‘The Death of Religion?’ sounds an optimistic note about faith

I love a good contrarian take, especially one that challenges my understanding of the world, which is why I was eager to pick up a copy of Byron R. Johnson and Thomas S. Kidd’s The Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith.Johnson, a sociologist of religion at Baylor University, and Kidd, a historian of American religion at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, did not convince me that the decline of religion in America has been oversold by the media, but I heartily agreed with their critique that too many in the press equate the religiously unaffiliated with atheists, thus overselling the secularization of America. More importantly, and more enjoyably, I learned an immense amount about the history of religious belief and identity in the colonies and the United States at its founding, and for that reason alone, I would encourage anyone interested in the past and future of religion in this country to pick up a copy. The Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith; By Byron R. Johnson and Thomas S. Kidd; B&H Academic; 256 pp.; $34.99 In the introduction to their book, the authors confess their own religious beliefs (both are active members of evangelical Baptist churches), so I’ll confess mine upfront too: I am one of the Nones their subtitle refers to. And like the vast majority of my None brethren, I am neither an atheist nor an agnostic. I firmly believe in God. I just have never belonged to any church.And as the authors obliquely concede, the number of Nones is rising.Gallup has been asking about Americans’ religious identities the longest. Going all the way back to 1948, the specific wording of Gallup’s question has been as follows: “What is your religious preference — are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, another religion, or no religion?”Between 1948 and 1967, between 0% and 2% of Americans chose the “no religion” category. Then it began rising in 1968, hitting as high as 9% in 1986. There it largely plateaued until finally hitting 10% in 2002, but then it doubled to 20% in 2017 and has been slowly rising to 24% today, edging out Catholics, whom Gallup now pegs at just 20% of the population.The General Social Survey began asking a similar question in 1972, specifically, “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” About 5% of Americans chose “no religion” the first year the GSS asked the question, and that figure bounced between 5% and 10% for roughly two decades before beginning to rise in 1996, reaching approximately 23% in 2018.In 2021, the GSS switched to a mixed-mode survey that included a web questionnaire that asked, simply, “What is your religious preference?” Respondents are then offered nine main choices, including Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, some other religion, and no religion, with additional categories generated through follow-up questions. The change in format, or maybe the effects of COVID-19, boosted the “no religion” answer to about 28% in 2021, but it has since come down to 27% in the most recent survey.Pew Research Center began asking its own religion question in 2007: “What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else, or nothing in particular?”Just north of 15% chose atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular in 2007, and that figure rose to 31% in 2022 before ticking down to 28% in the latest data.Despite different methodologies and specific wording, these three polls all tell the same story: The percentage of Nones in the U.S. has been rising for almost 40 years, and, if treated as a single group, would constitute the fastest-growing religious category in the country.I included the specific wording of each of these questions because the authors’ main argument against the rise of the Nones is that these polls all miss what the authors call “the Others,” by which they mean nondenominational Christians who might not identify as “Protestant” when asked by a pollster.The problem with this argument is that “another religion,” “some other religion,” and “something else” have been available to respondents throughout all of these series, yet those categories have shown nothing resembling the growth of “no religion.” Since the authors never acknowledge that the wording of these polls has long included an “other” category, they also offer no explanation as to why the “None” options have grown so rapidly while the “Other” options have flatlined.The authors are on much stronger ground when they make the case that the Nones are not the committed atheists many in the press make them out to be. According to a 2024 Pew poll, of the 28% of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated, just 17% are atheist, another 20% are agnostic, and the vast majority, 63%, are nothing in particular.Call them the “Nothings.” These Nothings have religious beliefs not too far from those who identify as having a religious affiliation. According to the same 2024 Pew poll, more than 80% of Nothings believe in “God or a higher power,” 75% believe “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it,” 78% believe “humans have souls or spirits in addition to their physical bodies,” and 40% pray at least monthly. There are, understandably, however, some major differences between the Nothings and those with a religious affiliation. Pew found that where just 20% of Nothings believe in “God as described in the Bible,” 73% of religiously affiliated adults do. Where just 51% of Nothings believe in Heaven, 87% of religiously affiliated adults do. And when it comes to attending religious services, just 13% of Nothings attend at least a few times a year, compared with 60% of the religiously affiliated. The most fascinating part of The Death of Religion?, however, is its well-made case that this religious unaffiliation is nothing new.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “Nothingarian” was first used by Loyalist Anglican cleric Jonathan Boucher of Maryland, who employed it as an epithet against Edward Gibbon, of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire fame. Gibbon, who was raised Anglican before converting to Catholicism and then converting back to Protestantism, possessed a “strange jumble of Calvinism, Republicanism, and a deal of other isms, which in the Aggregate, make, what I have heard call’d, a Nothingarian both in Politics & Religion,” Boucher wrote in a letter in 1776.By 1789, American Congregationalist minister and geographer Jedidiah Morse was using the term in his book The American Geography to describe the “considerable number” of people in Rhode Island “who can be reduced to no particular denomination, and are, as to religion, strictly Nothingarians.”“Nothingarianism could connote unbelief, heterodoxy, or neglect of church attendance, but in any case its prevalence heralded national instability and moral danger,” Johnson and Kidd write in their book. “To Morse, America needed to be a Christian nation, and being a Christian nation required widespread church adherence among the people.”And at the time of independence and in the decades following, the young U.S. was crawling with Nothingarians.While Congregationalism dominated Massachusetts and enjoyed state support, Rhode Island, according to Morse, was teeming with Nothingarians, as were Baltimore and North Carolina. Other authors would later identify Nothingarians as the “most numerous” denomination in Kentucky and estimate that two-thirds of Indiana’s citizens “are properly termed Nothingarians.”“To fight the perceived dangers of nothingarians, Christian leaders promoted missions to unchurched areas and banded together in new social reform organizations,” Johnson and Kidd write. “They hoped to reconstruct the Protestant scaffolding that had once united the British Empire, and which was still needed to sustain the new American nation.”And thanks to a First Amendment that forbade the establishment of a church at the national level, collectively these Christian leaders largely succeeded. From the time of the revolution through today, Johnson and Kidd document the rise and fall of many denominations. For the authors, the chaos of Americans constantly switching from one religion to another isn’t a sign of religious decline but instead evidence of a healthy religious marketplace constantly changing to meet people’s needs.“Overall, religious switching is simply a natural byproduct of religion’s importance and provides tangible evidence that American religion continues to be not only relevant, but vibrant,” they write.And for decades, religious switching was the greatest weakness of the Nones. Among Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s who were raised as Nones, only about 60% remained Nones as adults. By contrast, roughly 8 in 10 older Protestants retained their Protestant identity, while 6 in 10 or more older Catholics remained Catholic. And those who did leave the religion of their birth most often went to another religion.THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON MARRIAGE But for those born in the 1990s and 2000s, those patterns have begun to reverse. The Nones now retain about 80% of those raised without a religion. Meanwhile, younger Protestants and Catholics are substantially less likely than their elders to retain the religion in which they were raised. And now the top destination for those switching out of the religion of their birth is the Nones.Will the Nones continue to grow? God only knows. But for now, the religious marketplace Johnson and Kidd celebrate appears to be fueling the rise of the Nones, not reversing it.Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) is the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner.