in \u201cnones\u201d in the long-term, the Catholics have been relatively stable. Most of the \u201cnones\u201d have come out at the hide of Protestants, or what we call \u201cProtestant and other Christians.\u201d In other words, that\u2019s been the change over time. Catholics, for a variety of reasons, including immigration of majority-Catholic Hispanics over time, have been able to hold their own, but in these five years, they actually fell by a point, Protestants fell 2.2%, and others, there were slight changes over time in our religious identification; Muslims actually went up slightly; and this, of course, is the 3.2% that we\u2019re seeing. But I thought this was \u2013 and we\u2019ll come back to that in a bit.<\/p>\n\n
Here is something that our large sample sizes allow us to do, which I always think is fascinating \u2013 we can actually look at religiosity by each age point. George W. Bush is 67; we know that because he just had a stent put in, right, in Dallas. So we can actually find 67-year-olds and look how religious they are, and compare that to George W. Bush as an example.<\/p>\n\nTrends are the same; this is a well-established pattern of the relationship between age and religiosity that we\u2019ve all seen before. It starts out \u2013 these are negative numbers going up. People are more religious when we capture them at age 18 or 19 because they\u2019re still in the home, we think, but as you\u2019ve just said, everybody goes to college and ceases to be religious. I say everybody \u2013 people who go to Brigham Young and others may not, but for the majority of college students, we see \u2013 religiosity going up, and it comes down in some measures; it\u2019s been plateauing in the 40s and 50s, and then after the 60s, it goes down.<\/p>\n\n
I talk a lot about it in my book. This group of people who are 65 and over are going to double in the next 20 years, or at least just a couple of years \u2013 already the leading age of the baby boomers, including George W. Bush, are already past that point. But what\u2019s going to happen is these baby boomers move to this cohort, right? That\u2019s a fascinating question: Will it be generational, so that they, too, will become more religious, or will it be a cohort where they don\u2019t? Maybe you all can answer that question, but that\u2019s a real key to the future of religion, is what\u2019s going to happen? My point here is there\u2019s a pretty high correlation between all these measures. So cross-sectionally, the \u201cnones\u201d are getting at the same thing as these other measures, as we look at it by age, which I think is an interesting pattern, although there are some differences. Look at the 2008 and 2012, by age percent of \u201cnones.\u201d Statistically, there\u2019s a main effect for a year, right? In other words, we can see that for \u2013 in every little \u2013 right here in the early 50s, and I\u2019m not sure what\u2019s going on here, but statistically, there\u2019s a main effect for years, so no matter what your age, you\u2019d drop between 2012 \u2013 back 2008 and 2012. Everybody at every age point became less religious.<\/p>\n\nSo the 87-year \u2013 well, that\u2019s a little aberration there, but 80-year-olds that we interviewed in 2008, now when we interviewed 80-year-olds in 2012, they\u2019re more likely to be \u201cnones\u201d than they were back in 2008. You can notice, if you\u2019re perspicacious, which fits into your point here, there\u2019s a little wider gap there, and so I put this together here. This is the change in \u201cnones\u201d by age point between 2008 and 2012, and it was highest among the young generation. So we have more of a shift here.<\/p>\n\nIn other words, people of this age now have shifted higher than average in terms of \u201cnones\u201d compared to 2008 than other people. These are baby boomers when they\u2019re about 47, 48 and on, and I\u2019m not sure why they didn\u2019t shift, but we actually have some shifting up here as well, which is a totally separate question, but we are seeing some more change in that younger cohort than we do find elsewhere.<\/p>\n\nJust a couple of final things; I found this fascinating \u2013 this is back to my Catholic idea; this is cross-sectional. This is only 2012. This is age across the bottom axis, and then we see, of course, the percent of \u201cnones,\u201d which is here, declining with age and that\u2019s the standard pattern that we see with measures of religiosity, and of course, what\u2019s happening is, as I\u2019ve said, it\u2019s coming out of the hides of Protestants, right? Young people are significantly less likely to identify as Protestant or other non-Catholic Christian, and then that goes up as we get to older people cross-sectionally here, exactly concomitant with the decrease in the \u201cnones,\u201d and the Catholics have stayed fairly stable.<\/p>\n\n
One hypothesis here is that Catholics \u2013 it\u2019s more of an ascribed characteristic, as I\u2019ve talked about, for Catholics, than it is for Protestants. \u201cProtestants\u201d is an amalgam of literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different denominations. You mentioned religious switching; I wrote a paper on that once. \u201cProtestant\u201d is a weird conglomeration of religions in this country where, I think, people may get habituated with the idea that they can change, and they can shift and so it may be easier, the hypothesis would go, for somebody who is a Protestant to change to a \u201cnone\u201d than a Catholic, which it may be a little more like an ascribed characteristic sociologically, where if you\u2019re Catholic, you\u2019re a Catholic going forward. May be or not be the case, because of the Hispanic immigration, as I\u2019ve mentioned earlier, that accounts for a lot of the stability in the percent Catholic in this country over time, but at least in this cross-sectional sample in 2012, we can see that, generationally, it\u2019s the \u201cnones\u201d and the Protestants that are kind of playing musical chairs as we go across the age spectrum. I think that\u2019s an interesting finding as well, and it leads to some speculation for some other things we can see going forward. I have the same data in here in a couple other ways, in some scatter plots, but it\u2019s basically showing the same thing.<\/p>\n\n
The bottom line out of this is that in a microcosm of five years in our samples, at any rate, we have seen the percent \u201cnones\u201d go up, which we would expect based on the chart we\u2019ve seen and projections and every other bit of data we have. It looks like the significant majority of that increase in \u201cnones\u201d has come among people who were not religious in \u201908 and who are not religious in 2012 either, based on extrapolations from two cross-sectional, not panel, surveys. So we\u2019re seeing an increase among people who aren\u2019t religious, which leads to the hypothesis I discuss in the paper, and it\u2019s only a hypothesis because there are many other angles to come at it. But what we are seeing here, at least in the last five years, is people who are not very religious to begin with but who were clinging to a religious label earlier, are now finding it \u2013 freer, if that\u2019s the word, or finding that they are in a situation when an interview calls them up, it\u2019s easier for them to say, \u201cYeah, I\u2019m none, I\u2019m no longer going to cling to the label I cling to from early socialization because basically I\u2019m not religious so now I\u2019ll make all my labels conform.\u201d So that\u2019s a hypothesis that we can talk about and how that might extend back to where we are going back in time.<\/p>\n\n
[Research]<\/p>\n\n\nGREG SMITH, PEW RESEARCH CENTER:<\/b> Well, yes, this is conjecture, without having looked into it in any great depth. But when I see different surveys come out with different estimates of the share of the population that belongs to one religion or another, the number one thing I look to is question wording. I think that question wording \u2013 especially about religion \u2013 can make a big difference. I think that \u2013 In fact, you see this in our own data. We actually changed the way that we ask about religion here at the Pew Research Center back in 2007. Up until 2007, when we asked about people\u2019s religious affiliation, we asked a close-ended question \u2013 we provided a number of options for people to choose, but we did not provide people with the explicit option to say they had no religion. They could volunteer that, and if they volunteered that they weren\u2019t religious or had no religion or were atheist or agnostic, we recorded them as such, but the burden was on them to volunteer it. We did not list it among our options.<\/p>\n\n
We were watching over the years all these same trends that we\u2019ve just been discussing in the growth of the rise of the \u201cnones\u201d and we became convinced that not to provide people with that option would \u2013 to continue to not provide that option would be to miss in some ways what was clearly becoming a growing and increasingly important way that people identify themselves religiously. So in 2007, we changed the way we ask about religion, and we added the option for people to tell us what their religion is \u2013 we gave people the option to say they had no religion. The question we now ask is, \u201cWhat is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox \u2013 such as Greek or Russian Orthodox \u2013 Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else, or nothing in particular?\u201d And we take three of those categories \u2013 atheist, agnostic and nothing in particular \u2013 and that\u2019s what we call the \u201cnones.\u201d I think it\u2019s pretty similar to most other surveys. But when we made that switch in 2007 \u2013 and that\u2019s all we changed was the way we asked the question \u2013 we saw an immediate uptick in the percentage of people identifying as \u201cnones\u201d by about three or four points. It went from about 12% before the switch to about 15% or 16% right after the switch. So that\u2019s what we\u2019ve experienced, and I think \u2013 that\u2019s why I say \u2013 that\u2019s the first thing I look to, to try to understand differences.<\/p>\n\n
[The following exchange has been edited for clarity.<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> OK, just to clarify, in Pew Research surveys, that last response option is \u201cnothing in particular,\u201d while in General Social Surveys, Mike and Claude, the last response option is \u201cno religion,\u201d have I got that right?<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n\n
FISCHER: <\/b>\u201cNo religious preference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Wait, the response option offered to respondents in the GSS is \u201cno religious preference\u201d or \u201cno religion\u201d?<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> The stem question is \u201cWhat\u2019s your religious preference?\u201d The response options are: \u201cWould that be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, something else or nothing at all, no religion?\u201d<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> OK, so in the GSS, it\u2019s \u201cno religion,\u201d in Pew Research surveys, it\u2019s \u201cnothing in particular.\u201d Frank, what\u2019s the wording of the Gallup question about religious affiliation?<\/p>\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> We do not have atheists or agnostics, but it is \u201cno religion.\u201d \u201cCatholic, Mormon \u2026 another religion, or no religion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
[Nods of assent from the panel.<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
[all]<\/p>\n\n\n
OK. So what I thought I\u2019d try to do is, number one, echo Alan\u2019s gratitude to our guests. It\u2019s a real honor for me to be on this panel and to participate with such esteemed scholars of religion, and I\u2019ve really been looking forward to this session; I\u2019m looking forward to our discussion. I will try to keep my remarks brief. What I thought I would try to do is to try and reconcile what might be two countervailing pieces of evidence. On the one hand, we have seen that the \u201cnones\u201d have been growing, and we have seen that there is reason to expect their ranks to continue to grow. If the change is being driven largely by generational replacement, and young people are more likely to be \u201cnones\u201d than older people, then as they age into the population, the country should become less religiously affiliated. At the same time, there\u2019s other evidence that would lead us to expect maybe there will be a religious resurgence. If people get more religious \u2013 If people become more religiously affiliated as they age, then as baby boomers get older, as the 76 million baby boomers in the United States age and become retired, if they become more religiously affiliated, then that might lead us to expect that religious affiliation will increase, that we\u2019ll see a reversal of some of these trends. I don\u2019t know which of those two things will happen, but I can, I think, try and offer a couple of things that we might keep in mind to help us anticipate the future.<\/p>\n\n
[as]<\/p>\n\n\nSo let me just try to clarify what I mean by some of that. Number one, the religious \u201cnones\u201d are not uniformly secular, and to equate them with nonbelievers would be a real mistake. We\u2019ve talked a little bit about how we define this group in our surveys. If you tell us you are atheist or agnostic, or that your religion is \u201cnothing in particular,\u201d we count you as a \u201cnone.\u201d But you can see here that most \u201cnones\u201d are not atheists or agnostics. Instead the big majority are people who describe their religion as \u201cnothing in particular.\u201d They have not sworn off religious belief altogether; they\u2019re simply not personally associated with any particular religious organization.<\/p>\n\nWe can also see quickly that many people who are religiously unaffiliated tell us they pray. Four-in-ten \u201cnones\u201d overall tell us that they pray at least once a month, and more than half of that big group of people who say their religion is \u201cnothing in particular,\u201d more than half of them say that they pray once a month.<\/p>\n\nWe see the same kind of thing when we ask people, \u201cHow important is religion to you and your life?\u201d About one-third of the religiously unaffiliated say religion is at least somewhat important to them, and that includes four-in-ten among those whose religion is nothing in particular.<\/p>\n\n
Now, obviously, on these measures, the \u201cnones\u201d are substantially less religious than the public as a whole; that\u2019s also worth remembering. But nevertheless, you can see that it would be a mistake to assume that this group consists entirely of nonbelievers or people who are not religious. It\u2019s also not clear, as we\u2019ve discussed, that the growing ranks of the \u201cnones\u201d is an inherent indicator of secularization, and this chart makes much the same point that we\u2019ve already seen. It shows trends in religious disaffiliation by frequency of religious attendance over time.<\/p>\n\nWe use religious attendance as a rough but very valuable indicator of religious commitment, and what we can see is that just over the last five or six years, among people who tell us they seldom or never attend religious services, there\u2019s been a sharp uptick in the ranks of the \u201cnones,\u201d from 38% in 2007, all the way up to 49% today. At the same time, among those people who attend religious services more frequently, the trend line has been very stable; there\u2019s been no change in the percentage who described themselves as religious \u201cnones.\u201d Now, over the same period of time, there really hasn\u2019t been much change in how often people say they attend religious services. The number of people who say they seldom or never attend really isn\u2019t changing very much. It\u2019s just that these people are becoming more likely to describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated. So this is just more evidence of what we\u2019ve already seen.<\/p>\n\nSo it would be a mistake to conflate the \u201cnones\u201d with nonbelievers, and it would even be a mistake to infer that the growing share of the population that\u2019s unaffiliated is necessarily an indicator of secularization. But I think this is just as important \u2013 It would also be a mistake to conceive of the \u201cnones\u201d as a group of spiritual seekers or practitioners of new and alternative forms of religion. As I\u2019ve mentioned, I point this out not because anybody in this room necessarily makes this assumption, but I have talked to people over the years who do seem to make that mistake. This, I thought, was a really interesting question we asked on a survey last year. We asked those people who described their religion as \u201cnothing in particular\u201d \u2013 We asked them directly, \u201cWould you say you\u2019re just looking for the religion that would be right for you, or are you not doing this?\u201d And the overwhelming majority, nine-in-ten, tell us, \u201cI\u2019m not doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n\nThere are \u201cnones\u201d who say that they believe in yoga as a spiritual practice and not just as exercise. I thought that was an interesting question. There are \u201cnones\u201d who tell us they believe in reincarnation, that they believe in astrology, but it\u2019s not a majority of them. And they do not express these kinds of beliefs at rates any higher than what we see among the general public.<\/p>\n\n[Religion & Public Life Project Director Luis Lugo\u2019s]<\/p>\n\n\n
So they\u2019re not uniformly secular, but I also want us to remember that this does not mean that this large group of people is out there just searching, just waiting, just looking for the religious organization or religious community that\u2019s right for them. They\u2019re not doing that either.<\/p>\n\n
Let\u2019s turn and think about what will the future hold for American religion? Will \u201cnones\u201d continue to grow as a share of the population? Will the United States become more religious, or will it become less religious, or will it stay about the same? I, by my nature, am a pretty cautious person, so I try to stay away from too much in the way of prediction. I think it\u2019s much easier to look backward, and if we do that, as Frank pointed out, we can clearly see that people do tend to become more religious as they age in some important ways, and I think prayer is a good example of this. These data come from the General Social Survey, and it\u2019s just a little different way of classifying some of the generational cohorts than what we saw earlier. What you can see here \u2013 and what it shows \u2013 is the percentage of people who say they pray every day among different generational cohorts and how that has changed over time. And what the chart shows is that as a group of people gets older, they do become more prayerful.<\/p>\n\nBack in the late 1980s, about 45% of baby boomers told us that they pray every day \u2013 or told GSS interviewers that they pray every day. Today, or most recently, two-thirds of baby boomers say that they pray every day, and you see the same kind of pattern with each of the other generational cohorts. Forty-two percent of Gen Xers said that they pray daily in the late \u201990s. Today, 58% of the same group of people, Generation Xers, tells the GSS that they pray every day.<\/p>\n\n
[laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\nNow, if people became more religiously affiliated as they aged, then these lines would be sloping downward from left to right, because they would be becoming less unaffiliated. But that\u2019s not what these lines look like; they are all flat. Members of the silent generation \u2013 born between 1928 and 1945 \u2013 are just as unaffiliated today as they were way back in the early 1970s. I think the baby boom generation is interesting as well. In the late \u201970s, 13% of baby boomers were religiously unaffiliated; today, 15% of baby boomers are religious \u201cnones\u201d \u2013 no change whatsoever. So if past is precedent, then this would suggest that we won\u2019t necessarily see an uptick in religious affiliation as the population ages.<\/p>\n\nNow, we have seen and we\u2019ve shown and we\u2019ve discussed how and why being religiously unaffiliated is not necessarily an indicator that someone is a nonbeliever. And so growth in the size of the \u201cnones\u201d does not necessarily mean \u2013 It does not necessarily mean that the country is becoming less religious. I think that point is absolutely correct, but I would also conclude by pointing out that one key characteristic, and I think and I know this is the argument that you have made as well, perhaps the key defining characteristic of the religiously unaffiliated population is that they do not go to church. They might pray. We\u2019ve seen that. They might say that religion is at least somewhat important to them personally. Many of them believe in God. But they do not attend religious services. In our recent surveys, we find that just 5% of religiously unaffiliated people tell us that they attend religious services at least once a week, and three-quarters of them tell us that they seldom or never attend religious services.<\/p>\n\n
So I would end, and I hope that this isn\u2019t too unsatisfying or disappointing, but I would end my remarks with a question \u2013 and maybe we can consider it in our discussion but I definitely think it\u2019s worth keeping in mind whenever we think about the future of religion in the United States \u2013 and that question is: Over and above what all of these trends suggest about secularization, and regardless of whether the country is becoming more or less religious, what does the continued growth of the \u201cnones\u201d \u2013 combined with their detachment from churches and religious organizations \u2013 what does that suggest for the future of American religion? That is, even if many \u201cnones\u201d are believers, and even if many \u201cnones\u201d say that religion is important to them, what will it mean for American religious institutions and organizations \u2013 and American religion more broadly \u2013 if this group maintains its share of the population or even grows while simultaneously declining to participate in churches and synagogues and mosques? When I think of religion in the United States \u2013 what it means to be religious in the United States \u2013 I think of going to church, going to synagogue, going to mosque. If this group retains its share of the population and continues not to do that, then what will that mean for religion in the United States? One way of thinking about it is that in addition to considering how religious the United States is, we might also think about \u2013 and I know we do, I don\u2019t mean to imply that we don\u2019t, but we might also think about \u2013 how is the United States religious? So I\u2019ll leave it at that and look forward to our discussion.<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Terrific presentations by all of the panelists. Thank you very much. Let\u2019s turn to questions; let\u2019s make this a discussion. I\u2019m just going to remind you of a couple things: This is on the record. We are going to have a transcript of this. You are being recorded. When you want to speak, you need to do two things \u2013 well, three things: raise your hand. I\u2019ll take note. When it\u2019s your turn, push the button, and the red light will go on and then you\u2019re on. And then third, please identify yourself \u2013 your name and your journalistic organization or academic affiliation.<\/p>\n\nDAN MERICA, CNN BELIEF BLOG:<\/b> Hi, guys, thank you so much for doing this. It\u2019s really great. We\u2019ve seen in the last \u2013 a few months even \u2013 a lot of attention given to atheist churches, or these forums people can go to and talk about atheism and come together as a community. How much do you think that will affect the willingness of people to come \u201cout of the closet\u201d and say, \u201cI\u2019m an atheist. I\u2019m an agnostic,\u201d or do you think it\u2019ll have any effect? And what do you think it will do to the numbers that you guys have seen over time?<\/p>\n\n
SMITH:<\/b> It\u2019s hard to know, and I don\u2019t know quite what to make of the different gatherings and organizations that seek to bring together nonbelievers. I\u2019ve read about them, but I think it\u2019s interesting that most people who are religiously unaffiliated tell us they don\u2019t feel any particular need to belong to that kind of an organization. It\u2019s hard to anticipate how they might develop and what impact it might have on people\u2019s willingness to say that they have no religion. But more broadly, and it\u2019s very hard to measure this directly or point to data that provide direct support for this, but I do think that one of the things that\u2019s gone on in American society over the last couple of decades is that it has become more acceptable to say that you don\u2019t have any particular religion. I think that\u2019s part of what we see, and you can see that in \u2013 I think, part of the reason I say that is that there are a number of trends that we measure where people do express some increased skepticism of religion. We have found recently an uptick, for example, in the number of people who say they think churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics \u2013 social and political matters. We\u2019ve seen more people telling us they think there\u2019s too much religious talk in politics, for example, and so to the extent that people\u2019s attitudes about religion might be becoming somewhat more negative \u2013 I shouldn\u2019t overstate the degree of change but to the extent that\u2019s changing, it may well be \u2013 People may well feel more comfortable telling an interviewer that they don\u2019t identify with any particular religion.<\/p>\n\n
FISCHER:<\/b> Yes. I would just add that it\u2019s not a new phenomenon. There were atheist organizations and rallies in the 19th century, and so it\u2019s interesting, but it\u2019s not novel.<\/p>\n\n
MERICA:<\/b> Just the idea though that they\u2019re \u2013 they become regular every weekend, atheists getting together and meeting \u2013 is that \u2013 It might not be novel, but there are obviously organizations and meetings and stuff like that. If it becomes almost like a church-like experience where they go every Sunday, Saturday, whatever day and meet, do you see that as novel or is that \u2013 no?<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> As Greg\u2019s slide showed, 71% of the \u201cnones\u201d aren\u2019t affiliated with anything, including atheism, so they don\u2019t even identify with this group. And so I think it\u2019s a small piece of the action.<\/p>\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> I would just say, I\u2019m always cautionary until we have data. Journalists pick up on a trend and suddenly it becomes something that\u2019s discussed, but whether there are actually more of these than existed before \u2013 or how many, or whether it\u2019s more than a microscopic percent of the country \u2013 is an empirical question, so I don\u2019t think we have much data on those.<\/p>\n\n
SMITH: <\/b>It would be interesting to know how atheists and agnostics interpret our questions about religious attendance. If you are an atheist who\u2019s going to these kinds of meetings every week, would you pick up on that when we ask, \u201cHow often you attend religious services?\u201d and say, \u201cYes, I go to that,\u201d or would that not count? Should we develop a different question? I don\u2019t know. It might be something worth thinking about.<\/p>\n\nERIKA SEAMON, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY:<\/b> I have been doing a lot work on interfaith marriage in America, a lot of qualitative work, and couples articulate this multiple religiosity that goes beyond, Greg, your slide on spirituality, yoga, reincarnation. They\u2019re articulating beliefs in multiple traditions. They\u2019re trying to piece this together. It\u2019s really muddy and messy. They don\u2019t have words to articulate it, but they don\u2019t \u2013 Many of them, in a qualitative sense, have articulated that they don\u2019t like the term \u201cspiritual but not religious\u201d or a \u201ccultural\u201d Catholic or Jew. They refuse to let go of the idea that they still have religious sensation in them, and yet there are no categories for them. So I would be really curious from all of you, actually, how, looking forward, maybe we can start developing questions that, perhaps, would be a subset of the \u201cnothing in particular, no preference\u201d category to really start to get at this multiple dynamic and hybridity dynamic that we\u2019re seeing that continues to be messy. And are there plans to sort of write questions to look at that more deeply?<\/p>\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> Well, the GSS does ask spouse\u2019s religion, does it not?<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> We do, yes.<\/p>\n\n
[that]<\/p>\n\n\n
[of affiliation]<\/p>\n\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> Oh, I thought she\u2019s talking about mixed marriages. Is that a different issue? I mean a Catholic marrying a Jew, that\u2019s what you\u2019re talking about?<\/p>\n\n
SEAMON:<\/b> Right. There\u2019s the Catholic marrying the Jew. And then, now, we\u2019re seeing particularly with the rise of the unaffiliated and new language around \u201cno preference,\u201d it seems to be getting messier. So in the \u201950s, they\u2019d say, \u201cYes, I grew up Catholic. I married a Jew. We decided to raise the children Catholic.\u201d It\u2019s clean-cut. No one likes to talk about not affiliating, but now with this new liberty to talk about disaffiliation, it\u2019s not as neat and tidy, and so a lot of the survey data becomes less helpful in getting to that next layer down, in terms of how these families are actually operating and orchestrating their life. And my sense is that most of these families who decide not to clearly raise their children in one tradition or not \u2013 end up in this \u201cnothing in particular, unaffiliated\u201d sphere.<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> Every 10 years at the GSS we come up with an extensive battery of questions on religion and then trim it down, a couple of them get promoted into the annual survey, and so these would be candidates for 2018. Unfortunately, it\u2019s the years that end in eight. I guess, fortunately, we\u2019ve got several years to come up with the exact wording that might work, and then we\u2019ll try out a dozen or so and maybe one of them will survive. But right now, we don\u2019t have \u2013 This is news to me \u2013 But one of the things we have talked about is asking people as we do with race. We follow the Census Bureau\u2019s suggestion and let people name all they would \u2013 to try for a subsample to ask people to please give us all that apply, and because it\u2019s a face-to-face, it\u2019s not a form \u2013 We don\u2019t have the exact format, and the board is not approving any of this yet, but that may come forward.<\/p>\n\n
One last thing to toss out in this whole issue is that prior to the 1980s, a significant fraction of people were \u2013 About three-fourths of those who were raised with no religion, said they were raised with no religion, nonetheless declared a religion on the first question which is, \u201cWhat\u2019s your religious preference?\u201d For the most part, the religion they named was their spouse\u2019s religion, and increasingly, we see less and less of that all the time. There\u2019s more agreement between the religion the person was raised in and their current religion among married people than with their spouse\u2019s religion than in the past, so there\u2019s less pressure to reconcile it to \u2013 Especially for those who were raised without.<\/p>\n\nSTEVE SCHNECK, CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY:<\/b> Thanks. We\u2019ve been studying the phenomenon of the rise of libertarianism in politics, and it\u2019s interesting that the rising number of people who in some way or another associate themselves with libertarianism or libertarian ideas \u2013 that would include opposition to organized institutions of all sorts, individualism and so on and so forth \u2013 seems to be happening at about the same time we see the rise of \u201cnones.\u201d And I\u2019m wondering whether the panel thinks we\u2019re looking at a similar phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n
FISCHER:<\/b> I\u2019m skeptical. I mean, I think the rise of libertarianism is like another one of these headline things that I don\u2019t know that we\u2019re actually seeing in the data in any significant numbers. Frank probably tracks it better with his more frequent polls, and it\u2019s inconsistent with one of the most dramatic graphs that Mike put up, which is that the growth in the \u201cnones\u201d is all among \u2013 overwhelmingly among \u2013 people who call themselves liberal and negligible among those who call themselves conservative. I would assume most libertarians when given that standard question pick the conservative end of that scale, and we certainly \u2013 There aren\u2019t very many who say, \u201cI don\u2019t like that scale. I\u2019m a Libertarian.\u201d To the extent which we have any data, it would suggest it\u2019s really not part of that story.<\/p>\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> Good question. I don\u2019t know that we can actually track precisely. We don\u2019t say, \u201cAre you Republican, independent, Democrat or Libertarian?\u201d We don\u2019t track that directly. We have a lot of other indicators, but what your question raises, of course, is one of the other major trends we\u2019re seeing in religion, and that\u2019s the rise in unbranded religion, which we\u2019ve all looked at carefully. Particularly in the Protestant domain, if there is growth \u2013 and where there is growth \u2013 it\u2019s unbranded. By that I mean, Bible churches, non-denominational churches, mixed churches, churches with no official denomination of affiliation, so it might be part and parcel of the same kind of phenomenon, where people are feeling freer to move away from traditional institutions or parties or anything along those lines in today\u2019s culture. It\u2019s a viable and soundingly interesting hypothesis we just have to apply data to.<\/p>\n\nNATASHA MOZGOVAYA, WASHINGTON JEWISH WEEK:<\/b> I have two questions: First of all, is this trend of rise of the \u201cnones\u201d more visible among specific religious groups? I mean, for example, specific denominations or something. And second, if we accept this hypothesis that people feel more comfortable to associate themselves as not religious or nonaffiliated, did we hit the ceiling, or with respect to the number of people who feel uncomfortable \u2013 continuing to rise?<\/p>\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> As you saw on the graph and in answer to your first question, it\u2019s absolutely coming among the Protestant domain, which is big. We do not in our ongoing Gallup tracking, unfortunately, track denominations because, as you know, in the GSS, everybody else knows it\u2019s very complex, in the ARIS, and all these surveys try to track denominations. So it\u2019s very difficult to say that the \u201cnones\u201d are coming from Southern Baptist or they\u2019re coming from Nazarene. All we can say is that over time, every graph I think will show that it\u2019s the decrease in those who identify as Protestants, that it\u2019s concomitant with the increase in \u201cnones,\u201d and for a variety of demographic and other reasons, the other big religious group in this country, which is Catholics in the low 20%. Twenty percent of Americans have stayed fairly constant. So in answer to your question, I would say it\u2019s come from Protestants, but beyond that, we don\u2019t have the data to speak to it. Whether we\u2019ve reached a ceiling or not \u2013<\/p>\n\n
[and the Catholics, not the Protestants. That is what you learn from the question on religious origins in the GSS. After asking, \u201cWhat is your religious preference?\u201d we ask, \u201cWhat religion were you raised in?\u201d]<\/p>\n\n\n
[laugher<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> The decline of the Protestants you\u2019re seeing is the fact that for 50 years, they have one less kid than the rest of the population, and their average through that time was less than two. You take a couple and you have less than two kids, you\u2019re sowing the seeds for a long-term population decline, and that\u2019s exactly what we\u2019re seeing. Catholics, on the other hand, had more than two. Their stasis is totally a demographic misdirect.<\/p>\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> By the way, we\u2019re now seeing \u2013 We just looked at generations of Hispanics and I think that Catholic advantage may be lost, even among Hispanics going forward.<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Greg, did you want to add something?<\/p>\n\n
SMITH:<\/b> Well, just to illustrate how interesting and complex this is, I think everything that\u2019s being said here is accurate but it\u2019s at first, at least for me, kind of mind-boggling to figure out how can it be accurate, but it is accurate. So this is what\u2019s happening over time, over the long period of time. This comes from GSS data. The Protestant share of the population is shrinking \u2013 and that\u2019s the point that Frank made \u2013 while the \u201cnones\u201d share of the population is growing, and the Catholic share of the population is holding steady. I like to point out to people that this is an enigma wrapped within a mystery because the Catholic share of the population is holding steady even though Catholics have the most net losses through religious switching of any religious group in the United States. There are four people who say they are a former Catholic for every one person who indicates that they have converted to Catholicism, and there are no other religious groups that I\u2019ve seen that have anything like that ratio of losses to gains. So how can it be then, if that\u2019s what\u2019s occurring, that the Catholic share of the population is holding steady? The answer is there\u2019s these other demographic factors that are serving to offset those losses through religious switching.<\/p>\n\n
The same thing is true \u2013 but from the other direction \u2013 for religious \u201cnones.\u201d Religious \u201cnones\u201d are growing even though their retention rate is among the worst of the religious groups. Although I understand their retention rate is growing, there are more people who leave the ranks of the \u201cnones\u201d than there are for other religious groups. It\u2019s just that their ranks are offset by people becoming nothing after having been raised Catholic or Protestant or whatever the case may be.<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> When you say more people leaving, you mean a higher percentage of people raised as \u201cnones\u201d become affiliated with a religion? They have a worse retention rate than any of the other religious groups?<\/p>\n\n
SMITH:<\/b> Yes, and that\u2019s changing. Their retention rate is getting better over time, but nevertheless, their retention rate \u2013 the share of everyone who is raised as a \u201cnone\u201d who are still \u201cnones\u201d \u2013 is lower. It\u2019s lower than for Catholics. Two-thirds of everyone who is raised Catholic is still Catholic. That is higher than the percentage of people who are raised as \u201cnones\u201d who are still \u201cnones.\u201d It\u2019s just that these changes \u2013 that these differences in religious switching \u2013 have to be considered along with the demographic factors and other things that are going on to understand how it all fits together.<\/p>\n\nAMY SULLIVAN, NEW REPUBLIC:<\/b> Thanks. I just wanted to push Greg a little bit on the issue of \u201cseekers,\u201d especially in the context of the question you left us with, what are the consequences of this growth in the \u201cnot religious\u201d \u2013 especially for religious institutions? Because I think a lot of clergy would look at the numbers of nine-out-of-ten of these unaffiliated saying that they\u2019re not currently looking for the religion that\u2019s right for them and say, \u201cWell, we should just give up. There\u2019s no market for us here,\u201d but how do you, then, explain the four-in-ten of the unaffiliated who pray and who say that religion is an important part of their lives. Is it possible that the question is getting at their current motivation to look for a church and that, in fact, they could be activated as \u201cseekers\u201d from another life cycle event or something in their lives?<\/p>\n\n
SMITH:<\/b> Well, it\u2019s certainly possible, but I\u2019m glad you bring this up because the way that you framed it is actually the way that I have heard it expressed from religious leaders in the sense that, OK, so we know that the \u201cnones\u201d are growing, but since they have a religious pulse, so to speak, that means we can get them back. Maybe they can, and I\u2019m not suggesting that anyone should give up or \u2013 and certainly can\u2019t predict the future. Many of them may become associated with a religion or begin attending church, but I don\u2019t think that that\u2019s a foregone conclusion. And I think that we should keep in mind that not only do they tell us that they\u2019re not looking, not only do they not really tell us that they feel a need to belong to a community of believers, but many of them weren\u2019t going to church to begin with. So one way of illustrating that is \u2013 I\u2019ve talked to religious leaders over the years, some of whom have said, \u201cHow do I reconcile the growth in the \u2018nones\u2019 with the fact that my congregation isn\u2019t shrinking? There aren\u2019t people who are leaving my congregation.\u201d The answer is that the growth in the \u201cnones\u201d is being driven by people who weren\u2019t there to begin with. So it\u2019s not to suggest that nobody among the ranks of the \u201cnones\u201d will become religious or join a religious organization, but I do think that we shouldn\u2019t assume \u2013 as is sometimes done \u2013 that these are necessarily losses or that these are people that are just waiting to be activated. They may become activated, but I don\u2019t \u2013 it\u2019s not so easy as just recapturing people we\u2019ve lost. Does that make sense?<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> The point I hinted at and would like emphasize now is that church isn\u2019t the \u2013 Organized religion isn\u2019t the only major American institution that they are distant from. They\u2019re less likely to be married. They are less likely to be employed in an organization. They\u2019re patching together a number of contingent jobs rather than working with a steady employer. And although they\u2019re politically liberal, they don\u2019t vote. And so I think that they are a detached population in a number of ways. There is one intriguing GSS question that \u2013 I keep looking around for possibly another one \u2013 that they don\u2019t read the newspaper or watch TV either. So I\u2019d like to figure out a little bit more about their media consumption, but we only have those items.<\/p>\n\n
LUIS LUGO, PEW RESEARCH CENTER:<\/b> I bet they\u2019re \u201cBowling Alone\u201d too \u2013<\/p>\n\n
[Laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> Yes. We talked about the one Putnam book. This is a different Putnam story, yes.<\/p>\n\nMARK PATTISON, CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE:<\/b> A couple of questions, one may dovetail and one may not. I don\u2019t know if 1973 is the first year with which you had enough solid data to offer these long-term trends, but I also keep thinking of 1973 as one of those watershed years where things may have started collapsing in the social fabric, which may, in turn, have started affecting people\u2019s views about their own religiosity \u2013 because certainly, politically, the mushrooming of the Watergate scandal, and economically, the deterioration of the American dream, the lower purchasing power of the American worker coupled with persistent inflation and the oil embargo. I don\u2019t know if that had anything to do with \u2013 people started to feel disaffected from organized religion. But by the same token, the other question would be if the changing cohorts represent 60% of this change in \u201cnones,\u201d what are the other factors accounting for the 40%?<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> OK, two answers, \u201973 was the first year the GSS asked, \u201cWhat religion were you raised in?\u201d That\u2019s why I picked \u201973. Yes, Claude and I wrote a book about the 20th century, and we really, really, really wished the NSF had started the General Social Survey in 1963 \u2013 or 1962 \u2013 instead of 1972, but we\u2019re stuck with our starting date. We rely heavily on Gallup for all things prior to 1972.<\/p>\n\n
The other 40%, I think, is this period effect, which is driven by politics. The data that both Frank and Greg showed indicates that these are disproportionally folks who were already disconnected from a church and were Catholic in name only, Baptist in name only or whatever. And when the religious right began to say, \u201cThis is what a religious person in America looks like,\u201d they said, \u201cWell, that\u2019s not me,\u201d and stepped back from it and quit identifying themselves as part of that community.<\/p>\n\n
[exert]<\/p>\n\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> If they voted in greater numbers, the consequence would be great, but the fact that they\u2019re so politically disaffected and detached \u2013 as well as religiously detached \u2013 mutes the impact of this on politics. The identification in their minds between certain churches and a conservative social agenda in politics makes them step back from the religious identification that they once held, but it is not pushing them to become politically active on the other side.<\/p>\n\n
[In your tracking poll,]<\/p>\n\n\n
NEWPORT:<\/b> Well, it\u2019s a fascinating question. I probably don\u2019t have time to get into it in great depth. Obviously, religion is highly intertwined with politics. I\u2019m not sure what you\u2019re \u2013 If they did vote, how would they vote? How would you answer that, Mike?<\/p>\n\n
[laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Greg, do you want to comment on that?<\/p>\n\n
[could that also be]<\/p>\n\n\n
[side]<\/p>\n\n\n
FISCHER:<\/b> Another historical note. In the 1960s, there were people who were complaining about the churches and ministers being too political. What they were complaining about were the left-wing ministers involved in the civil rights, the anti-war, anti-nuclear movement. These things have historical ironies, and there was a moment in which religion was identified more often \u2013 That public religion was identified more often with the liberals than the conservatives. And we\u2019re going through a patch where it\u2019s the other way around.<\/p>\n\nCATHY GROSSMAN, RELIGION REPORTER:<\/b> I have a double-barreled question. One is for the whole panel, and one is more for Greg. In the comparison of the different, the wording of the different questions that Alan did at the beginning of the discussion, every form of the question involved giving a list of choices. The American Religious Identification Survey is a wide open question; it\u2019s \u201cWhat is your religious identity, if any?\u201d What are the advantages or disadvantages of leaving it totally wide open vs. some form of giving people something to check off? That\u2019s question one. And more to Greg, you and I talked about a year ago about the group that I ended up labeling the \u201cso-whats,\u201d which are the \u201cnones\u201d who are not \u201cseekers,\u201d who are not doing something alternative. They\u2019re not thinking about it at all. I actually think that there may be \u2013 do you see, let me put it this way \u2013 Do you see a growth in the number of people who simply \u2013 This is just not something of interest to them. They\u2019re not out there looking for the inner meaning of the universe. They\u2019re just going about their lives. Other things have higher priorities. They just give a big shrug to the whole issue. They\u2019re not atheist, agnostic or anything in particular.<\/p>\n\n
[in which case]<\/p>\n\n\n
In terms of the \u201cso-whats,\u201d I think it\u2019s an interesting question. I don\u2019t know that we have hard data. I mean there are clearly people among the \u201cnones\u201d who are committed nonbelievers. They\u2019ve thought about these things. They\u2019ve thought about them carefully, and they have come down on one side of this and decided that they do not believe. On the other side, you have people who, even though they\u2019re detached from religion \u2013 from religious institutions \u2013 really are religious by any of these measures. But then there\u2019s that big group in the middle that is probably the \u201cso-what\u201d group that you asked about, and I do think that many of them are not interested in this, and aren\u2019t thinking about it carefully, and are not seeking. And I think it\u2019s the key difference between them and a group like libertarians, for example. Without commenting on the size of the groups or how they might be related in the data, just thinking about it, one key conceptual difference is libertarianism is a school of thought. It is a set of principles that people either agree with and adhere to or don\u2019t, but being a \u201cnone\u201d isn\u2019t like that. I mean there are atheists and agnostics, that might be more akin to being a libertarian, but being \u201cnothing in particular\u201d can mean a whole bunch of different things, and it does mean a whole bunch of different things to a lot of different people. And so I think that \u2013 I\u2019m glad you bring it up because I think it\u2019s an important thing to keep in mind about this group. Not to overthink it in a way, right? There\u2019s not necessarily more there than it appears.<\/p>\n\n[dis]<\/p>\n\n\n
[way]<\/p>\n\n\n
SMITH:<\/b> Right. So married people \u2013 let\u2019s see where is this chart? If you look just over the short-term, you see an increase in the percentage of the population that is religiously unaffiliated across a variety of social and demographic groups, but one exception to that is marital status. This is over the very short period of time between 2007 and 2012, there was a four-point uptick in the ranks of the \u201cnones\u201d among people who are not married, but among people who are married, there was no change over that same period of time.<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Page 21.<\/p>\n\n
[Pew Research\u2019s \u201c \u2018Nones\u2019 on the Rise\u201d]<\/p>\n\n\nPER SMITH, BOSTON UNIVERSITY:<\/b> One major event that I rarely hear discussed in terms of the \u201cnones\u201d is the end of the Cold War, which happened in the end of the \u201980s. I wonder if the ease at which people \u2013 the increasing ease at which people are able to identify as \u201cnones,\u201d if that\u2019s the case, is related to the changing shape of American civil religion, of what it means to be an American vis-\u00e0-vis religious identification. I also wonder if that has something to do with the church attendance figures. I, at least, think that Mark Chaves and others have shown convincingly that people exaggerate church attendance when asked to self \u2013 to talk about how much they go to church themselves. Is it possible that people are feeling more comfortable not exaggerating those figures and that this is why you\u2019re seeing that change with the \u201cnones\u201d in church attendance but not people who still identify within those communities?<\/p>\n\n
FISCHER:<\/b> Well, very clever question, and one that had not occurred to us, actually \u2013 the extent to which religion is part of the package of being an American, and if the issue of being an American vs. an atheistic communist has become less salient. That\u2019s very interesting. I would not put my money on that. I want to reiterate one thing, and then I\u2019ll close, which is, let us remember that the population that increasingly says \u201cno religion\u201d is a population \u2013 Frank made this point clearly \u2013 we actually make that point in the 2002 paper. It\u2019s a population that was marginally religious to start with, and the argument, I think, here, we share, whatever the cultural atmosphere change has been, Cold War or the religious right or whatever, that group of people who weren\u2019t very closely tied to religion in the first place are now increasingly making a declaration that they\u2019re not religious. So I think if we want to understand that we have to understand where that change is coming from, and it\u2019s coming from that group that used to say nominally, \u201cOh, I\u2019m a Catholic,\u201d and now either feel free \u2013 in Frank\u2019s term \u2013 or feel politically pressed \u2013 which is what we argue \u2013 to make a declaration, \u201cReligion is not for me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
HOUT:<\/b> I like more proximate causes than that, and I think that the politics of the 1980s were rife with \u201cGod is on our side\u201d kinds of proclamations and that that was off-putting to a certain segment of the population. For example, presidents of the United States didn\u2019t always say, \u201cGod bless America\u201d into time immemorial. Ronald Reagan\u2019s acceptance speech in 1980 is the second time a president uses that phrase. Teddy Roosevelt said it after McKinley got shot, and between there, nobody used that phrase. And then all of a sudden it becomes de rigueur. Obama says it all the time even. And I just think that that intertwining \u2013 the visibility, the \u201ccivil religion\u201d phrase you use, I think the civil religion became actually more religious after the fall of the Berlin Wall than before, and that is more off-putting to more people than it used to be.<\/p>\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Frank, do you want to make a final point on this, or in general?<\/p>\n\n
[Laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Greg, did you want to have a final word?<\/p>\n\n
G. SMITH:<\/b> I\u2019ll leave it at that.<\/p>\n\n
[Laughter<\/i>]<\/p>\n\n\n
COOPERMAN:<\/b> Thank you all. It\u2019s been a wonderful discussion. Thank you all for coming. I want to thank our panelists. Terrific, terrific panel, thank you very much.<\/p>\n\n
[NORC]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/figure>\n\n![\"newport-14\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/newport-14.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"newport-15\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/newport-15.png\")
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<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-2\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-2.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-3\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-3.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-4\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-4.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-5\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-5.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-6\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-6.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-7\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-7.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n![\"Smith-8\"](\"https:\/\/assets.pewresearch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2013\/08\/Smith-8.png\")
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<\/figure>\n\n