Stephen Bullivant presents evidence that the US is becoming an ex-Christian country, as more people become ‘nonverts’ to no religion.
Meet John: a serious, straitlaced, staunch libertarian. Economically and sartorially conservative, he panic-bought his AR-15 rifle in 2016 in fear of a looming Clinton repeal of the Second Amendment. Meet Judy: a proud, practising polyamorous progressive. Mohawk-ed and inked, she can normally be found either behind the bar she co-owns, or else officiating gay weddings as a state-approved “minister of religion”. I encountered both within the space of a few hours – Judy at a mall Starbucks, John at a gun range to try out that AR-15 – in the same mid-sized city that each calls home. It’s just a normal day in southern Louisiana.
For all their contrasts, John and Judy have two important things in common with each other, and with tens of millions of their fellow Americans. The first is that neither the semi-automatic stockpiler nor the leather-clad liberal regard themselves as belonging to a religion. They are, in the media’s now-ubiquitous terminology, religious “nones”. Despite her online ordination and a penchant for Buddhism, Judy normally ticks the “no religion” box on surveys; if pushed, she jokes that she’s a “conscientious objector”. John is more straightforwardly secular. He too ticks “no religion”, though would prefer a dedicated “atheist” box. For all his personal embrace of the identity, though, he’s mindful of how it might come across: “I find that saying ‘not religious’ in mixed company is a way safer bet than saying ‘atheist’ because some people might think that I’m actively trying to ruin their fun with their belief and their religion, and I’m not.”
Identity labels aside, it’s clear that John and Judy are in good company. On a conservative estimate, nones now account for around 59 million US adults: very nearly one in every four. What’s more, their ranks have tripled in just the past three decades. And given that over a third of young adults now say they have “no religion”, the nones look certain to keep rising for a good while longer. The second thing they share is that both were brought up “in” a religion – and indeed, within mainstream Christian denominations: John very minimally so (“baptised for family reasons”), Judy enough to have once seriously explored becoming a nun. That is to say, they are not simply nones, but what I call “nonverts”: think “converts”, but going from a religion to having none. The distinction is an important one: to no longer be religious is, in all manner of ways, different from never having been in the first place – just as being a recovering alcoholic is different from being a lifelong tee-totaller, or how an ex-wife is distinct from all the other women to whom someone is not presently married. Our pasts colour our presents in all sorts of ways.
Around 70 per cent of religious nones used to be religious somethings. Judy is one of the roughly 16 million nones who say they were brought up Catholic. Add 7.5 million ex-Baptists, two million each of ex-Lutherans and ex-Methodists, and a million apiece of ex-Episcopalians and ex- Presbyterians. Another two million nones were brought up in non-Christian religions, just over half of whom were raised Jewish. That’s around 41 million nonverts: roughly equal to the adult populations of California and Pennsylvania combined.
Nonverts may be a new, and etymologically awkward, coinage. But the reality it points to is indispensable for making sense of the present, recent past and long-term future of American religion. In short, nonverts are the key to understanding much of the “rise of the nones”, including how and why it happened, and what it all means for the future of America.
Let’s be quite clear: America has seen an awfully large amount of (non)religious change in an awfully short span of time. This is a genuine watershed moment: a grand socio-religious Reset. The nonverts are dramatically changing the face, and heart, of America.
Watershed moments, by definition, don’t last forever. So – and this is, or rather should be, the critical question for church leaders as they look to the future – what happens next?
It might perhaps be helpful, if for some a little jarring, to start thinking in terms of “ex-Christian America”. By that I’m referring not to just that portion of the population who used to be Christians, but to some nascent “ex-Chris-tian” quality to America as a whole. Obviously, the meaningfulness of “ex-Christian America” in this sense relies, to a large degree, on how one understands “Christian America”. In my usage, this is as much about an overarching cultural climate – the way in which the Deep South just feels more religious than say the Pacific North West, based on innumerable little nudges and clues – as it is about sociological measures of belonging, believing or behaving.
“Ex-Christian America” in this more ambitious sense is, then, a claim that this kind of culturally Christian mood music is much quieter in America than previously (and in the many places where it does still exist, it is therefore more conspicuous than it used to be). But it is also the stronger claim that an ex-Christian nation is not simply the same as a non-Christian one. A culture that used to be Christian, just like a person who used to be one, carries much of the past along with it.
Viewed in terms of individuals’ biographies, the process of nonversion has often been slow and gradual. Taken together, though, and judged by the typical timescales of major social and religious changes at the national level, the nonversion of America itself has been swift. This has been exhilarating for many of my interviewees (“I can still feel it, this weight lifting off my shoulders … It was liberating”), and profoundly disorientating and distressing for others (“it was very isolating … really scary”). Think of it as a kind of cultural whiplash, one penetrating into the heart of many families.
Futurology is always a risk: American religious history is littered with failed prophecies. If I had to make a prediction, though, it is that the nones will keep on growing, more-or-less steadily, for a good while longer. A large and diverse nonreligious constituency will become established as a normal feature of the USA, bigger in some places than in others. Significant areas of the country, such as the Pacific Northwest or parts of New England, could feasibly go “majority nonreligious”. The South, meanwhile, will remain very religious compared to the rest of the country (though not-iceably less religious compared to the South a few decades ago). Notably, political parties – note the plural; nones may skew to the left, but the 9 per cent of them who identify as Republicans still add up to a sizeable 5 million – will be well-advised to court the secular vote. It’ll probably become easier to do that without simultaneously alienating religious voters as nones became more and more a normal and accepted part of the landscape.
That said, the current Christian decline won’t continue indefinitely: present trends never do. Many of America’s churches will reach a new, resilient normal. There will still be a steady stream of new nonverts, since the wider culture will exert a powerful attraction, as it always does. But, significantly helped along by both immigration and birth rate, the overarching religious subculture will both keep enough of its own and attract a good few others. So there will still be plenty of Christians in America. But “Christian America”, except perhaps for certain pockets, will mostly be a thing of the past.
Prof Stephen Bullivant teaches theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University, UK, and the University of Notre Dame, Australia. Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America is published by Oxford University Press.
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