Nothing in particular is America’s fastest growing religious group
IN APRIL 1966 Time The magazine sparked outrage in America when it ran a cover story asking “Is God Dead?” More than 80 years after Nietzsche said so. Today, American religion seems less exceptional. According to a recent Gallup poll, a pollster, for the first time, a majority of Americans do not belong to a church. “We officially live in a pagan nation,” regretted the editor of a Catholic magazine. Pollsters attribute the decline in church membership to the rise of “nuns” or unaffiliated with religion, who now represent a third of the population. Yet it is a subgroup of the no’s, of those who believe in “nothing in particular,” who are reshaping the American religious landscape.
Although they are generally grouped with atheists and agnostics in the category of people without religious affiliation, the nothing in particular is a separate religious group. They are twice as numerous as atheists and agnostics – nearly one in four Americans is nothing in particular – and are growing faster than any religious group. As its enigmatic name suggests, their defining characteristic is an aversion to being defined.
“They don’t want to be stuck,” says Ryan Burge, social science researcher and author of “The Nones”. In some ways, they’re remarkably average: unlike atheists and agnostics, who are mostly younger men, they’re more likely to be middle-aged and just as likely to be women as they are men. The majority of the nothing in particular believe in God, and a third of them attend church sporadically. Yet they reject allegiance to any religious group and are skeptical of institutional authorities. Distrust of the covid-19 vaccine is one example of this trend.
Mr. Burge says nothing in particular is alienated from society in more ways than simple religious affiliation. They have the lowest level of education of any major religious group – only one in five has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Almost 60% earn less than $ 50,000 per year. In politics, they lean neither to the right, like most white evangelicals, nor to the left, like atheists or black Protestants. (Only a third of them voted for Donald Trump, according to Mr. Burge’s analysis of the Co-operative Election Study.) They rarely participate in political activities, such as attending a protest, giving money to a campaign or even put up a sign in the yard. . “Apathy is the big word that comes to mind,” says Burge.
While Christianity has declined in America, the Nothing in particular is growing at a breathtaking pace. Since 2008, when social scientists began to follow them, their ranks have grown by 60%. Mr. Burge believes there are two reasons for their rise. First, as America’s religious makeup changes, it becomes more and more acceptable not to identify as a Christian. It could be that their emergence is less linked to people leaving organized religion than to the revelation that they were never really a part of it. Nothing in particular is drawn largely from this segment of Americans who have become unhappy as they have seen their economic prospects plummet with recessions and the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs. “They are just shut out of society, sort of adrift in space,” Mr. Burge said.■
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the title “None of the above.”