The uber-trend in 21st Century American religion is the increase in “nones” who cite no religious affiliation or identity when pollsters phone. Last December, the Pew Research Center reported that 29% of the adult population currently self-describes as either atheist, agnostic or — by far the biggest category — “nothing in particular” regarding religion.

Thus the media and religious professionals will want to examine two new assessments of the situation.

Religion’s cup looks half-empty, a familiar scenario, in the book “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters” by Bob Smietana. But the cup is half-full for a team at Baylor University’s top-flight Institute for Studies of Religion, whose findings are summarized in a (paywalled) Wall Street Journal item. For access to the full academic report on "nones" research (Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, volume 18, article 7), contact the institute at ISR@baylor.edu or 254 -710-2841.

Smietana is a well-positioned veteran guide as a Religion News Service national reporter, formerly with the Nashville Tennessean and Christianity Today magazine. His book is especially useful for journalists new to the religion beat as he surveys this generation’s dire data of decline, mingled with interviews of assorted dropouts and questers.

His over-all theme is that America and Americans depend on what’s called “organized religion,” actual face-to-face gatherings now weakened by both COVID and societal undertow. Organized secularism simply cannot offer a substitute for building and serving communities. Pointed questions are posed by Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America raised Ismaili Muslim, summed up as follows by Smietana.

“What would happen if all the religious and faith-based institutions in your community disappeared? All the churches and schools, the hospitals and medical clinics, homeless shelters and food pantries, all the tutoring programs and benevolence funds. Who would pick up the slack? Who would tutor kids, resettle refugees, run shelters for battered women, and devote themselves to the whole host of charitable activities, large and small, that faith groups do?”

That doesn’t even touch help to individuals that nobody notices or the religious aspect of religion, the inherent need to worship, the sense of wholeness and purpose within a puzzling cosmos that faith can provide, or the resulting emotional and even physical well-being demonstrated in many secular studies.