In the overheated world of political fundraising and public-relations, America remains on the verge of theocracy, with women forced into red capes and white bonnets.
That’s the view of the political and cultural left, of course. On the right there are people who are absolutely sure that the drag-queen story hours held in some public libraries will soon be required in private religious schools. (Personally, I would like to see some of the folks on the right in those zip codes head to their public libraries and propose Narnia story hours or rosary-class meditation circles. If they are refused access, then it’s time to talk to authorities.)
The bottom line is that America is a very big, complex place and what flies in blue urban zones will not work in most of the heartland. While there is plenty of evidence that the nones-agnostics-atheists side of American life is growing (it is), there are also trends on the cultural and religious right that must be considered. As GetReligion has been arguing for years, the messy truth is that the mushy middle is what is vanishing.
This brings us to this weekend’s think piece at Religion & Politics, which ran with this headline: “Why the Partisan Divide? The U.S. Is Becoming More Secular — and More Religious.”
What does that mean? Well, for starters, consider trends among Hispanic Americans. You know that top Republicans and Democrats are thinking about that, right now.
In the end, there is plenty of evidence that the warring halves of American culture are real and they are not going away. What does religion have to do with that? Plenty. Click here for a recent GetReligion look at half of that: “'Blue Movie' time again: Massive New York Times op-ed says the 'pew gap' is real and growing.”
But back to this new essay by Spencer James, Hal Boyd, and Jason Carroll, who are faculty members in Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life. Here’s a key chunk of their thinking:
The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanship — it involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nation — nor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the country’s cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.
According to our recent survey report sponsored by the Wheatley Institution, a non-partisan research center at Brigham Young University, slightly less than one third of the U.S. population is deeply religious, frequently attending church services or engaging in other religious activities in their homes. Another third is fully secular, never participating in any sort of religious practice, whether it’s prayer, reading holy writ, or attending services. Meanwhile, a final third of Americans are nominally religious — attending services infrequently or engaging in other practices with varying levels of devotion.
These findings align with the 2020 National Religion and Spirituality Survey from the National Opinion Research Center as well as findings from the Pew Research Center, which estimates that roughly a quarter of American adults today are religiously unaffiliated.
There are changes taking place, in pews and outside of them. But nothing that is happening is easy to put on a bumper-sticker.
It’s true that some people have been turned off by religious conservatives who seem to think that being Republican is the same thing as actively practicing a traditional religious faith. Clearly this has something to do with the rising tide of people in the religiously unaffiliated niche.
But what else happened to cause this? Is a large flock of white evangelicals voting for Donald Trump (with enthusiasm or reluctance) enough to explain what is happening?
This next part is long, but essential:
… Certainly, people stop affiliating with their religious tradition for many reasons. However, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published research suggesting that an aversion to the religious right’s involvement in politics throughout the 1990s (and beyond) may have influenced the decision of self-identified moderates and liberals to disaffiliate from religious institutions during this period.
“Organized religion,” they write in their 2014 study, “gained influence by espousing a conservative social agenda that led liberals and young people who already had weak attachment to organized religion to drop that identification.” The scholars note a causal link between the religious right’s entrance into public conservativism and disaffiliation among certain pockets of the population: “Political liberals and moderates who seldom or never attended services quit expressing a religious preference when survey interviewers asked about it.”
These findings are significant, but they don’t tell the full story of American faith in the twenty-first century. … The same trends that seem to push some toward secularism may also help crystalize faith in others. Indeed, even as the nation is becoming more secular, in another sense, it’s also becoming more religious as well.
For example, a 2017 study from Indiana University’s Landon Schnabel and Harvard’s Sean Bock suggests that “intense religion” has persisted even as more “moderate religion” has seen declines. In other words, ascendent secularism is accompanied by a deepening of religious intensity. Speaking to The Washington Post, Schnabel compared this phenomenon to a “container getting smaller, but more concentrated.” So, yes, the steady stream of cable news chyrons on waning religious affiliation are accurate (the religious landscape is shifting) but the real story is more complicated.
The fact is that the highly religious in America haven’t gone away. They’ve remained steady as a percentage of the population, which means their overall numbers have grown with the population and their higher-than-average fertility patterns are one sign that the trend probably won’t reverse. Thus, those anticipating a full conquest of secularism in the United States shouldn’t hold their breath — neither should those rooting for a modern-day Great Awakening.
There is more.
I would simply say “read it all,” but I also think that some reporters may want to contact these thinkers and then add their contact info to their newsroom’s source lists.