John Meyers

Increasingly, Religious ‘Nones’ Support Pastors Preaching Politics on Pulpit Freedom Sunday

July 12, 2013 by John Meyers

As almost 1,500 pastors attempt to provoke the IRS this Sunday by preaching political messages from their pulpits, a recent survey finds that Americans increasingly agree they should have such a right—including the religiously unaffiliated.

This weekend will be the seventh Pulpit Freedom Sunday, coordinated by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to encourage pastors to break an existing law that prohibits registered nonprofit organizations from electioneering.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that nearly half of Americans (49 percent) now believe that churches (and other houses of worship) should express their views on social and political issues—including two-thirds of white evangelicals, more than half of black Protestants (who mostly identify as evangelicals), and one-third of so-called religious “nones.” Support has risen most among mainline Protestants, from 35 percent in August 2010 to 49 percent in September 2014.

While most Americans still believe churches should not be allowed to outright endorse candidates, Pew reports “significant movement in the direction of more support” of this right. One-third of Americans now agree that churches should be allowed to favor candidates, and support among nones increased approximately 50 percent. In 2010, 26 percent of the religiously affiliated and 15 percent of the nones said they would favor churches publicly backing candidates; in 2014, the percentages increased to 35 and 23 percent, respectively. Among white evangelicals, 42% now favor pastors having this right, as do 39% of black Protestants.

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CT has noted how ADF hopes to provoke the IRS into (ironically) punishing pastors in order to lead the federal government to review and overturn the law in question: the Johnson Amendment. The initiative even gained an unexpected ally last year in Sen. Charles Grassley and the Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations (CAPRO).

The ADF has a strange bedfellow of sorts in its hope for a confrontation: An atheist legal group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, also wants the IRS to investigate such activity (but hopes for an opposite outcome than ADF). It dropped a related lawsuit this summer after the IRS agreed to investigate and enforce electioneering prohibitions.

While ADF lists thousands of churches that have participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday over the years, the IRS has only flagged a much smaller number of churches as problematic.

In a June letter, the tax agency told the U.S. Department of Justice that 99 churches “alleged to have violated the prohibition” merit “a high priority examination.” ADF lists 1,225 churches in 2013, but the IRS only cites one egregious violation that year. ADF lists 1,620 churches in 2012; the IRS cites only 65 churches. ADF lists 539 churches in 2011; the IRS cites only 18 churches.

CT’s sister blog, Church Law and Tax, notes that the IRS had put church reviews on hold since 2009

when a Minnesota church challenged the audit process.

LifeWay Research, which offers five things to know about “the IRS and the pulpit,” has found in surveys that 9 in 10 Protestant pastors believe pastors should not preach politics from the pulpit, but also 9 in 10 believe that the government shouldn’t prohibit the practice.

Here is CT’s previous reporting on Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

RELIGION & INTERNET: The Rise Of The ‘Nones’

July 12, 2013 by John Meyers

(CNN) We can blame the Internet for plenty: the proliferation of porn, our obsession with cat videos, the alleged rise of teen trends like — brace yourself — eyeball licking.

But is it also a culprit in helping us lose our religion? A new study suggests it might be.

Allen Downey, a computer scientist at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, set out to understand the national uptick in those who claim no religious affiliation. These are the “nones,” which the Pew Research Center considers the fastest-growing “religious” group in America.

Since 1985, Downey says, the number of first-year college students who say they’re religiously unaffiliated has grown from 8% to 25%, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey.

And, he adds, stats from the General Social Survey, which has been tracking American opinions and social change since 1972, show unaffiliated Americans in the general population ballooned from 8% to 18% between 1990 and 2010.

These trends jibe with what the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project reported in 2012. It said one in five American adults, and a third of those under 30, are unaffiliated.

Downey says he stepped into the ongoing debate about the rise of the “nones” not because he has a vested interest one way or the other, but because the topic fascinates him. He says it’s good fodder for study and appeals to students who are learning to crunch real data.

In his paper “Religious affiliation, education and Internet use,” which published in March on arXiv – an electronic collection of scientific papers – Downey analyzed data from GSS and discovered a correlation between increased Internet use and religious disaffiliation.

Internet use among adults was essentially at zero in 1990; 20 years later, it jumped to 80%, he said. In that same two-decade period, we saw a 25 million-person spike in those who are religiously unaffiliated.

People who use the Internet a few hours a week, GSS numbers showed Downey, were less likely to have a religious affiliation by about 2%. Those online more than seven hours a week were even more likely – an additional 3% more likely – to disaffiliate, he said.

Now, Downey is the first to point out that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation.

But he was able to control for other factors including education, religious upbringing, rural/urban environments and income, to find a link that allowed him to “conclude, tentatively, that Internet use causes disaffiliation,” he said.

“But a reasonable person could disagree.”

The Internet, he posited, opens up new ways of thinking to those living in homogeneous environments. It also allows those with doubts to find like-minded individuals around the world.

He believes decreases in religious upbringing have had the largest effect, accounting for 25% of reduced affiliation; college education covers about 5% and Internet use may account for another 20%.

That leaves 50% which he attributes to “generational replacement,” meaning those born more recently are less likely to be religiously affiliated – though he doesn’t attempt to explain why that is.

The Pew Research Center has offered its own theories.

One explanation Pew gives is that our nation is experiencing political backlash – “that young adults, in particular, have turned away from organized religion because they perceive it as deeply entangled with conservative politics and do not want to have any association with it.”

More specifically, Pew explains, this brand of religion and politics is out of step with young adult views on same-sex rights and abortion.

Postponement of marriage and parenthood, broader social disengagement and general secularization of society may also play a part, according to Pew.

But to be religiously unaffiliated doesn’t require a lack of faith or spirituality, researchers say.

Yes, the “nones” group includes those who might call themselves atheists or agnostics. But it also accounts for many – 46 million people – who don’t belong to a particular group but are, in some way, religious or spiritual, according to Pew.

This is all part of the changing face of society and faith, and where the Internet fits in is just part of a complicated puzzle.

The evolving landscape includes plenty of people who go online in search of spiritual and religious sustenance, said Cheryl Casey, who delved into the issue for her 2006 dissertation.

Casey, now a professor of media, society and ethics at Champlain College in Vermont, wrote about the “revirtualization of religious ritual in cyberspace” and the morphing relationship between technology and religion.

That Downey would find a correlation, that the Internet is increasing disaffiliation, makes perfect sense to her.

“The institutional control over the conversation is lifted, so it’s not just a matter of more churches to choose from but more ways to have that conversation and more people to have that conversation with,” she said Wednesday.

People move away from formal affiliation and toward what she calls “grass-roots religious exploration,” where “the nature of the medium allows for those conversations to grow organically.”

Innovations have long played a part in influencing religion, she said, and will continue to.

Something she wrote back in 2006 said it best.

“When a new technology, such as the printing press or the Internet, unleashes massive cultural change, the challenge to religion is immense. Cultural developments change how God, or the ultimate, is thought of and spoken about,” she wrote.

“The dynamics of this transformation, however, await continued investigation.”

By Jessica Ravitz

Christians Decline While Religious “Nones” Become Second Largest Faith Group

July 12, 2013 by John Meyers

NEW RESEARCH SHOWS CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA IS DECLINING, WHILE THE NUMBER OF THOSE UNAFFILIATED WITH RELIGION IS INCREASING.

Over the past seven years, the United States has become a less Christian country, according to the Religious Landscape Study, the latest such study conducted by the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, the rise in nones, the religiously unaffiliated has continued in America.

Christianity is far and away still the most populous of the religious denominations at approximately 70%, but this is down from about 78% in 2007, when Pew did its first study.

What is probably most striking about the findings is that the shrinking numbers are not confined to any particular denomination or demographic. The study reveals that declines are present among women and men, among whites, blacks and Latinos, and among college graduates and people with a high school diploma.

However, the largest declines occurred in younger Americans who increasingly leave behind religious institutions and identify with nones. For example, the percentage of millennials born between 1981 and 1989 who did not affiliate with a particular religion grew from 25% in 2007 to 34% in 2014, the Washington Postreports.

The Washington Post analysis of the report also reveals something quite telling:nones or non-affiliated Americans (23%) now outnumber American Catholics (21%) and mainline Protestants (15%). Moreover, the Washington Post also found that the non-affiliated group has become less religious and hence, more secular. In 2007, 25% of the nones reported themselves to be atheist or agnostic. That number jumped to 31% in 2014.

Other highlights from the report:

White Americans (24%) are more likely to say they are not affiliated with any particular religion than Hispanic Americans (20%) and black Americans (18%).
The median age of adults who identify as nones dropped from 38 in 2007 to 36 in 2014 (in a population where the median age of the adult population is 46. The median age of mainline Protestants is up to 52 (from 50 in 2007) and of Catholics is up to 49 (from 45 in 2007).
The Black Protestant Tradition has remained steady in number at just under 16 million in both 2007 and 2014.
The USA Today quoted Alan Cooperman, Pew Research Center’s director of religion research, as explaining “there are more than four former Christians for every one convert to Christianity.”
As far as reasons for the overall decline in Christian religious affiliation, the report offers a theory of generational decline and also points to a surprising trend in older Americans who are disavowing organized religion. Pew’s research was done between June and September of 2014.

‘Religious Nones’ Are growing Quickly. Should Republicans Worry?

July 12, 2013 by John Meyers

People gather for the Reason Rally on the National Mall in 2012 in Washington, D.C.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Jenny Schulz isn’t religious.

“I see religion as something really personal,” said Schulz, 26, who works at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “So the fact that it is a requirement in politics always seems unusual to me.”

She said she “oscillates between atheist and agnostic,” but she knows it could be many years before she votes for a political figure who shares her (lack of) religious beliefs.

Schulz is not alone. She is part of a growing group of American adults who do not identify with any religion. More than one-in-five American adults say so now, the highest in U.S. history. They are being identified as the religious “nones,” so called for their lack of religious affiliation. As they grow in size, they are also gaining political power.

“I personally think that the characteristics, the profile, the potential influence of religious ‘nones,’ who say they have no religion, is an often overlooked part of the religion in politics story,” said Greg Smith, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center.

Those “nones” consist of atheists, agnostics, and people who simply say they subscribe to no religion in particular. Altogether, they make up nearly 23 percent of the adult population, according to Pew.

American/s With No Religious Affiliation Are On The Rise

That’s more than than Catholics, and nearly as many as evangelicals, at 25.4 percent, according to the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Survey. Between just 2007 and 2014, the adult population of “nones” skyrocketed by 52 percent, to nearly 56 million. And that growth makes the “nones” one of the biggest, but least-noticed, stories in American politics, Smith said.

“When we think about religion in politics we often think about evangelicals,” Smith said. “We often think about the religious right. We think about conservative Christians — and those are important groups. But we also have this large and growing group in the U.S. that say they have no religion. And that group is a kind of a counterweight at the other end of the religious spectrum from evangelicals.”

He points to the 2012 election as an example. White evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Republican nominee Mitt Romney, 79 to 20 percent. But people who claimed no religious affiliation voted overwhelmingly for President Obama — 70 percent to 26 percent.

Nonreligious Politicians Are Remarkably Rare

Schulz is so used to politicians invoking God in one way or another that she really doesn’t think much about it.

“It doesn’t rub me the wrong way. I just see it as a given: In order to run for office in the U.S., you have to play up the religious side,” she said. “That’s the perception I’ve always gotten.”

It’s easy to see why she would think that. There has never been an avowedly atheist president of the U.S., and only two have been unaffiliated with any religion, according to Pew — Thomas Jefferson, who, while fascinated by Jesus’ teachings, was considered a deist, and Abraham Lincoln, whose religious beliefs remain a topic of debate.

And, as of January, only one member of the current Congress reported being religiously unaffiliated. (An additional nine said they didn’t know or refused to answer).

Of course, there are a few other reasons why so few politicians pander to the “nones” and so many are appealing to the evangelicals that Smith mentions as their “counterweight.” One is that the religiously unaffiliated are still a pretty diverse group, meaning appealing to all — or even most — at once on a broad spectrum of issues is difficult.

For example, some still have some sort of belief in a god, and around one-third to one-quarter of them say religion is still “important” to some degree to them. Just under half of these unaffiliated people go to church sometimes, for example (though it’s less often than for the religious). And then there are the atheists, the agnostics and those who simply say religion isn’t important to them. Together, that group of the least religious people in America makes up around one-in-seven Americans.

“They may be unaffiliated; they may be atheist; they may be agnostic … but they’re not part of some club,” says Margie Omero, a Democratic strategist at Purple Strategies. “You could certainly argue that evangelicals are not monolithic in terms of their policy beliefs, but there’s no denying that there’s more of an organization around organized religion than there is around disorganized atheism.”

So could a group defined by its lack of religious definition in any way be considered a cohesive voting bloc?

“Yes and no,” said Todd Stiefel, chair of Openly Secular, a nonprofit that encourages nonbelievers to be more vocal.

“I think we are a voting bloc on some issues. Marriage equality, pro-choice, the separation of church and state. Those are issues where, yeah, we’re pretty much a voting bloc,” Stiefel said. “On other issues, it’s complicated,” he added, noting that nonreligious Americans range from fiscally liberal to conservative.

And then there’s another huge reason politicians and pundits pay such close attention to the religious compared to the unaffiliated: the “nones” are underrepresented at the polls. For example, the religiously unaffiliated are almost even with white evangelicals in the broader population today, but the “nones” made up only 12 percent of the electorate in 2012, compared to white evangelicals’ 23 percent. In other words, they’re less likely to vote.

Americans Don’t Want To Vote For Atheists

Americans also really, really like voting for religious people. In a 2014 Pew poll, 53 percent of Americans said they’d be less likely to vote for an atheist (only 4 percent said they’d be “more likely”). Yet another poll found that 53 percent of Americans believe that it’s necessary to believe in God to be moral. Being religious is simply good politics.

Indeed, on the 2016 campaign trail, virtually all of the candidates bring up religion. When she happened upon a man reading his Bible at a bakery on the campaign trail this year, Hillary Clinton talked God with him, remarking that the Bible is the “living word.”

Scott Walker has likewise played up his religious beliefs more on the presidential campaign trail than during his early political career in Wisconsin, as the New York Times has reported. The only major presidential candidate who is not openly religious is Bernie Sanders. He is Jewish, but has made a point of saying he is not practicing.

But even with all of the public displays of religion, you can already see politicians playing to a less religious electorate. Republicans, who fare poorly among the “nones,” are subtly tailoring their messages for an increasingly secular nation.

“You’re already seeing Republicans, in particular, take this into account, and you’re seeing it with gay marriage,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who worked for the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008, chair of CivicForumPAC, managing director of Civic Forum Strategies and author of Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery. “What you’re starting to see is Republicans significantly changing their tone and rhetoric. … For example, on gay marriage — they’re couching it as ‘religious liberty,’ which sounds less divisive.”

And while they may not be a huge force in 2016, the “nones” are still growing, and they’re doing so by the power of replacement. The younger the person, the less likely they are to claim a religion. Thirty-six percent of young millennials are religiously unaffiliated, compared to just 11 percent of the silent generation. Not only that, but the group’s members are increasingly identifying as atheist and agnostic, while the share who consider religion at all important to them is falling.

The incoming wave of nonreligious Americans could mean a tipping point in the Republican Party’s platform of social issues.

“The real question for the Republican Party is will this trend continue and will it continue at this rate?” O’Connell said. “I can see them changing their views on not so much abortion but other related issues [like same-sex marriage] by 2024.”

Why 2024? Because that’s when today’s millennials will be entering middle age, replacing today’s Gen-Xers and baby boomers. As millennials marry, settle down and have kids — things they’re doing later than their parents — he thinks there’s a possibility they will shift rightward. The GOP does better among married women than single women, he points out (though his logic assumes that marriage could make a person more conservative, not just that conservative women might be more likely to be married to begin with). And once people marry, he added, more-religious people might end up bringing their less-religious partners into the church.

But those are big ifs. The growing share of “nones” may not care whether their politicians are religious, as Schulz said she doesn’t. But they could mean a voting population that increasingly doesn’t care if their politicians aren’t.

Nominals to Nones: 3 Key Takeaways from Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey

July 11, 2013 by John Meyers

How are Christians to understand the data from the newest Pew study on Christianity in America? | Ed Stetzer

As I’ve said before, Christianity is not dying; nominal Christianity is.

Today, Pew Research Center released a report drawing a variety of headlines—everything from “Christianity faces sharp decline as Americans are becoming even less affiliated with religion” to “Pew: Evangelicals Stay Strong as Christianity Crumbles in America.”

So what are we supposed to think of Christianity in America?

The big trends are clear, the nominals are becoming the nones, yet the convictional are remaining committed.

In other words, Americans whose Christianity was nominal—in name only—are casting aside the name. They are now aligning publicly with what they’ve actually not believed all along.

The percentage of convictional Christians remains rather steady, but because the nominal Christians now are unaffiliated the overall percentage of self-identified Christians is decline. This overall decline is what Pew shows—and I expect it to accelerate.

As I have said before, not one serious researcher thinks Christianity in America is dying. What we see from Pew is not the death-knell of Christianity, but another indication that Christianity in America is being refined.
As such, let me share three takeaways from the data.

The nominals are becoming the nones, and the convictional are remaining committed.

1. Convictional Christianity is rather steady.

Evangelicals are not the only people who call themselves Christians and a good proportion take it seriously, but since this is an evangelical publication, let me share some data from there with one caveat.

You might say that I have a vested interested in evangelicalism’s success. However, as an author, the opposite is true. If I announced the death of evangelicalism and Christian faith, I’d sell a lot more books, I assure you.

But, facts are our friends and math is math, so let’s take a look.

First, from 2007 to 2014 the number of evangelicals in America rose from 59.8 million to 62.2 million.

Evangelicals now make up a clear majority (55%) of all US Protestants. In 2007, 51 percent of US Protestants identified with evangelical churches.

Within Christianity, the only group retaining more of their population than the evangelical church is the historically black church.

One of the primary reasons it appears as though “American Christianity” is experiencing a sharp decline is because the nominals that once made up (disproportionately) Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism are now checking “none” on religious affiliation surveys.

Nominal Christians make up a higher percentage of Mainline Protestants and Catholics than any other denomination of Christian, and this is why their numbers continue to sharply decline.

For those who have only ever considered themselves “Christian” because they’ve been to church before, or because they aren’t Muslim or Hindu, it is starting to make more sense to check “none” on religious identification surveys.

Yet, church attendance rates (though overreported) are not changing substantially. (I will be writing more on that soon.)

From 2007 to 2014 the number of evangelicals in America rose from 59.8 million to 62.2 million.

2. There have been significant shifts within American Christianity.

One of the most notable shifts in American Christianity is the evangelicalization of church in America. Fifty percent of all Christians now self-identify as “evangelical” or “born again,” up from 44 percent in 2007. In 2007, 44 percent of American Christians, who made up 78 percent of the US population identified as evangelical. In 2014, 50 percent of American Christians, who make up 70 percent of the US population identify as evangelical.

Pew notes, “The evangelical Protestant tradition is the only major Christian group in the survey that has gained more members than it has lost through religious switching.”

It should be noted that evangelicals’ share of the overall US population dropped by 0.9 percent over the last seven years, but the percentage of US adults who self-identify as evangelical actually rose from 34 percent to 35 percent over the same period of time. The drop in population share is based on denominational affiliation, whereas the 1 percent increase is based on self-identification.

(I will be sharing more on practice soon, which will actually be a surprise to many.)

The percentage millennial evangelicals remained the same (21%) from 2007–2014. The only decline was among the Greatest Generation (28–25%), who, because of their age, are not a growth demographic. Every other one stayed the same as well.

Sixty-five percent of those raised evangelical remain evangelical (behind only Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and Historically Black Protestant). Sixteen percent switched to another version of Christianity, 3 percent switched to another faith, and 15 percent became unaffiliated.

The only region where evangelicals decreased—the South (37–34%). It remained the same in the Northeast and Midwest, and grew in the West (20–22%).

That’s not to say that evangelicalism is doing well—it peaked a couple of decades ago in the United States—but one of the big shifts inside Christianity is toward Evangelicalism, oddly enough. Yet, in the culture as a whole, and as a percentage of the population, Evangelicalism is losing ground.

Only 45 percent of those raised in the Mainline Protestant tradition remain in Mainline churches.

3. Mainline Protestantism continues to hemorrhage.

Only 45 percent of those raised in the Mainline Protestant tradition remain in Mainline churches. Those whose parents and grandparents were mainline Protestants aren’t carrying on the family tradition like those who align with other Protestant denominations. Since members of these churches are not gaining new members from the culture at-large, nor growing by birth rates, they continue to decline precipitously.

Mainline Protestantism isn’t experiencing growth as a portion of Americans generally nor American Christianity specifically. If Mainline Protestantism continues its trajectory it is only a couple of generations from virtual extinction.

For more on this issue, read a recent blog post I wrote on 3 important church trends in the next 10 years.

So What?
Christianity isn’t dying and no research says it is; the statistics about Christians in America are simply starting to show a clearer picture of what American Christianity is becoming—less nominal, more defined, and more outside of the mainstream of American culture.

For example, the cultural cost of calling yourself “Christian” is starting to outweigh the cultural benefit, so those who do not identify as a “Christian” according to their convictions are starting to identify as “nones” because it’s more culturally savvy.

Because of this, the statistics show (on the surface) that Christianity in America is experiencing a sharp decline. However, that’s the path of those who don’t read beyond the surface. If there remains a relatively stable church-engaged, convictional minority, and there is a big movement on self-identification, that means that the middle is going away.

As the Pew Forum’s Conrad Hackett explained (before this release of the data):

To some extent, this seems to be a phenomenon in which people with low levels of religious commitment are now more likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated, whereas in earlier decades such people would have identified as Christian, Jewish, or as part of some other religious group.

In short, and as I put it, the “nominals” are becoming the “nones” and convictional Christian practice is a minority, but generally stable, population. If that is the case, and that is what the data is showing, than the decline is primarily (not exclusively) that nominal Christians are becoming honest reporters.

So, Christians, we need not run around with our hands in the air and say, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

Christianity is losing, and will continue to lose, its home field advantage; no one can (or should) deny this. However, the numerical decline of self-identified American Christianity is more of a purifying bloodletting than it is an arrow to the heart of the church.

NEW RESEARCH SHOWS CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA IS DECLINING, WHILE THE NUMBER OF THOSE UNAFFILIATED WITH RELIGION IS INCREASING.

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