Paul Waldman, in the Prospect:
In 1984, 7.3 percent of respondents answered "none" when the General Social Survey asked what their religious preference was. Twenty years later, nearly twice as many, 14.3 percent, gave the same answer. Of course, the number of non-religious people will varies depending on how you ask the question. (For instance, the National Election Studies asks respondents whether religion plays an important part of their lives; in 2004, 23 percent said no.) But however you define them, no one doubts that their numbers are increasing.
So the question now is whether non-believers will, in large numbers, begin to define themselves as a tribe of their own ... Whatever the answer is, the possibility does seem real for secularism to achieve a new awakening of its own as a political and social movement.
This dovetails - unsurprisingly, since we're looking at some of the same data - with my piece in the latest Atlantic, which you could read for the price of, say, two lunches at Subway if you felt like taking advantage of this only-for-blog-readers subscription deal. (But no pressure.) The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.
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There's a Baylor study bouncing around that suggests that the numbers of secularists in those studies is a good bit inflated. Plus, from Robert Putnam's work, it's clear that churchgoing as a mass phenomenon has been declining consistently from its historically very high levels in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
I'd suggest that what you have are a number of interrelated phenomena. First, you have a genuine, if rather slight, secularization as some number of people drop out of any kind of religious belief or practice (say, their parents were religious, but they aren't). (This is probably more pronounced in Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism than anywhere else). Plus, you have a shift of people from what used to be the establishment churches (Episcopal, liberal Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) into more evangelical congregations. And, finally, you have - probably because of a combination of culture, politics, whatever - the emergence of a greater willingness on the part of some portion of the country to affirm positively that they have no religious belief at all.
Whether this turns into a mass anti-clerical sort of movement (on the line of 19th century French republicanism, for example) seems more doubtful to me. The problem is that however much some sectors of our intellectual, cultural, and media elite might be convinced (and try to convince us) that there is this large, threatening mass of religious "bogeymen" (and "bogeywomen" - wouldn't want to be sexist), America's religious landscape is profoundly fractured. To have an "enemy" around which to build a "tribe" is tough to do here, especially as the media's favorite Christian Right totems pass into death or obscurity. Note how really none of the viable candidates are running on the "I'm a religious conservative" identity ticket and that also none of them are running on the "Americans United for the Maginot-Line Separation of Church and State" ticket.
Posted by Michael Simpson | June 15, 2007 11:11 AM