A Dispatch From the Post-Religious Future

The Nones have arrived. When asked their religious affiliation, Americans who answer “none” have been on the march for two decades. Now their ascendancy is a fact, confirmed by a Gallup poll showing that, for the first time since 1937 (when Gallup began to ask the question), fewer than half of all Americans—47 percent—belong to a church, synagogue, or other house of worship. As the share of both Catholics and Protestants in the population shrinks, the share of self-identified “nones” grows apace. The most precipitous change has occurred in the two decades between the turn of the present century—when the then-fairly constant figure still stood at approximately 70 percent—and today.

Not that Americans are alone; to the contrary, Gallup’s findings only reinforce the worldwide survey data summarized by the late political scientist Ronald Inglehart in “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion” (Foreign Affairs, September-October 2020). Between 2007 and 2019, 43 of the 49 countries studied by Inglehart had become steadily less religious. The United States, long an outlier as one of the world’s more religious countries, is now conspicuously among the vast majority.

In accounting for this historically sudden American decline, Inglehart cites some reasons given by his survey’s respondents. These range from, among lapsed Catholics, ongoing Church abuse scandals to, among evangelicals, the uncritical support given by some of their leaders to Donald Trump. A less frequently mentioned but, according to Inglehart, a more potent contributing factor lies in other data showing that multitudes of Americans, and especially younger Americans, have ceased to uphold the moral values concerning gender and sexuality sanctioned by religion. Thus, between 1981 and 2019, on a “values” scale of 1 to 10, the U.S. moved upward from a reading of 3.49, reflecting mainly conservative and religious views on issues like divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, to a reading of 5.86, passing the midway tipping point of 5.50 and entering the realm of predominantly liberal moral values.