I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the continuing trend toward a secular future, in America and other nations.
In most countries, the power and influence of religion declines as the populace becomes wealthier and more educated. As people look toward the future with greater optimism, they feel less need for the illusory consolation of faith. For a long time, the United States was an outlier in this regard: a rich, developed country where religious fundamentalism exerted a powerful political influence.
But those days may be coming to an end. A new poll shows that less than half of Americans say religion is important in their daily lives. This is the first time that this has ever happened, and it points toward a future where religion has waned in cultural influence and power – despite the regressive right-wingers in office doing their utmost to prop the churches up. Their best efforts have done precisely nothing to stop this trend.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
The numbers of atheists, agnostics and generally nonreligious people have been growing for years. As a share of the U.S. population, they now outnumber every single religious denomination. As of 2021, for the first time ever, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or other organized house of worship.
Even among those who still identify as religious, the intensity of their belief is declining. Increasingly fewer people say that religion is an important part of their lives.
There’s a new poll on this topic, and it comes with a whopper of a title: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World.
One thing I wonder about in all this: do any of the surveys or analysts make a distinction between organized/institutional religion and spirituality?
Or considering themselves part of a religious tradition vs. being formal members?
Or even how many active members of a religion are also atheist?
I ask because I currently attend a Unitarian congregation, and a fair number of the people there are openly atheist. I know a number of people who consider themselves Jewish and may or may not observe some of the practices but are not members of any of the established Jewish movements. And I’ve known a number of people who aren’t a member of any church or anything, but instead practice some variety of pagan or new-age religion.
Personally, I could be considered atheist, since I don’t believe in a deity (or rather I believe that if there is a “deity”, she probably doesn’t care much about what we do — we’re entirely on our own.) But I don’t call myself atheist, because most of the prominent capital-A Atheists are not folks I would want to be associated with: I don’t see them as being any better persons than your average fundamentalist Christian. And there’s Libby Anne, of the Patheos blog “Love, Joy, Feminism”, who is an example of someone who doesn’t believe in a god but refuses to call herself “atheist.”