Real change is afoot in America. It won’t happen overnight, but the beneficial effects should be obvious within a decade.
The Pew Research Center has released a report titled “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” tallying our religious beliefs, based on the results of a 2014 telephone poll of 35,000 Americans. The center ran a similar poll in 2007, and a comparison of the results is eye-opening no matter what your religious beliefs might be.
The determining factor in any nation’s well-being is culture. Although the buzz in the news is usually about politics, culture is far more fundamental because culture determines politics. And among many other cultural values it is the religious values that loom largest today, in America and around the world. Whether you’re talking, for example, about chaos in the Middle East or the drama in the U.S. presidential race, religion dominates. In America, religion dominates the Republican Party, and it dominates the differences between the two parties. So the Pew Center’s results are a critical gauge of where we’re at and where we’re going.
As expected, the 2014 poll reveals a majority Christian nation, 46 percent Protestant and 21 percent Catholic, with a surprisingly large 23 percent minority listing themselves as “unaffiliated” (atheist, agnostic, or “none”). But the trends are most interesting. During 2007 to 2014, mainline Protestants and Catholics dropped from 42 to 35 percent, evangelical Protestants held steady at 25 percent, while “unaffiliated” jumped from 16 to 23 percent. So 7 percent switched from “mainline Christian” to “unaffiliated” while evangelicals held steady.
Most significant is the generational tally, comprising four groups born 1928-1945 (World War II generation), 1946-1964 (boomers), 1965-1980 (generation X), and 1981-1996 (millennials). Among these, the percentages calling themselves “Christian” were 85, 78, 70 and 57, respectively. The percentages calling themselves “evangelical” were 30, 28, 25 and 21. The percentages calling themselves “unaffiliated” were 11, 17, 23 and 35. Note that the unaffiliated percentage more than triples as you go from the oldest to the youngest generation. The trend away from religion is far more pronounced among the young than the old, so we can expect this trend to become even stronger in the future.
Although many readers will disagree, I regard all this as good news. Religion has a beneficial side, but overall it has for decades made life difficult on our planet. This is especially true of religion’s most fundamentalist forms. The most obvious examples are in the Islamic nations of the Mideast, but America is certainly not exempt from religiously inspired foolishness. When everything is a matter of religious faith, all matters become intense, irreconcilable, subject neither to rational debate nor pragmatic compromise, and democracy flounders.
A nation that believes in miraculous conceptions and people rising from the tomb is likely to be conned into all sorts of irrational nonsense. As we become more free of religion, we will be less likely to chase after miracle cures and future salvation and more likely to look realistically at where we are now and what steps can move us toward becoming a society of healthy and happy individuals who understand the beauty of this life and are humanely engaged in being all that they can be. We will more frequently resolve our problems by rational discussion rather than by battles over absolute beliefs. That success will build appreciation for life here and now, a life full of joy and wonder if we can only muster the rationality to grasp it.
The bad news is these trends seem to be pushing fundamentalists into a corner. Worldwide, we see religiously inspired terrorist groups of mostly young men in revolt against modern times, in fervent quest of the imagined security of a monastic medieval male-dominated state. Most of western Europe freed itself from religion many years ago, resulting in a largely non-religious and reasonably rational culture. America is beginning a similar transition, but we are starting from a mix that includes a 25 percent minority of fundamentalists. Their numbers are declining, but very slowly, and the intensity of their belief seems to be increasing, especially in the Southeast and Midwest, and especially within the Republican party. This spells continued division and difficulty.
The large positive changes since 2007 will continue, eventually creating a stronger, healthier, more peaceful, more humane America. Hopefully, we are now near the high tide of resistance to these changes, the destructive culture wars will soon recede, Congress will again function, and America will begin to be all that she can be.
—––––– v –––––—
Art Hobson is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Arkansas. Email him at [email protected].