Nones

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The bottom line: The 'pew gap' remains a powerful reality in American political life

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The bottom line: The 'pew gap' remains a powerful reality in American political life

As an emerging American voice, the Rev. Jerry Falwell visited South Carolina in 1980 to promote his new Moral Majority network, while urging evangelicals to back Ronald Reagan, instead of President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist.

Then Furman University professor John C. Green was intrigued by mixed reactions on three Baptist campuses in Greenville -- his own "moderate" Baptist school, a mainstream Southern Baptist college and the proudly fundamentalist Bob Jones University. For example, Bob Jones, Jr., called Falwell the "most dangerous man in America today," because of his efforts to unite religious groups in political activism.

This potent blend of politics and religion was an obvious topic for political-science research. Colleagues agreed, but one said they needed to act fast, "since these kinds of trends burn out quick," Green recalled, laughing. "Here we are in 2023 and arguments about religion and politics are hotter than ever."

From the start, experts tried to show a clash between religion and secularism, noted Green, author of "The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections."

The reality is more complex than a "God gap." By the late 1980s, researchers learned that -- while most Americans remain believers -- it's crucial to note how often voters attend worship services. The more fervently Americans support religious congregations with their time and money, the more likely they are to back cultural conservatives.

This "religiosity gap" remains relevant. A new Pew Research Center analysis noted that, in 2022 midterms: "The gap in voting preferences by religious attendance was as wide as it's been in any of the last several elections: 56% of those who said they attend religious services a few times a year or less reported voting for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterms. … But GOP candidates were the favorite among those who attend services monthly or more by more than two-to-one (67%, vs. 31% who voted for Democratic candidates)."

Meanwhile, Protestants supported the "GOP by nearly two-to-one." White evangelical support for Republicans hit 86%, while white Catholics "favored Republican candidates by 25 points, whereas Hispanic Catholics favored Democratic candidates by an even greater margin (34 points)." Jewish voters preferred Democrats -- 68% to 32%. Atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular" voters remained loyal to the Democrats, with 72% supporting that party, and 27% backing Republicans.

In 2012, Green was part of the Pew Research team behind the landmark "Nones on the Rise" study, which documented the stunning growth of the "religiously unaffiliated."


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Two leaders of the new U.S. House could put Baptist diversity in the news spotlight

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Two leaders of the new U.S. House could put Baptist diversity in the news spotlight

There could hardly be a greater contrast than New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries’ glide into leadership of the U.S. House Democratic minority and that of California Republican Kevin McCarthy’s agonizing 15-ballot crawl to barely become House Speaker in the worst such Capitol Hill fuss since the Civil War.

Jeffries, of course, wins news renown as Congress’s first African-American party leader. But here’s a factoid has gotten little media notice. Yes, this is a religion angle.

By coincidence, both party leaders are now Baptists, a faith that outside the South has generally been underrepresented among the political elite. Catholics (think Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Paul Ryan) monopolized the speaker and minority leader posts for much of the 21st.Century.

There would be good feature potential in comparing the two Baptists’ congregations.

Though Jeffries has an Arabic first name (meaning “wise”), he’s a lifelong worshiper at Cornerstone Baptist Church,  a prominent African-American congregation in Brooklyn. Senior Pastor Lawrence Aker III and his wife Cynthia have the distinction of holding diverse divinity degrees from both “evangelical” Dallas Theological Seminary and “mainline” Yale.

McCarthy’s congregation is the equally well-known Valley Baptist Church in his hometown of Bakersfield. Senior Pastor Roger Spradlin, who trained at Criswell College, has served Valley since 1983 and now leads a team of eight clergy. This is a typical white evangelical fellowship and affiliated with the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which Spradlin has served as chairman of the national executive committee.

Speaking of religion on Capitol Hill, reporters will want to keep on file the official religious affiliations of all 534 members of the incoming House and Senate (with one vacancy due to death) accessible by clicking here. The handy list is compiled every two years by the Pew Research Center from information the legislators themselves file with CQ Roll Call.

Labels may say little.


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NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect

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NPR comes to hills of Tennessee and sees exactly the religion trends that you would expect

What do you know: National Public Radio came to my backyard here in East Tennessee to cover an important religion-beat story. And, well, NPR saw exactly what you would expect NPR to notice, while ignoring all of the details and questions you would expect this deep-blue news organization to ignore.

Once again, we are talking about a story that is totally valid, but its producers avoided the kind of diversity in sourcing that would have made matters more complex. Here’s the headline for the online text version: “As attendance dips, churches change to stay relevant for a new wave of worshippers.”

What’s missing in this story? It’s absolutely true that there are declining churches here in the mountains of East Tennessee, especially during COVID-tide. That’s an important story. The problem is that there are also growing churches in the region (yes, including my own Orthodox parish, which has grown at least 25% in the past three years) and that’s a detail that makes this story more complex. Here is the overture:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — It's Sunday morning and a small group sits around a fire pit in a community garden under the limbs of an expansive box elder tree. Church is about to start. And it's cold.

"God our Father, we are just so thankful for this time that we have to share this morning," says Pastor Chris Battle, a big man with a pipe clenched in his generous smile. "And we really thank you for fire that keeps us warm even as we sit up under this tree. We just pray that you would bless our time together."

Three years ago, Battle walked away from more than three decades leading Black Baptist churches and turned his attention to Battlefield Farm & Gardens in Knoxville. They grow vegetables and sell them at a farmer's market. They also collect unsold produce from around the city and deliver it to people in public housing once a week.

Battle says he left because traditional church was not connecting with people. He felt they were turned off by the sermons, the pitches for money, the Sunday-morning formality of it all.

This brings us to the first of two thesis statements describing the big picture:

American Christianity is in the midst of an identity crisis. Attendance is in steep decline, especially among millennials and Gen Z who say traditional church doesn't speak to their realities.


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Ryan Burge day: Black church believers and Black ‘nones’ show little Ideological divide

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Ryan Burge day: Black church believers and Black ‘nones’ show little Ideological divide

There are a number of narratives that have emerged from the 2020 election season, many of which will take years to fully unpack.

One of the most important actually began to take root in December 2017 when Alabama held a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions who became Attorney General in the Donald Trump administration. Alabama, one of the most conservative states in the nation, elected a Democrat — Doug Jones — to a statewide office for the first time in 25 years.

The reason for the victory was quickly attributed to the African-American community who turned out in large numbers for the Democrats. This same thread has run through coverage of the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden bested Trump in Georgia. Observers noted that the deep history of civil rights activism in the state energized the African-American base to repudiate the Trump presidency.

That bore out again on Jan. 5, 2021 when the Democrats won both Senate run-off elections in the state, defeating two Republican incumbents.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock’s win has garnered the most headlines. The pastor of one of America’s most historic churches — Ebeneezer Baptist — Warnock’s sermons featured prominently in the campaign. One of the results of this coverage is that it pulled back the curtain a bit on the Black church experience for many White Americans who have never had a lot of exposure to other religious traditions.

Yet, despite the fact that a lot of the chatter about the Black vote has centered on people of faith — it’s important to recognize that the Black community is not a religious monolith. While the largest share of African-Americans identify as Christian (63.5%), nearly a quarter indicate that they have no religious affiliation (22.1%) and another 15% identify as part of another faith group (Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.)

While these religious differences generate huge political divides among the White community, is the same true for Black Americans? The data indicates that race generates a unifying identity for Black Americans much more so than it does for White America, and religious differences at the ballot box are often small or non-existent when comparing Black Americans of different faith traditions.

In terms of political partisan and ideology — the differences between Black Christians, Black Nones and those of other faith traditions is relatively small. However, it’s worth pointing out that Black Christians are clearly the most likely to identify with the Democratic Party.


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Skeptical thinking (from left) about role of religion in President Joe Biden's big day

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Skeptical thinking (from left) about role of religion in President Joe Biden's big day

Back in the early days of GetReligion (we launched on Feb. 2, 2004) I urged reporters not to forget the old Religious Left and, when covering believers in those flocks, not to forget that there is more to their stories than politics. The left is the left because of doctrinal and worship traditions, as well as convictions that align with the New York Times editorial page.

Then something happened that modified my thinking on this subject. Hang in there with me, because I am working my way to an interesting think piece, care of Religion Dispatches. The headline: “The Inauguration’s Beautiful Call for Unity Was Undermined by the Invocation of Religion.”

Faithful readers of GetReligion will remember that, in the summer of 2007, political scientist and polling maven John C. Green spoke at a Washington Journalism Center seminar to a international circle of journalists who came to Capitol Hill to discuss press freedoms in their homelands. But the hot topic of the day was the rise of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and whether he could reach the White House. As I wrote in a previous post about that:

The bottom line: Obama was speaking directly to Democrats in the black church, but he was also reaching out to an emerging power bloc in his party — a group Green called the “religiously unaffiliated.” These so-called “nones” were poised to form a powerful coalition with atheists, agnostics and liberal believers.

Green made a prediction that was years ahead of schedule, in terms of the conventional thinking of Beltway politicos. At some point in the future, that growing coalition of secularists and religious liberals was going to cause tensions inside the Democratic Party.

Five years later, when the Pew Forum released its groundbreaking report on religiously unaffiliated Americans, Green raised that issue once again in a public event. Here’s a bite of the “On Religion” column that I wrote at that time.

[The] unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."

This brings us to Biden, today’s Democratic Party and some of the challenges he faces, when dealing with moral, cultural and religious issues in American life.


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Do it yourself tradition: Many Millennials are creating individualistic versions of Lent

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Headline writers love short words.

If you were a copy-desk pro, which of the following two terms would you prefer to use in a bold one-column headline when describing one of the biggest and most complex trends in American religion today (hello omnipresent Pew Research Center folks)?

Would you prefer to call people linked to this trend “religiously unaffiliated Americans” or “nones”?

You see my point, right?

Now, one of the problems associated with the term “nones” is that many people seem to think that this word means that these Americans have no religious beliefs.

That’s inaccurate and misses the main point, which is that the “religiously unaffiliated” are just that — people who have cut their ties of affiliation to organized religious groups. Instead of religious traditions, they have their own personal approaches to religion and ultimate issues. Does the term “Sheilaism” mean anything to you? It should. It’s a term linked to the work of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, author of the landmark book, “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.”

This brings us back to the season of Lent and to this weekend’s think piece, care of The Lily website operated by The Washington Post. The key is that large numbers of Millennials, many of them “nones,” have not given up on Lent. Instead, they have — this is America — created their own versions of the season, using the “give up one thing” motif as an opportunity to express themselves. Here is a key section of this breezy feature:

Millennials are leaving religion in greater numbers than ever before, but they are more likely to observe Lent than baby boomers, according to 2014 research from Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling group. Twenty percent of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) responded that they were planning to fast, compared with 10 percent of boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964).


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There's a whiff of a tiff when the pros try to pick the past decade's top religion stories

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What were the past decade’s top religion stories?

In the current Christian Century magazine, Baylor historian Philip Jenkins lists his top 10 in American Christianity and — journalists take note -- correctly asserts that all will “continue to play out” in coming years.  

His list: The growth of unaffiliated “nones,” the papacy of Francis, redefinition of marriage, Charleston murders and America’s “whiteness” problem, religion and climate change, Donald Trump and the evangelicals, gender and identity, #MeToo combined with women’s leadership, seminaries in crisis and impact of religious faith (or lack thereof) on low fertility rates.

Such exercises are open to debate, and there’s mild disagreement on the decade’s top events as drawn from Religion News Service coverage by Senior Editor Paul O’Donnell. Unlike Jenkins, this list scans the interfaith and global scenes.

The RNS picks:  “Islamophobia” in America (with a nod to President Trump), the resurgent clergy sex abuse crisis, #ChurchToo scandals, those rising “nones,” mass shootings at houses of worship, gay ordination and marriage, evangelicals in power (Trump again) as “post-evangelicals” emerge, anti-Semitic attacks and religious freedom issues.

You can see that the same events can be divvied up in various ways, and that there’s considerable overlap but also intriguing differences.

Jenkins  looks for broad “developments” and focuses on the climate and transgender debates, racial tensions, shrinking seminaries and low birth rates (see the Guy Memo on that last phenomenon).

By listing religious freedom, RNS correctly highlights a major news topic that Jenkins missed. RNS includes the U.S. legal contests over the contraception mandate in Obamacare and the baker who wouldn’t design a unique wedding cake for a gay couple. Those placid debates are combined a bit awkwardly with overseas attacks against Muslims in China, India and Myanmar, and against Christians in Nigeria. OK, what about Christians elsewhere?


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Mainstream journalists should pay attention if American Judaism gets into serious trouble  

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How many articles have we read about the inexorable demographic slide of U.S. “mainline” Protestantism, difficulties lately hitting “evangelicals,” declining Mass attendance for Catholics and the growth of religiously unaffiliated people (“Nones”) who forsake all religious ties that bind?

There’s been far less media attention to the state of Judaism, the nation’s second-largest religion though Islam is moving up. It faces far worse prospects, according to premier chronicler Jack Wertheimer, a historian and former provost at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).

Reporters — if American Judaism is in serious trouble, that’s a big story by any definition.

This dire, developing story is a good example of the way scholarship that deserves media coverage can be mostly hidden for an extended period yet remain pertinent and newsworthy. Wertheimer’s “The New American Judaism” (Princeton), published two years ago, only caught The Guy’s eye when boss tmatt noted a review in the current edition of the Orthodox Union magazine Jewish Action. (The Guy has not yet read the book but that lengthy review provides ample substance and quotes.)

Wertheimer sees a “recession” — if not a great depression.

More than 2 million people of Jewish parentage “no longer identify as Jews.” Many others do not see themselves as part of the Jewish religion and define themselves only in cultural or ethnic terms. Rising intermarriage means fewer Jews tomorrow. Birth rates among the non-Orthodox are so low one wonders “who will populate Jewish religious institutions in the future.”

If the religion atrophies,  can non-religious communal life thrive?


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