America’s Secular Surge

America appears to be undergoing a surge of secularism. Yet as Americans increasingly fall away from organized religion, the picture is far more complicated than the empty pews suggest. 

What defines a religious person or religious people is less and less clear, as discussed recently on the Faith Angle Forum podcast with its host Josh Good of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Atlantic writer Elizabeth Breunig and scholar of religion John C. Green whose book Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics explores these topics.

Breunig asked Green about the difficulty of defining the term “religious” and the struggles journalists and academics can have when covering religion news. One problem, according to Green, is the decline of once shared theological language.

“Things that used to be taken for granted, that people would know something about just from ordinary interactions and daily life, no longer have that kind of currency that they once did,” Green said.

However, Green also noted that the secularization of America has been remarkably uneven as well. There are really two large groups of secular individuals in the United States, Green argues. 

“There are those people who are really non-religious but have no particular set of secular beliefs, perspectives or identifications, and I think those people are those with the most difficulty with the concept of religion, particularly in society that’s always been religiously diverse, but it’s become even more diverse in more complicated ways,” Green identified.

This is a group of secularists for whom religion isn’t so much a despised phenomenon as much as it is an alien one. The other group entails “more genuinely secular people, as people who think and live from a secular worldview.”

But, apart from differences among groups that identify as non-religious, among religionists, social and political differences have also emerged.

“When I talk to political reporters about religion and elections they will often ask me where the Catholic vote is in this election,” Green recounted. “I try not to be facetious, but my answer is ‘which Catholic vote are you talking about?’ Because there are maybe four, depending on how you divide it.”

These groups include White Catholics, Non-white Catholics, theologically traditional White Catholics, theologically progressive white Catholics and lastly centrist or moderate Catholics. Each group self-identifies as Roman Catholic, but they have such a diversity of beliefs and behaviors that the descriptor “Catholic” ceases to have coherent sociological meaning.

Good also brought up an intriguing statistic from Green’s book: “half of American Jews, two fifths of Mainline Protestants and fully one third of Catholics score above average on the personal secularism index.” Good and Green agreed that this showed that, even for people who identify as religious, secularity is still a powerful force in their lives.

These contradictions confuse both people who want to study and write about religion and to the people living out these conflicts in their daily lives.

“If we think of secularism as a set of perspectives that reflect a secular worldview, there are religious people who otherwise engage in religious beliefs and practices who still share those [secular] beliefs… In many of our religious traditions we have a strong modernist component… and it turns out that many of the modernists aren’t — by most measures — pretty religious people. But, there’s something else going on there, there’s another set of beliefs and perspectives that don’t, in their minds, contradict their religiosity, but fits with it in some complementary fashion,” said Green.

Interestingly, Green also noted that people most indifferent to religion, those who are secular but without strong atheistic beliefs, “tend to be among the less educated.” The social scientist speculated that this is because “as higher education has become more common in the U.S., people that have access to that education find ways to fill out a complicated worldview.”

In other words, instead of becoming less religious, many college-grads find a way to combine their modernist sensibilities with their religious beliefs in a way that works for them. These people are known as “religious secularists” and their “behavior puts them as being very religious, but their actual beliefs are very secular. These people tend to be highly educated, probably because they’re trying to work out their conflicting beliefs.”

Lastly, Green added that much of the increased irreligion in America is less an emptying of churches and more a reflection that “religious communities used to count on a large group of fairly indifferent members.” Instead, today those people who would have been nominally Presbyterian or Methodist are now “more and more just out there.” These “nones” can’t just be ignored because they’re heterodox, though; Green predicted that they would come to be a potent political force, noting that former U.S. President Donald Trump dominated the share of the vote from those who identified as neither secular nor religious.