25AR30-18

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AR 30:18 - America embraces "the sacredness of the individual"

In this issue:

AMERICAN RELIGION - How "the statistical decline in religious affiliation naturally levels off"

 + and America's longing for "some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos"

DOUTHAT, ROSS - Believe: "not as effective," as it might have been?

Apologia Report 30:18 (1,707)
May 24, 2025

AMERICAN RELIGION

"America isn't becoming less spiritual. It's becoming differently spiritual," by Landon Schnabel (RNS, Apr 14 '25) -- "For the past few decades, many feared that the marked rise of those who were leaving institutional religion were doing just that: Getting rid of God, in their lives at any rate.

   "But recent Pew Research findings <www.tinyurl.com/5bt7upwp> suggest that the decades-long decline in American Christianity may be stabilizing, leaving religion sociologists like me to ask, 'Why would the rate of religious disaffiliation suddenly slow after years of steady increase?'

   "One explanation may be offered in the decadelong study that my colleagues and I recently published in the journal Socius: We're witnessing not simple secularization, but transformation and polarization — a sorting process in which those uncomfortable with religious institutions have largely already left, while those who remain are more committed. <www.tinyurl.com/5n75fd9f>

   "Our new research, based on the National Study of Youth and Religion, reveals <www.tinyurl.com/ytv986ma> that many of those who left, however, aren't abandoning faith. Instead they're rejecting religious organizations they find too rigid, judgmental or politicized. ... Recent research suggests the key trends we identified have likely only intensified in the past dozen years.

   "This religious transformation we found stems from what we call individualization, a phenomenon in which people increasingly craft their spiritual lives according to personal values, rather than institutional dictates. Once this sorting process reaches a certain point, with most of those experiencing tension between personal values and institutional demands having already departed, the statistical decline naturally levels off.

   "Following the same individuals from adolescence into adulthood, we uncovered a revealing pattern: While church attendance and denominational affiliations declined sharply, personal spiritual practices often persisted. Many who stopped attending services continued to pray. Belief in God remained durable, even as organizational commitments faded. Meditation practices increased. ...

   "Some maintained robust spiritual lives while rejecting organizational affiliation — the 'spiritual but not religious.' Others blended practices from multiple traditions. Still others became secular or indifferent to religious matters. What united many wasn't a rejection of the sacred but a rejection of religious bureaucracy that felt disconnected from their lived experience. ...

   "What's emerging from this sorting is a religiously polarized landscape. At one pole stand those committed to traditional religious authority and institutions. At the other are those embracing what sociologist Robert Bellah and colleagues called 'the sacredness of the individual' — prioritizing personal authenticity over institutional directives.

   "As the middle ground empties, with marginally attached people having already disaffiliated, the rate of decline naturally stabilizes.

   "Our interviews revealed that political concerns often catalyze nones' departure from organized religion. ... Meanwhile, those remaining in traditional religious organizations increasingly align with conservative politics, creating two religious Americas with less and less common ground between them.

   "For religious organizations, this transformation presents both challenge and opportunity. Those doubling down on rigid doctrine and political conservatism risk pushing out those valuing authenticity and inclusion.

   "America isn't becoming less spiritual — it's becoming differently spiritual. The 'nones' aren't simply rejecting religion; many are reimagining it on their own terms. And as this sorting process nears completion, with most who feel tension between personal values and institutional demands having already disaffiliated, the statistical decline in religious affiliation naturally levels off — precisely what recent Pew data suggests is occurring." <www.tinyurl.com/5n7ksbjv>

With "Americans Haven't Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion" Lauren Jackson (New York Times, Apr 18 '25) suggests: "Is it any wonder the country is revisiting faith?" providing an unintended counterpoint to Schnabel (above).

   She begins: "On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true. ...

   "But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn't see any incompatibility between those things. But America's intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick. ...

   "I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity. Around 40 million Americans have left church over the last few decades, and about 30 percent of the population now identifies as having no religion. People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.

   "That's what I did, too. ...

   "America's secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they've ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. ... 

   "They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

   "Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew <www.archive.ph/XqBXc> found this year. This is a major, generational shift. People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something 'beyond the natural world.' ...

   In Washington, religious conservatives are ascendant. President Trump claims God saved him from a bullet so he could make America great again. The Supreme Court has the most pro-religion justices since at least the 1950s. Nearly half of Americans believe the United States should be a Christian nation. In Silicon Valley, tech bros have found God. Downtown hipsters have embraced Catholicism. And the singer Grimes recently said 'I think killing God was a mistake.'

   "Even in the institutions where conservatives are sure that elite liberals are indoctrinating youth with godlessness, something is changing. 'I have served as a chaplain at Harvard for 25 years, and the interest in and openness to religion and spirituality has never been higher on campus,' said Tammy McLeod, the president of the Harvard Chaplains. ...

   "I remember the first time I saw Richard Dawkins's book 'The God Delusion.' I was in middle school, at a Barnes & Noble in a strip mall down the street from my church. I think I was there to buy the latest Harry Potter. I stopped in front of the shelves, confronted with an astonishing possibility: It was an option not to believe.

   "Mr. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, intended to provoke. He was one of the patriarchs of New Atheism, a movement that began around the turn of the century. Disruptive forces — technological change, globalization and the attacks of Sept. 11 — invited people to question both their relationship to faith and the role of religion in society. The New Atheists' ideas, spread in best-selling books and viral videos on a young YouTube, helped make that interrogation permissible.

   "Religion was no longer sacrosanct, but potentially suspect. By 2021, about 30 percent of America identified as 'nones' — people who have no religious affiliation.

   "Scholars like the sociologist Steve Bruce said the United States, long an exception among Western countries, finally seemed to support the 'secularization thesis,' the idea initially posited by Max Weber, which holds that a society's modernization and economic development leads to the decline of religion. The Brookings Institution said churches were in 'their twilight hour.' The Washington Post speculated about when Protestant churches would be empty. ...

   "'Secularization in the West was not about the segregation of belief from the world, but the promiscuous opening of belief to the world,' said Ethan H. Shagan, a historian of religion at the University of California, Berkeley. ...

   For the last few decades, much of the world has tried to go without God, a departure from most of recorded history. More than a billion people globally and about a third of Americans have tried to live without religion. Studies in recent years have offered insights into how that is going. The data doesn't look good. 

   "Religiously affiliated Americans are more likely to feel gratitude (by 23 percentage points), spiritual peace (by 27 points) and 'a deep sense of connection with humanity' (by 15 points) regularly than people without a religious affiliation, researchers found this year. The latter is particularly important: Positive relationships are the single most important predictor of well-being, according to the longest-running study on human happiness in the world.

   "This isn't true for everyone, of course. About a third of Americans who have left religion appear to be doing just fine, according to a new study" from Ryan Burge, a former pastor and a leading researcher on religious trends. ...

   "About a quarter of Americans told Pew that the pandemic had strengthened their existing faith. 'Covid may have cemented or reinforced the importance of religion to people who were already religious,' said Alan Cooperman, an author of the Pew report. ...

   "There is plenty of evidence, though, that people aren't just religious because of insecurity or instability. Highly educated people are more likely than people who attended only high school to go to religious services weekly. Additionally, Hindus, Jews, Mainline Protestants and Muslims are all more likely than religiously unaffiliated people to have at least a college degree. These are people who tend to have good jobs, higher incomes and private health care. They are going to religious services because they are getting something they value out of it.

   "A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Dawkins, the famous atheist whose book had so shaken me all those years ago. I wanted to know what he made of the fact that America's secularization had stagnated.

   "He remained hopeful that secularism can replace religion. ...

   "He said he understood that churches in particular could provide moral instruction (and he said he valued the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man). But he insisted people should be able to fulfill their spiritual desires outside of faith.... There are lots of substitutes to spirituality that those can provide."

   "But many of the people I have spoken to say those kinds of alternatives aren't enough.

   "In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don't trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most importantly, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.

   "People also want to belong to richer, more robust communities, ones that wrestle with hard questions about how to live. They're looking to heady concepts — confession, atonement, forgiveness, grace and redemption — for answers.

   "'Nones' ... aren't necessarily going back, en masse, to their previous faiths. ...

   "But many of these 'nones' have had a dawning recognition that they had thrown 'the baby out with the baptismal water,' as my colleague Michelle Cottle said. ...

   "But I don't feel I can go back. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me. ... I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church. ...

   "I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos." <www.archive.ph/t5cIV>

 ---

DOUTHAT, ROSS

Elizabeth Grace Matthew (Real Clear Books & Culture, Apr 15 '25) reviews Douthat's new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and in turn, titles her response: "Can Everyone Be Religious?" -- "The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's recent book ... is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other words, even though most Americans still profess attachment to some religion, those attachments are in many cases so anemic and so historical - and American society as a result is now so presumptively secular - that a case for religious belief and practice must start from a very different place than might have made sense a quarter century ago. ...

   "Douthat posits that this kind of mass apathy toward religion might, counterintuitively enough, be fertile ground for the seeds of curiosity and faith. ...

   "For Douthat, this opens up space for 'an argument that tries to lay a general foundation for religious interest and belief.' So, in Believe, he attempts 'to persuade skeptical readers that it is worth becoming a seeker in the first place, and to provide guideposts and suggestions for people whose journeys begin in different places or take them in different directions.' ...

   "That Douthat pretty much accomplishes his end, balancing his own Catholic faith with broadminded, ecumenical dexterity, is a testament to his talent and his quality of mind. ...

   "So, while I find Douthat's intellectual pursuit and defense of religion intriguing and noble, I do think that the utilitarian case - an exhortation to check out some churches of your grandparents' persuasion in order to make friends and find community, from which belief will spring if indeed you commit - might remain more potentially effective to achieve his ends.

   "Especially if we're talking, as Douthat does, not just about the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - but also Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths. Which brings me to both the second reason I stay Catholic and the second tension in Douthat's thesis.

   "Catholicism is, as Douthat knows as well as anyone, a religion that can take, absorb, and answer for all the intellect a believer (or, for that matter, a skeptic) can bring its way. Take intellectual queries to Catholicism with any degree of seriousness and you will find not only answers, but more and better questions. ...

   "In short, I was blessed to be born into a faith where intellectualism trained on theological questions and religiosity itself are not at odds, but complements. This makes it easy - rational, even - to remain Catholic.

   "It makes it difficult, however, to accept the breadth of Douthat's intellectual ecumenism in Believe."

   Substacker Matthew concludes: "I can't help thinking that the book would have been more useful without any reason to suspect disguise. Although Douthat wrestles his expansive project down as well as anyone could, Believe's meta-exhortation just is not as effective as an argument more accessible in scope, and more targeted, might be.

   "Fortunately, Douthat has already given himself a head start on exactly such an undertaking. 'Why I am a Christian' is Believe's final and most compelling chapter.

   "It would make for an even more compelling book unto itself." <www.tinyurl.com/y34utubc>

   Believe is generating "a lot of buzz." No surprise there. However, a delightful surprise may be waiting as to who the ghost author(s) are behind the witty, erudite, humorous - and lengthy - Believe review posted at the "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf" Substack (Apr 7 '25), <www.tinyurl.com/53vhby52>

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