It was certainly an attention-getting headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: “America Pulls Back from Values that Once Defined It.”
“Patriotism, religion and hard work hold less importance,” the subhed ran.
But is the story true? There are critics of the poll, and we will get to that.
Meanwhile, does any other country relentlessly poll and examine itself as much as the United States of America? Was 1,019 people a large enough sample size to draw conclusions about how 332 million Americans are thinking?
The story is this: Compared with how people responded to the same poll 25 years ago, America is slipping fast into a European-style secular state with little religious observance, less work ethic (four-week work days anyone?) and less care for the motherland. Maybe parts of Eastern Europe and the Russians are the only ones headed in the opposite direction these days. Here’s how the Journal summarized it all:
Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds.
The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, also finds the country sharply divided by political party over social trends such as the push for racial diversity in businesses and the use of gender-neutral pronouns.
Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.
These aren’t just tiny signs of movement; these are huge drops in nearly every category.
The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.
The having children and hard work components can be traced to directions in the Bible encouraging people to procreate and to work to support one’s family.
Oddly, the article didn’t develop the drop in religious attachment factoid like it did some of the other points in the survey.
The one priority that rose was money; from 31% to 43%. As for the reason for all this malaise:
A number of events have shaken and in some ways fractured the nation since the Journal first asked about unifying values, among them the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent economic downturn and the rise of former President Donald Trump.
But if anything, Trump was a boost for the legal standing of many religious Americans, so that argument doesn’t wash. Didn’t the presidency of Barack Obama have similar destabilizing trends connected with it? I’d say that some of Obama’s policies encouraged the class warfare that helped get Trump elected.
I downloaded the actual survey and found the largest percentage of people (32%) said they “never” attend religious services, while 19% said “less than once a year.” Together these groups comprise 51% or half the population. I added together the people who attend religious services frequently and that came to 29%. Those who follow Gallup polling may recall that, for years, about 20% of Americans have shown strong commitments to practicing traditional forms of religious faith.
In this new poll, the three largest denominational categories were Protestant (26%), Roman Catholic (21%) and “just Christian” (20%). Add those together and you get 66%, which shows that while people identify as having some kind of faith, they’re not necessarily in church.
Thirty-two percent of the respondents said they are evangelical. In the age breakdown, the largest group were the young (!) or the 18-24 category at 29%. The 35-49 and 50-64 age groups came in at 25%. Over 65 was 22%. That reverses the accepted wisdom that the young are highly irreligious these days.
I also found it interesting that the percentages of marrieds vs. singles were both at 50%. Sixty-two percent were employed; 38% were not, which seems high to me.
It’s hard to know how COVID-19 has changed these results for the better or worse. Church populations took a hit during the pandemic, especially among the young, although polls differ as to how much.
Also, how do you account for the fact that “Jesus Revolution,” the indie film about hipster-turned-evangelist Lonnie Frisbee, has become a hit, outdoing Oscar nominees, (according to this Free Press piece.) I mean, someone is going to see that film. If traditional forms of faith is a “niche,” these days, it’s still a large niche.
(The Free Press, btw, which was started by former New York Times writers Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles, is becoming a news source in its own right these days. Do give it a look).
What about that short-lived revival at Kentucky’s Asbury that people were jumping on planes to get to? Most of the reporting I saw on it in the secular media missed the real reason people were there: They are so desperate for God, they’ll jump in a car and drive 3,000 miles if need be.
Sadly, they don’t seem to be finding God in church, so they’re not going. It’s been nearly 15 years since my book “Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing” came out and depressingly, many of the problems I outlined have not changed. After awhile, people lose endurance and hope. It’s the bad church experiences that are impossible to quantify in polls.
Before we all get too depressed, Patrick Ruffini, a 40-something Republican pollster, came up with some interesting analysis in a Medium column as to why the Journal’s results were skewed to show dramatic changes.
First, they fit into the “declinist narrative” that many Americans feel compelled to believe about their own country, he wrote. Secondly, they just don’t ring true. He wrote:
If these numbers had been produced by my firm, I would immediately assume we had made a mistake and send them back to an analyst to double check…
Rather, the dramatically different results we see from 2019 and 2023 are because the data was collected differently. The March 2023 survey was collected via NORC’s Amerispeak, an extremely high-quality online panel. In the fine print below the chart, we can see that data from previous waves was collected via telephone survey.
In other words, responses gathered by phone will differ considerably from responses gathered via an online form. Read the whole thing for his argument that the Journal piece is based on faulty polling techniques. He concluded:
Reality is almost always a lot more boring. We know that patriotism and religion have been on the decline for quite some time, but the rate of decline did not quintuple in the last four years …
Maybe it is boring to say that because we’ve just crawled out of a once-every-100-years pandemic, it’s hard to make generalizations about much of anything. Of course people care about money; we had huge losses in the stock market in 2021, there’s a war in Europe and there’s banks failing these days.
If Americans are truly losing sight of shared values, what are millions of people doing on Facebook, talking to their core communities? And are religious institutions holding back the tide of further secularism and loss of values, or are they simply not relevant to the picture at all?
So many questions, so few answers.