America is rapidly secularizing

America is rapidly secularizing

Losing our religion

By Matthew Yglesias at Slow Boring.com

April 4, 2021.

Church goers leave the First Baptist Church of Luverne after a recent Sunday service

(Photo by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

One of the basic stylized facts about the United States is that compared to Western Europe, we are a much more religious country.

This continues to be true in a relative sense, but the American religious landscape is changing very quickly. There are lots of different ways to measure religiosity, but this recently released Gallup survey tracking church (or synagogue, mosque, etc) membership is particularly striking.

Graph titled "church membership among U.S. adults now below 50%," Showing the percentage of Americans who responded "yes" to the question "Do you happen to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque?" over time, with a sharp decrease from 70% in 2000 to 47% in 2020

One thing that pops out here is that the pace appears to be accelerating. From roughly 1950 to 2000, membership fell from 76% to 70%. Then it fell 23 points in the last 20 years.

And if you delve into the data, this turns out to be both a question of individual cohorts becoming less observant over time and also of each successive cohort being less religious than its predecessor. In other words, absent some kind of dramatic religious awakening among Zoomers, these numbers are going to keep falling pretty dramatically in the future.

I think there is some broad dim awareness of this reality, but I think it’s worth dwelling on at some length because my guess is that it’s a big underlying factor in a lot of our social trends.

Religion is getting more polarized

When I shared that image on Twitter, a lot of secular liberals who don’t like right-wing evangelical politics got excited and dunked on right-wing evangelicals.

But this doesn’t really seem to be the case. Ryan Burge, a religion scholar who makes lots of great charts on Twitter, shows that evangelical or “born again” identity is holding up very well.

The decline in membership instead has two causes. One is that a growing number of people who describe themselves as non-denominational Christians aren’t members of a congregation. The other is that, as documented in Burge’s new book, we’ve seen a big increase in the number of people who say they have no religious affiliation. In the 1972 General Social Survey, the “Nones” are 5% of the population, while today they are nearly a quarter of the population.

We’re essentially looking at a more polarized religious landscape, with normie Protestants and Catholics in decline but evangelicals holding their ground in the face of the Rise of the Nones.

The U.S. Muslim population is also growing rapidly from a small base and is forecast to overtake the Jewish population relatively soon.

One way this polarization manifests itself, I think, is that American Christians now seem increasingly likely to perceive themselves as a minority group subject to discrimination.

Table displaying percentage of respondents who said each group's experiences "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination, by party identification crossed with demographic groups

This seems different from both normal discrimination against minority groups and from white people claiming to be the victims of “reverse racism” via affirmative action. Instead, they see right-wing views on certain political issues (especially as related to sex and sexuality) as constitutive of Christianity, so as America becomes more secular and left-wing on those topics, they feel marginalized.

Secularization drives racial depolarization

The racial polarization of the American electorate steadily increased for decades until bottoming out in 2012. Then somewhat contrary to what you’d guess based on the tenor of the Trump-era takes, the gap between the white and non-white vote shrunk a bit in 2016 and then shrunk more in 2020.

There are a few different reasons for this.

But a political data person I spoke to says that secularization plays a role. He says that in his firm’s data, they see “a substantial effect of no longer identifying with a religion on change in partisanship,” but the impact varies by race. When a white person goes from Christian to non-affiliated, they are more likely to become a Democrat. But when a Black person makes the same switch, the correlation goes in the other direction.

The causation here, of course, is a bit hard to tease out. Michele Margolis’ book suggests that when people leave the GOP, they tend to leave their church, too, since they see right-wing politics as having become constitutive of the religion. Ismail White and Chryl Laird have a recent book which argues that Black Americans with moderate or even conservative views tend to be Democrats out of a sense of partisan loyalty that is inculcated in Black social institutions — with Black churches very high on that list. So secularization of the Black population leads to higher levels of GOP affiliation as Black conservatives (and some Black moderates) drift right in their voting behavior without the socializing influence of the church.

Burge’s data also sees religious disaffiliation moving Hispanics to the right.

This is interesting in part because it’s so contrary to the Bush-era theory of how conservatives would grapple with demographic change. His big idea was that if Republicans did things like champion faith-based initiatives, school vouchers, and openness to immigration, then the more upscale and churchier segments of the Black and Hispanic populations would come around to the GOP. Trump brought the GOP back up to their 2004 share of the non-white vote in 2020, but he did so with a totally different theory of the case.

Liberals are less worried about theocracy

One of the signature memes of the Bush era exploited the contiguity of the Kerry 2004 states with Canada to suggest realigning the North American continent into a progressive United States of Canada and a conservative rump America that was called Jesusland.

Map of the US and Canada, color coded in accordance with the states that voted for Kerry and Canada vs states who voted for Bush

Today, of course, progressives are obsessed with whiteness and white supremacy to the point of insisting that a pro-Trump riot that happened to have a diverse group in its leadership was a manifestation of whiteness.

Bush-era politics was much more dominated by the fear of theocracy.

And that also changed how we understood where different people are on the spectrum. Andrew Sullivan is an intellectually eccentric guy, and current perceptions of him are probably dominated by his insistent championing of Charles Murray’s (bad imo) work. But in the mid-to-late aughts, he was pretty firmly on the left, in part because he was so critical of what he termed “Christianist” politics by way of analogy with the foreign Islamists with whom the United States was at war.

This was a time when Sam Harris, today seen as a right-wing Intellectual Dark Web figure, would have been seen as on the left as he published books like “Letter to a Christian Nation” criticizing the then-ascendant strains of fundamentalist politics. Michelle Goldberg’s 2007 “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” was the best of a series of books on Christian nationalism, but there were a bunch.

At the same time, there was an electoral preoccupation with how Democrats could win the votes of religious people.

When Obama offered his 2008 version of economic anxiety theory, he put religion ahead of race in terms of right-wing identity politics: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Factually, of course, it continues to be true that religion is a fault line in partisan politics. If I describe a white person living in Wisconsin, you picture a Republican. Then I say it’s a white woman with a college degree living in Wisconsin and you picture a Democrat. But then I say she goes to a megachurch every Sunday and she’s back to being a Republican. But when you ask “who are the rural white non-college voters who Kerry won but Clinton lost?” it’s primarily people who weren’t very religious at a time when the religion cleavage was more electorally salient.

Demographics to watch out for

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that the media and political universes seem to have overreacted to the declining political salience of religion by moving to ignoring it entirely. We used to hear a lot about segmenting the white population based on religious affiliation, and now we’ve shifted almost entirely to discussing educational attainment.

But it’s not like the religious influence on politics went away just because secularization forced Republicans to become a less-overtly Jesus-first kind of political coalition.

As I noted above, the secularization trend seems to be prompting a reduction in the racial polarization of the electorate. But it’s also worth saying that since white voters outnumber non-white ones, it’s not like this is a neutral change — falling religious affiliation helps Democrats. It’s also particularly important because the geographical skew of the Senate is a huge deal in contemporary politics, and that skew is driven in part by the great overrepresentation of white voters in the upper house. So a dynamic through which Democrats gain newly unchurched white voters in exchange for losing newly unchurched non-white ones is actually very unfavorable to the GOP.

Original here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/secularizing-trend