“As we looked at the data, the conclusion we’ve come to, even it is kind of wishy-washy, is that it’s way too early to tell if the rise of the religious nones has come to an end,” he said.
Conrad Hackett, a senior demographer and associate director of research at Pew, said there are signs that “something interesting” is happening with nones right now but more data is needed.
Hackett said the conditions that fueled the rise of the nones are still in place. Younger Americans are less religious than older Americans, many Americans still switch their religious faith, and being nonreligious has become “stickier,” said Hackett — so that people who are born without a religious identity are more likely to stay nonreligious. Nonreligious people in the U.S. also tend to be younger than religious people.
Hackett is the co-author of a 2022 Pew report that projected what religion in American could look like in the next 50 years. That report looked at the birth and mortality rates as well as rates of switching religious identities and projected a long, slow growth in the nones for the foreseeable future. Researchers projected that by 2070, the nones would make up between 41% and 52% of Americans.
Christians, according to Pew’s projections, would make up just under half of Americans, with non-Christian religious people making up about 12% of the population.
Complicating matters is that Pew, like other organizations that survey religion in America, has moved to a probability-based online model for surveys — rather than mostly phone interviews. The GSS, a well-respected and long-running survey, switched from in-person interviews to a hybrid phone and online model during COVID — making it harder to compare its most recent data with past versions.
The CES data has consistently found higher percentages of nones than the GSS and Pew. But Burge said all three sources appear to show that something has changed with the growth of the nones.
The slowing growth of the nones doesn’t mean a religious revival in the U.S. Instead, Burge said, the U.S. will likely end up in the future with large numbers of religious people and nonreligious people, with neither group having a sizable majority. That will pose challenges for democracy, he said, which relies on cooperation and compromise — which is difficult when many people are feeling unnerved by the changes in the country and where religious and nonreligious people have different ideas on how the country should be run.
And those conflicting ideas lead to polarization and at times, hostility. That hostility, if it continues to grow, “will be bad for democracy,” said Burge.
“We can’t function in a democracy where you have two very large groups who hate each other.”
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
