By Michael Lipka May 13, 2015
Religiously unaffiliated people have been growing as a share of all Americans for some time. Pew Research Center’s massive 2014 Religious Landscape Study makes clear just how quickly this is happening, and also shows that the trend is occurring within a variety of demographic groups – across genders, generations and racial and ethnic groups, to name a few.

Religious “nones” – a shorthand we use to refer to people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” – now make up roughly 23% of the U.S. adult population. This is a stark increase from 2007, the last time a similar Pew Research study was conducted, when 16% of Americans were “nones.” (During this same time period, Christians have fallen from 78% to 71%.)

Overall, religiously unaffiliated people are more concentrated among young adults than other age groups – 35% of Millennials (those born 1981-1996) are “nones.” In addition, the unaffiliated as a whole are getting even younger. The median age of unaffiliated adults is now 36, down from 38 in 2007 and significantly younger than the overall median age of U.S. adults in 2014 (46).

At the same time, even older generations have grown somewhat more unaffiliated in recent years. For example, 14% of Baby Boomers were unaffiliated in 2007, and 17% now identify as “nones.”

”Nones” have made more gains through religious switching than any other group analyzed in the study.” Only about 9% of U.S. adults say they were raised without a religious affiliation, and among this group, roughly half say that they now identify with a religion (most often Christianity). But nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) have moved in the other direction, saying that they were raised as Christians or members of another faith but that they now have no religious affiliation. That means more than four people have become “nones” for every person who has left the ranks of the unaffiliated.

“Nones” are more heavily concentrated among men than women. But the growth of the unaffiliated has not been limited to certain demographic categories; a rise in the share of unaffiliated has been seen across a variety of racial and ethnic groups, among people with different levels of education and income, among immigrants and the native born, and throughout all major regions of the country.

Not only are the “nones” growing, but how they describe themselves is changing. Self-declared atheists or agnostics still make up a minority of all religious “nones.” But both atheists and agnostics are growing as a share of all religiously unaffiliated people, and together they now make up 7% of all U.S. adults (up from 4% in 2007). Nearly two-thirds of atheists and agnostics are men, and the group also tends to be whiter and more highly educated than the general population.

In addition to atheists and agnostics, another 9% of Americans say their religion is “nothing in particular” and that religion is not important in their lives. At the same time, however, a significant minority of “nones” say that religion plays a role in their lives. Indeed, about 7% of U.S. adults say their religion is “nothing in particular” but also say that religion is “very” or “somewhat” important in their lives, despite their lack of a formal affiliation. This group is more racially and ethnically diverse than other “nones”; only 53% are non-Hispanic whites (compared with 66% of the general public).

It is hardly news that many folks are skipping church. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Church membership continues to dwindle, as many Americans, especially younger ones, pursue other activities. The Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project and other survey outlets indicate that more than one-fifth of Americans now have no religious affiliation, and more than one-third of young adults under 30 are not active in a faith community.

Many reports on this decline are quick to qualify these numbers with the fact that more than two-thirds of the so-called NONES maintain a belief in God, but simply have little or no interest in organized religion. So the issue is not one of a sudden upsurge in atheists, but disenchantment with church.

Analysis of this trend has frequently gone in the direction of stereotyping millennials. The criticism often proceeds that this is the entitled generation, the narcissists who would rather be posting “selfies” at Starbucks than showing up for 11:00 a.m. worship. Because church requires communal participation in something larger than oneself, it is by definition boring to most millennials, who would rather be texting or promoting themselves through social media.

As a seminary professor who teaches millennials on a regular basis, I find this a false and patronizing characterization. Millennials have grown up in the shadow of 9/11, two wars and a crippling recession, and now they face a precarious job market. Perhaps younger Americans are registering their impatience with pointless bureaucracy, judgmental theologies and a perception that their perspectives are often of little value to their elders.

For those interested in growing the church, the message should not be one of analysis, but recruitment. Millennials, the church needs you! The reasons are numerous. We need your colorblind perspective, since the worship hour continues to be the most segregated time of the week. Many churches are perpetually mired in process, worrying far more about protocol for committee meetings than how to become a welcoming body. With your wariness about the glacial pace at which institutions change, you can help the church become more dynamic.

As our society becomes more tolerant of equality, many millennials perceive churches as homophobic and dismissive of leadership roles for LGBTQ persons and marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples. Yet the clamor for “conversion therapy” and the like among extremist groups like Focus on the Family does not represent a majority of church-going Christians. Mainline denominations like the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ have taken concrete steps to become far more inclusive in this regard. Millennials can join the exciting task of thoughtful reflection on equality issues, as churches seek to understand and interpret difficult biblical passages in a changing landscape.

In our increasingly pluralistic context, many believers are asking questions about the best response to people of other faiths. Millennials can help the church think through the fact that our suburban streets are now a microcosm of the world’s great religions. They can help the rest of us find the balance between being faithful believers and non-judgmental towards our neighbors.

Millennials can teach the rest of us how to utilize technology more effectively for worship, outreach to those in need, and for advocacy on pressing issues. They can help churches innovate with technology and reach more into the public square, reclaiming a place where churches are pillars in the community, and those with contrary perspectives welcome one another as brothers and sisters.

Now for those millennials reading this, you may be thinking,
Why should I become active in a church? My life is already busy enough, and there are far better ways for me to spend my precious free time. I can develop my own spiritual life without the burden of organized religion.
The response to such a query is that the church is and can be a place for essential interchange across generations. I have learned more about the amazing faith of the Greatest Generation through my involvement in church than anywhere else. These intergenerational relationships are sorely lacking in our current context, especially among millennials.

Another core reason for millennials to become active is that you will find many churches to be places for exciting theological reflection, where topics like human suffering, the beauty of God’s creation and the divinity of Jesus receive careful attention. Mainline denominations in particular take seriously the idea that we can draw closer to God through serious intellectual engagement with difficult questions. With millennials’ interest in probing hard issues, church can be an important venue for growth, especially in congregations that care about social witness.

As a proud member of Generation X, my message to millennials is that the church needs you, and perhaps you need the church. Here is why: seminaries are stocked with some of the best and brightest of your generation, who want to travel the road with you in the coming decades and grow together in the faith. They want to reflect with you on the Bible, your lives, and where we are headed as a society. They want the church to be a place of fellowship for you, where you can develop meaningful friendships and a sense of belonging in our hyper-individualized culture. Yet they and I recognize that the church is in serious peril without your participation. It is high time that we quit caricaturing your generation and seek your involvement. You are not the future of the church, but the necessary present.

This week when I clicked the Facebook app on my phone, I was greeted by a happy looking hamster character informing me that I would no longer be able to send messages to Facebook friends from the app on my phone. I would need to download the new Facebook Messenger app which promised faster sharing of images, files and videos, as well as what is essentially a “free” text message platform.

Of course, if it sounds to good to be true it probably is, so this week also saw a deluge of articles about the “permissions” you are granting Facebook when you download this new application, among them permission to “use microphone without authorization to record conversation,” to “send and receive SMS (text) messages without your knowledge” as well as activate and use the camera(s) on your phone. I know this because my Facebook feed was then swarmed with apocalyptic warnings and passionate claims of deleting and uninstalling the app, along with recommended, less invasive alternatives. Strangely enough after commenting on a few of these posts, I was invited the next time I logged in to “take a Facebook survey” which only makes me think Big Data is watching more closely than any of us can imagine.

I’m no conspiratorialist. I think Facebook has done a very good job of getting people to share very personal details about every aspect of their lives and then tracking that data to market to advertisers and companies. It makes good business sense. But the foundation of any person’s use of a product is trust — the idea that the product or commodity will work when you need it to work. That you can trust your car to crank, your plumber to be fair and do a good job, your doctor to prescribe the right medication. Consumer trust is everything, and while I don’t think that Facebook will see a mass exodus anytime soon, it’s strange that if you type “how do I uninstall” into Google, at the top of the list is “how do I uninstall Facebook messenger.” This notwithstanding the recent revelation that Facebook was experimenting with human emotions in something between a fifth grade science experiment and a BuzzFeed survey. These are serious questions that are ultimately about who we trust-and why.

Let me put it another way.

Once upon a time you found this great, new thing. It allowed you to share some of who you are in a place that felt safe, primarily because you were in control of what you shared and whom you shared it with. Along the way you made great friends, even re-connecting with others you hadn’t talked to in awhile. Pretty soon you had what felt like a real community — people who you could tell about how bad your day was, how cruel your boss was being, how difficult your ex was being or how you wished you could do more for your children. You shared pictures and funny stories from vacation, from lunch, from graduations and celebrations, from funerals and hospital rooms. You became part of a network that prayed for one another, that laughed, grieved and “liked” alongside one another. The space felt safe, until it didn’t.

Maybe it was just realizing that someone else was controlling the narrative you thought you were telling. Maybe it was feeling like there may be gatekeepers somewhere who were shaping the stories you shared. And that caused you to question everything. It made you wonder whether the space was ever safe. It may even have made you question the authenticity of the other people, who were really just participants like you were, equally hurt by what felt like manipulations by someone else, somewhere out there. Would you trust that place again? Could you trust that place again?

Now, instead of thinking of Facebook when you read that last paragraph, read it again and think about the Church. Even if this has not been your experience (or mine) of Church, there are millions of people for whom the institution of the Christian church is no longer a place worthy of trust.

As a minister, I regularly hear conversations about how we can get people to “come back” to church. Much of the conversation centers around this very idea of how we create communities of trust for the millions of individuals who once placed their trust in the Church only to find that trust violated by another. I’ve never been in Facebook’s headquarters, but I imagine the questions are the same. What do people want that we’re not giving them? Do we need to package it differently? Can we incentivize them to make them want to come back? Can we make a better product they’ll actually want to use?

I know very little about business, but after serving in church one way or another for around 20 years now, I’ve seen lots of folks who have been hurt and damaged by the church. I have dear, close friends who have caused me to understand another category of abuse that is neither physical, emotional nor sexual — it is religious abuse and though it can take the forms of these others, it all too often is a tool for oppression, dominion and subjugation.

You don’t undo those things with better packaging, or a new release of an old product. You have to do the deep, soul-baring, painful work of repentance and asking forgiveness — and do it without caring if this person ever comes to your church or not. You do it because it is right, it is just. You do it because bringing about shalom and wholeness means helping people heal and repair that which is broken. Sometimes repair isn’t possible. And occasionally something really remarkable and beautiful happens. There are no guaranteed results but then again, it’s not supposed to be about results to begin with. I don’t know if the Church can prevent more and more people from uninstalling religion from their lives, but I do believe those who serve and love the Church can help cultivate a culture of love and support — the kind that shows those who have been hurt that it is possible to love — and to trust anew.

Imagine for a moment that you are a teenager, arriving at college for your first year, and that you come from an interfaith family. Perhaps you were raised in one religion, but now, you feel drawn to explore the other religion in your family background. Or perhaps you were raised with both religions, and plan to stay connected to both. Or perhaps you were raised with neither religion, but now plan to explore both family religions, or all religions.

Now, imagine you are handed a survey and asked to choose one religion, and only one religion, as your identity. Your only other choices are to choose “none,” or “other religion,” or to skip the question altogether.

I went through this thought experiment as I read “The American Freshman,” an annual report released earlier this month, based on a survey of more than 150,000 college freshmen in the annual CIRP (Cooperative Institutional Research Program) survey, produced by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA.

The survey only allows students to pick one religion as their “religious preference.” I suggest that as a result of this restriction, the researchers are missing an opportunity to better understand the changing landscape of American religious identity. As summarized recently by Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, that landscape includes the following: one in five Americans is religiously unaffiliated, a quarter of the unaffiliated still see themselves as religious, one in six Americans follow the teachings or practices of more than one religion, and about one quarter have a spouse or partner of another religious background.

This year’s American Freshman survey found that nearly 28 percent of the students chose “none” as their religious preference, up from some 15 percent in 1971. And yet, more than 16 percent of these “religious nones” in 2014 rated their own spirituality as “above average” or in the highest ten percent. I asked Kevin Eagan, the director of the survey, for additional information on the students who came from interfaith families. In 1973, about 22 percent of students reported having parents with two different religions or denominations (or having one parent with no religion). By 2014, almost 30 percent had such “religiously discordant” parents.

When I asked whether the researchers had considered allowing students to check more than one religious preference, Eagan replied in an email:

“Unlike race/ethnicity, we have not heard feedback from students or institutions that respondents have felt boxed in by restricting them to just one preference for religion.” I can only reply that both my college-student daughter and my college-bound son do feel boxed in, as do I. And based on the college students I surveyed and interviewed for Being Both, my book on interfaith families, I suspect we’re not the only ones.

I also asked Eagan what he thought of the idea that students from interfaith families would check “none” if they could not check more than one box. “I would think that students who wanted to check multiple religions would either skip the question entirely (i.e., be coded as missing data) or choose the option of ‘other religion’ rather than choose ‘none,'” Eagan wrote me.

As someone who claims an identity formed by both my Jewish and my Christian heritage, I would not choose “other religion,” a category that seems designed for Sikhs or Jains or Pagans. Interfaith is not a religion: it is an identity based on the synergy and symbiosis of two distinct family religions. Often, those of us honoring both family religions are accused of trying to form a new religion. In order to avoid feeding this kind of concern, I would make a point of not checking the “other religion” box. My 18-year-old son says, “At least checking ‘other’ sends the message that they need to expand their options.” But does it send that message?

The choice to just skip the question creates the unfortunate result that people with complex religious identities from interfaith families will not be counted or included in the study results on religious identity. And we are tired of not counting. I agree that some students might just skip this question since there would be no way to express their true religious preferences within the parameters of the survey. My argument is that by allowing them to check more than one box, researchers would be able to gather data to better understand the religious identity of these students.

Why would students who feel connected to more than one religion choose “none”? Those of us who are interfaith children grow up hearing “you can’t be both” and “if you try to do both, you’re really nothing,” and being told that clergy, or religious texts, do not accept the existence of interfaith families. A survey that does not allow students to check two or more religion boxes, but does allow them to check “none,” effectively steers respondents from interfaith families to the “none” box. And yet, this is clearly an uncomfortable box for interfaith children who celebrate more than one religion. My 18-year-old son explains, ” ‘None’ strips you of your religion. They’re saying that because you don’t fit into one of our categories, you can’t have any religion.”

There’s a simple solution to all of this. Allow students to check more than one box. Allow them to check both Buddhist and Jewish. Allow them to check, whether or not you agree that it is a valid choice, Jewish and Catholic. The results will be more complex, perhaps harder to summarize. And more true.

LAKEWOOD, CO – JANUARY 14: A New Hope Ministries, Center of Hope program participant waves an American Flag, trying to lure drivers on S. Sheridan Blvd to the church’s car wash in the parking lot January 14, 2015. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images) | Andy Cross via Getty Images

(RNS) A new survey shows in stark relief that what some are calling the Great Decline of religion in America continues: Since 2012, the U.S. has about 7.5 million more Americans who are no longer active in religion.

Earlier this month, the 2014 General Social Survey was released. The GSS is the gold standard for sociological surveys. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this multimillion-dollar study gives us the most accurate data on American society — including religion.

(An important point to remember as you see the data: Each percentage point increase represents a growth of 2.5 million adults. So a 3-point rise in secularity, for example, means that about 7.5 million people left religion since 2012.)

1. More Americans prefer “no religion.”

When asked their religious preference, nearly 1 in 4 Americans now says “none.” Up until the 1990s, the percentage who were in this group known as “nones” hovered in the single digits. The 2014 GSS showed that nones are 21 percent of the population, up one point from 2012.

How large is this group? There are nearly as many Americans who claim no religion as there are Catholics (24 percent). If this growth continues, in a few years the largest “religion” in the U.S. may be no religion at all.

2. Americans aren’t going to church like they used to.

The number of Americans who never darken a church door is also at a new high. Over a third of Americans (34 percent) never attend a worship service (other than weddings and other ceremonies). This is a 3-point increase from just a few years earlier.

3. More Americans say they never pray.

Is this just a departure from organized religion? Even with people no longer identifying with religion or attending worship services, they still pray. Nearly one-in-six Americans never prays.