Decline of religious affiliation in recent decades

[lpetrich]

The Barna polling group rather commendably avoids being Pollyannaish about religion, and it shows.
The Barna Group - How Post-Christian is U.S. Society?
The Most Post-Christian Cities

Barna's results roughly agree with the results of various other polling organizations, like ARIS, Pew, and Gallup.

infographic about how post-Xian the US is

1. 04% - do not believe in God
2. 08% - identify as atheist or agnostic
3. 13% - disagree that faith is important in their lives
4. 18% - have not prayed to God (in the last week)
5. 27% - have never made a commitment to Jesus Christ
6. 29% - disagree that the Bible is accurate
7. 32% - have not donated money to a church (in the last year)
8. 33% - have not attended a Xian church (in the last year)
9. 41% - agree that Jesus Christ committed sins
10. 47% - do not feel a responsibility to "share their faith"
11. 57% - have not read the Bible (in the last week)
12. 79% - have not volunteered in a church (in the last week)
13. 81% - have not attended Sunday school (in the last week)
14. 81% - have not attended a religious small group (in the last week)
15. 89% - did not participate in a house church (in the last week)

In this table, being post-Xian is meeting at least 60% of these criteria (9 of them), and being strongly post-Xian is meeting at least 80% of them (12 of them).
[table="class: grid"]
[tr]
[td]Who[/td]
[td]PostXian[/td]
[td]Str PsXn[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Overall[/td]
[td]37%[/td]
[td]09%[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Ages 18-28[/td]
[td]48%[/td]
[td]16%[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Ages 29-47[/td]
[td]40%[/td]
[td]11%[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Ages 48-66[/td]
[td]35%[/td]
[td]08%[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Ages 67+[/td]
[td]28%[/td]
[td]05%[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]
By their criteria, I'm a complete 15 out of 15. For Jesus Christ's possible sins, I considered how he was depicted in the Gospels.

Also, the Barna group seems to have evangelical Protestantism in mind by Xianity, because some of the criteria do not work well for non-fundie Protestants or for Catholics.

 

[lpetrich]

The Country’s Most “Post-Christian” Cities Are Also the Places You Want to Live by Hemant Mehta
The Most Post-Christian Cities in America: 2017 - Barna Group
If one satisfies at least 9 of these 16 criteria, then one is post-Xian, while if one satisfies 13, then one is strongly post-Xian.

1. Do not believe in God
2. Identify as atheist or agnostic
3. Disagree that faith is important in their lives
4. Have not prayed to God (in the last week)
5. Have never made a commitment to Jesus
6. Disagree the Bible is accurate
7. Have not donated money to a church (in the last year)
8. Have not attended a Christian church (in the last 6 months)
9. Agree that Jesus committed sins
10. Do not feel a responsibility to “share their faith”
11. Have not read the Bible (in the last week)
12. Have not volunteered at church (in the last week)
13. Have not attended Sunday school (in the last week)
14. Have not attended religious small group (in the last week)
15. Bible engagement scale: low (have not read the Bible in the past week and disagree strongly or somewhat that the Bible is accurate)
16. Not Born Again

Roughly the criteria from their earlier work with not being born again added to them. As with the previous list, I have a perfect score: 16.

That page also contains a list of US cities by how many of each city's inhabitants are post-Xian by this definition. Portland ME is the highest at 57%, while Shreveport LA is the lowest at 12%.

The most post-Xian area is New England, followed by the West Coast between San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound. The least post-Xian area is the southern Appalachian mountains and the southern Mississippi Valley.

-

2017 Bible-Minded Cities - Barna Group

What Is a Bible-Minded City?

Each year, Barna and American Bible Society rank the nation’s top media markets based on their level of Bible engagement. Individuals considered to be Bible-minded are those who report reading the Bible in the past week and who strongly assert the Bible is accurate in the principles it teaches. This definition captures action and attitude—those who both engage and esteem the Christian scriptures. The rankings thus reflect an overall openness or resistance to the Bible in various U.S. cities. Nationally, only 25 percent of the population is considered Bible-minded.

Though I'd prefer to call it Bible worship.

Chattanooga TN is the most Bible-minded city at 50%, while Albany NY is the least Bible-minded city at 10%.

Patterns of Bible-mindedness roughly follow patterns of post-Xianity, though in inverse fashion. The southern Appalachians and the southern Mississippi Valley are the most Bible-minded regions, while New England is the least Bible-minded region.

 

[lpetrich]

Polls: Americans believe in evolution, less in creationism., about belief in creationism starting to go downhill in the US.

The people responsible for this shift are the young. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 73 percent of American adults younger than 30 expressed some sort of belief in evolution, a jump from 61 percent in 2009, the first year in which the question was asked. The number who believed in purely secular evolution (that is, not directed by any divine power) jumped from 40 percent to a majority of 51 percent. In other words, if you ask a younger American how humans arose, you’re likely to get an answer that has nothing to do with God.

A good part of it is less religion on the part of younger generations. Since it seems to take decline of religion to cause a decline of belief in creationism, this indicates a failing on the part of the less fundie sorts of churches. If creationism isn't True Xianity, then why aren't they being more loud about it?


Why the Gods are Not Winning, by Edge, Gregory Paul, and Phil Zuckerman, takes a longer view, but points to a slow but steady decline over the years. Some studies show generational differences, with younger generations of Americans being less religious than older ones -- and with each generation keeping its amount of religiosity as it ages.

Right next door in Canada, Churches come tumbling down, with the number of people who professed no religion increasing dramatically:
1961 - 1%
1971 - 4%
2001 - 16%
with 35% in British Columbia.

Many people there still have some religious affiliation, but it is often pro forma, with religious activity largely being among older people.

A possible reason? Women having more opportunities, so they could do more than be housewives and Sunday-school teachers and church-picnic organizers -- and nuns. PZ Myers noted this factor in his report on this work, O Canada! O Women!, and he suggested pointing out some female "New Atheist" activists.

And scientists? Despite all the numerous claims of scientific research "finding God" over the decades, the actual beliefs of scientists are a different story. Leading Scientists Still Reject God reports on a study that found:

[table="class: grid"]
[tr][td]Belief in Personal God[/td][td]1914[/td][td]1933[/td][td]1998[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Personal belief[/td][td]27.7[/td][td]15[/td][td]7.0[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Personal disbelief[/td][td]52.7[/td][td]68[/td][td]72.2[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Doubt or agnosticism[/td][td]20.9[/td][td]17[/td][td]20.8[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Belief in Immortality[/td][td]1914[/td][td]1933[/td][td]1998[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Personal belief[/td][td]35.2[/td][td]18[/td][td]7.9[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Personal disbelief[/td][td]25.4[/td][td]53[/td][td]68.7[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Doubt or agnosticism[/td][td]43.7[/td][td]29[/td][td]23.3[/td][/tr]
[/table]

Figures are percentages. ("Personal disbelief" adjusted down from 76.7 to 68.7 to add up more reasonably)

Source: Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham: "Leading Scientists Still Reject God." Nature, 23 July 1998; v. 394, p. 313.

 

[Cycad]

Atheism is even on the rise in the Middle East. SNIP

Any source for this ?

SNIP

In my (admittedly limited) experience with Muslims from the Middle East, the religion has gone pretty much unchallenged for so long in that part of the world that the apologetics are of very poor quality, even in their best institutions of higher learning. A lot of it is easily overcome with some very common sense measures.

Hi and thanks for the references.

When reading the cited sources it looks more like a combination of wishful thinking and the increased visibility of a few atheists due to social media.

Unlike Christianity, Islam is extremely hard to leave. Religion is a complete part of the daily social life and not participating will immediately stigmatize you. Open apostasy is usually not tolerated.

From personal experience : open atheism was way more common during the secular rule of the baath party under Saddam. Islam is not only stronger now but also veered towards a more aggressive militant form.
Saudi, Bahrain, UAE, Sudan, Libya etc : same. Even Egypt. Under the secular rule of Nasser The Brotherhood was imprisoned, leaders hanged and tortured.

IMO its a matter of Atheists being more visible.

But then, its from personal experience and cant be extrapolated.

 

[lpetrich]

Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?: American Journal of Sociology: Vol 121, No 5

Virtually every discussion of secularization asserts that high levels of religiosity in the United States make it a decisive counterexample to the claim that modern societies are prone to secularization. Focusing on trends rather than levels, the authors maintain that, for two straightforward empirical reasons, the United States should no longer be considered a counterexample. First, it has recently become clear that American religiosity has been declining for decades. Second, this decline has been produced by the generational patterns underlying religious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive cohort is less religious than the preceding one. America is not an exception. These findings change the theoretical import of the United States for debates about secularization.

reported on in American Religion Not as Exceptional As We Think | Duke Today

Across the board, people have slowly become less religious over time; the U.S. decline has been so gradual that until recently scientists haven’t had enough data to be sure the trend was real, said Mark Chaves of Duke, the study’s other co-author.

...
This slow drip is generational. A few examples:

-- 94 percent of Americans born before 1935 claim a religious affiliation. For the generation born after 1975, that number drops to 71 percent.

-- 68 percent of Americans 65 and older said they had no doubt God exists, according to the study. But just 45 percent of young adults, ages 18-30, had the same belief.

-- 41 percent of people 70 and older said they attend church services at least once a month, compared to just 18 percent of people 60 and younger.

The data are consistent over a long stretch of time, Chaves said.

“If you break it down over five-year chunks, each age group is a little less religious than the one before it,” he said.

Study Shows Religion In The U.S. Is In Decline by Michael Stone of Progressive Secular Humanist
Another study concludes that America is becoming less religious by Dan Arel of Danthropology

 

[lpetrich]

Americans Have Lost Faith In Religious Leaders And Church Attendance, New Book Says
That's certainly an overstatement; "losing faith" would be a better term.

But in a new book on religious trends in the United States, a Duke University professor says this picture of an unflinchingly faithful America is not quite accurate. At least when it comes to traditional religious practices, Americans' belief has faded in recent decades, says professor Mark Chaves.

Take the well-known fact that fewer Americans are joining the clergy. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States, for example, has experienced a sharp decline in priests.

Nuns are even worse. US nuns are becoming "none", with only some small fraction being under 60.

Chaves, a professor of sociology, religion and divinity, found that between 1973 and 2008, the percentage of people with "great confidence" in religious leaders declined from 35 percent to less than 25 percent. He also found that two-thirds of Americans say they would prefer religious leaders to stay out of politics.

Could part of the problem be the abdication of liberal and moderate ones? I say "abdication" because it's hard to think of any other word for their lack of participation in political discourse. One doesn't see much of a Religious Left or a Religious Center these days, only a Religious Right.

The American public has lost confidence in leaders of all sorts,” Chaves says. “But the loss of confidence in religious leaders has been more precipitous.”

Americans also have less interest in traditional religious practices than they once did, he adds. The percentage of Americans who attend church or other worship services has declined slightly over the past four decades, Chaves says.

The article notes that many Americans exaggerate their church attendance. While about 35 to 40 percent claim to attend church, only 25 percent actually do.

Some more:

• In the 1950s, 99 percent of Americans said they believed in God. In 2008, only 92 percent did.
• In 1991, 30 percent of Americans "strongly agreed" that religious leaders should not take part in politics. By 2008, that number had jumped to 44 percent.
• The extent of an American's religious involvement more closely predicts that person's political leanings today than it did in the past.

“Several decades ago there was not a strong correlation between how religiously active you were and whether you voted Republican or Democrat,” Chaves says. “Now, there is. If you’re religiously active, you’re now more likely to vote Republican.”

 

[lpetrich]

Is the Religious Right to Blame for Christianity’s Decline? | The American Conservative

For the later part of the 20th century, the liberal and moderate Protestant churches declined, while the conservative and evangelical and fundamentalist ones did not decline nearly as much. Supporters of the latter sorts of churches prided themselves on their steadfast conviction, and stated that that's the way to go for Xianity.

But those churches also started to decline, and those churches' supporters don't make that argument very much anymore.

There is plenty of evidence that part of that decline is due to association of Xianity with the Religious Right -- because Religious Right leaders have been the only prominent Xian ones for some decades. So why have the Religious Center and the Religious Left abdicated the public square to the Religious Right?

This will not turn off every believer, but it's likely to turn off someone who is not very religiously convinced or involved.

Author George Hawley concludes:

Many political movements flop, and those sympathetic to the Religious Right may want to at least give the movement credit for fighting for its beliefs, however ineffectual it was. Lots of political non-profits have an abysmal return on investment. But if the research on religious decline and the Religious Right is correct, and the movement played even a small role in expediting the decline of Americans’ religiosity, it deserves to be judged as one of the most dramatic failures in American political history.

 

[lpetrich]

Rise of the Nones Re-examined
noting
Event Transcript: Religion Trends in the U.S. | Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project with researchers from both Pew and Gallup

A decade ago, some of these researchers had thought that it was a reaction to the rise of the Religious Right.

But they are now deciding that it's because it's now more socially acceptable to claim to have no religion. Something like what's happened with being LGBT.

The rise of the Nones also seems to be a generational effect, with each generation having roughly the same religiosity as it ages, and more recent ones being less religious.

Michael Hout:

Bob Putnam and Dave Campbell published “American Grace” a couple of years ago [in 2012] and they put forth the argument that there was a culture shock and two aftershocks; and we set about trying to test that in our current work. The shock was Woodstock and everything that came before and after – that’s the cover from the album – sex, drugs and questioned authority, and it turns out this looms much larger, actually, than these other two. The aftershocks – Moral Majority, traditional values, church-based, that’s the political push that Claude was talking about; and the second aftershock is the changing status of gays in American society, the trend toward embracing gay members of society and accepting it not just as a lifestyle but as an orientation and as an essence of being; and that’s the second aftershock.

So the Sixties radicals had led a cultural revolution, and the Religious Right a cultural counterrevolution. This all fits into the Arthur Schlesingers' cycles of US history -- the Sixties (roughly 1963 - 1978) as a liberal period, and the time after that as a conservative period, one that I call Gilded Age II.

 

[lpetrich]

BBC News - Viewpoints: Why is faith falling in the US?

According to WIN-Gallup International poll,

From 2005 to 2012,

• the number of people who consider themselves religious has dropped from 73% to 60%
• those who declare themselves atheists have risen from 1% to 5%

Rod Dreher: Progressive churches fuel apathy

Like Ross Douthat in the New York times (Can liberal Xianity be saved?), he notes the continuing decline of the more liberal sects. The more conservative ones are doing better, but they are also declining.

He claims that the Nones are the "spiritual but not religious" sort of people, and that they believe in the God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

MTD teaches that God exists and wants us to be nice, and that happiness is the point of life. In MTD, God, who is "something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist", doesn't have to be involved in one's life unless one needs something.

He then moans and groans about the alleged prevalence of this "pseudo-religion".

At some point, the Nones may discover that neither MTD nor atheism can give them the otherworldly hope they need to endure and to triumph over true suffering.

The "no atheists in foxholes" argument, the idea that people need to drug themselves with religion to keep themselves going. However, that does not seem to have happened in Europe.

The two RD's do not mention what I think is a serious problem with the more liberal Xian churches: their unwillingness to challenge the Religious Right. That makes them look like wimps, and losing wimps at that.

David Ellis Dickerson: Conservative churches are losing the moral high ground

About the "Nones":

Many of these respondents are presumably the religious equivalent of undecided voters; the mushy middle that shrugs at questions like this. But now they say, "I guess I'm no religion" when seven years ago they said "I guess I'm Christian".

It's a large shift, but it's probably not a passionate one. So what caused these folks to bother changing their minds at all?

After considering several possibilities, he concludes:

The real issue is homosexuality.

Consider: In the early 2000s, the Barna Group—an evangelical survey organisation that has long tracked American attitudes toward religion—discovered that, almost overnight, the reputation of evangelicals had cratered.

For the first time in Barna's polling history, Americans were more likely to view Christians negatively than positively. This attitude was especially marked in Americans aged 16-29, and so David Kinnaman, now the president of Barna, spent the next three years examining why.

What they think about evangelicals:

• anti-homosexual: 91%
• judgmental 87%
• hypocritical 85%
• too involved with politics 75%
• out of touch 72%

After noting friendship beating Bible-thumping, he continues:

That's the unanswerable argument: Why would God be against good people loving each other? If that's what religion is, we can do better.

This is why it's good news that mushy-middle people are saying "I'm no religion" in response to poll questions. Not because anyone's behaviour has actually changed—I doubt these folks were going to church anyway, even when they called themselves merely "religious" in 2005—but because it means that "no religion" is now the safe neutral thing to say.

It means that the conservative Christian church, though it may still own the label "religion", no longer owns public morality along with it.

This gives everyone else—other Christians, other religions, and even atheists like me—room at the conference table.

I think that that may be overoptimistic, even if trends are in that direction.

 

[lpetrich]

Consider From Taoist to Infidel, by Richard Carrier. Toward the end, he says about fundie nastiness "It did no good that most nominal Christians disavow all this behavior, for I discovered all too quickly that hardly any of them had the moral fiber to stand up to it, few make much effort to defend in public their apparently kinder, gentler message of tolerance and love against the Righteous Hoarde, and fewer still would call me ally."

Or consider a recent President, Barack Obama. He described in The Audacity of Hope how he did not have a good answer to a right-wing scriptural-percussionist fundamentalist:

Take my Republican opponent in 2004, Alan Keyes, who deployed a novel argument for attracting voters in the waning days of the campaign. 'Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,' Mr. Keyes proclaimed, 'because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.'

...Alan Keyes presented the essential vision of the religious right in this country, shorn of all compromise. Within its own terms, it was entirely coherent, and provided Mr. Keyes with the certainty and fluency of an Old Testament prophet. And while I found it simple enough to dispose of his constitutional and policy arguments, his readings of Scripture put me on the defensive.

Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, Mr. Keyes would say, and yet he supports a lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination. Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, but he supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life.

What could I say? That a literal reading of the Bible was folly?

That's what he ought to have said, instead of acting as if Bible-waving is an irrefutable argument.

 

[lpetrich]

Why did the secular ambitions of the early United States fail? | Aeon Essays

The sudden flourish of secularism at the time of the United States’ foundation is incongruous, a rogue wave of rationality in a centuries-long sea of Protestant evangelising, sectarianism and God-talk. But it is undeniable. In 1788, with the adoption of its Constitution, the United States became the first modern republic founded on a legal separation of church and state. In a country that holds sacred the intentions of its revolutionary-era founders, those founders’ secular ambitions are clear. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, to try to prove that Jesus was not Christ, that the man was not the son of God. Around the world, his pithy expression ‘a wall of separation between church and state’ continues to represent a particular secular ideal of separating religious and political power.

James Madison, the primary author of the US Constitution, was an even more rigorous and consistent, if less poetic, secularist. On grounds of what he called ‘pure religious freedom’, Madison opposed military and congressional chaplains, believing that they amounted to government sponsorship of religion. Every step short of this ‘pure religious freedom’, he wrote, would ‘leave crevices at least thro’ which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster… feeding & thriving on its own venom’.

So, in brief, what went wrong? How did the country founded by visionary secularists, and that made historic advances in both religious freedom and the separation of religious and political powers, nonetheless become the world’s most religious political democracy?...

Unfortunately, that article does not discuss much of the history since the US's early days, though it does point out one bit of quasi-theocracy.

Churches would have been the big losers of this ‘systematical plan’, but their opposition was not the only reason, nor even the main reason, it failed to materialise. The nature of Southern plantation society did not permit potential alternatives, such as state-run school systems and libraries, to planter authority. The great 19th-century American intellectual, and former slave, Frederick Douglass called literacy ‘the pathway from slavery to freedom’. In his autobiography, he recalled his master admonishing his mistress for teaching him the alphabet: ‘If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.’

Planter authority could not be compromised for the sake of the visions of a few eccentric deists, however prominent. At the same time, there was a reason that the Bible was the only book slave-owners allowed to circulate freely on plantations. ‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters in fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ,’ states Ephesians, one of many places where the scriptures authorise slavery, and counsel submissive obedience. Slavery was simply more important to US nation-building than secularism.

Just more evidence that slavery had corrupted the American body politic very terribly.

 

[lpetrich]

A problem here is, I think, a lack of institutional support, a shortage of freethought organizations.

Susan Jacoby in Freethinkers stated the problem very well.

Values are handed down more easily and thoroughly by permanent institutions than by marginalized radicals who, even if they change minds in their own generation—as the abolitionists did—are often subject to remarginalization in the next. Every brand of religion maintains and is a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values—whether one regards those values as admirable or repugnant. Secularist movements, with their generally loose, nonhierarchical organization, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in a systematic way.

and

The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation. It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.

Referring to this from Thomas Paine's Age of Reason:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

That's a big challenge for secularists, to create enduring organizations suited for them.

Later, she notes about the secularists' legal victories in the 1950's and 1960's,

The secularist victories of the postwar area were achieved mainly in courts of law rather than in the court of public opinion, and they were not followed by a sustained and candid appeal that challenged traditional beliefs and made a moral, as distinct from a legalistic, case on behalf of freedom of expression, secular public education, and rationalism itself. What was missing was an explicitly humanistic, nonreligious vision of personal ethics and social justice—a vision that could be understood even by Americans who had always believed that religion and morality were identical.

She also noted the long American tradition of liberal religion, sects like the Unitarians and Universalists and the Reform Jews.

Many historians have argued that the success of the Unitarian movement, which tended to attract the most educated members of New England communities, was an important and enduring factor in the greater acceptance of Christianity by influential Americans than by their counterparts in Europe. Liberal Protestantism in America, by virtue of its opposition to state-established churches, fitted comfortably into and made a major contribution to the secularist foundations of the republic. Another way of looking at Unitarianism is that it moved religion itself into the camp of Enlightenment rationalism.

But liberal religion appears to be fading, I think in good part for being unwilling to state loudly and repeatedly in public, in clear and plain language, why the fundies are just plain wrong. The recent generation of atheist activists has been willing to do so.

 

[lpetrich]

In the late 19th cy., the US had had a big freethought movement, with the likes of Robert Ingersoll getting big audiences. But it all faded after the Great War, as World War I was called back then. Freethought in the US went into eclipse until recent decades, I've seen some theories about why that happened.

That eclipse happened over what Eric Hobsbawm had called the short 20th cy., from 1914 to 1991, the beginning of WWI to the end of the Soviet Union. More precisely, the chronological 20th cy. with a few years at each end trimmed off.

-

AL notes David Niose's argument, in his recent book Nonbeliever Nation, pointing out how in the early 20th cy., the likes of John Dewey would cloak their positions with religious language, like "It is the active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name 'God.'" I think that I'd prefer Einsteinian pantheism to such wooziness, but that's another story.

However, Susan Jacoby pointed out some broader social trends in Freethinkers, like a violent backlash against secularism at the end of WWI, a backlash associated with the "Red Scare" back then. Communist revolutionaries had taken over Russia, and they threatened to take over other places, though they were thwarted back then. They were atheists, they believed that religion is the Opium of the People, and they ruthlessly suppressed churches in the areas that they controlled.

Secularists had to be concerned about civil liberties, and they could work with liberal religionists on that and various other issues. They could even support secularism through support of church-state separation and the rights of believers in unorthodox sorts of religions.

However, a social consensus grew up over the short 20th cy., a consensus of don't ask, don't tell about religion. It was not good for atheist visibility, but it offered a good hiding place.

-

Susan Jacoby has also proposed another feature of the short 20th cy. that worked against atheist activism: centralization of news media and entertainment media in the big production and broadcasting companies, and convergence on a lowest common denominator because of economies of scale.

-

There was another Red Scare at the end of WWII, when Communism advanced further. It is best known for Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red-under-the-bed finger-pointing, but "In God We Trust" dates back to then, as a way of opposing Godless Communism.

Though Ayn Rand was as atheist as a Communist, her father lost his business to the Soviet Communists, and she was a vehement supporter of capitalism, depicting capitalists as great assertive heroes in her novels, heroes beset by hordes of incompetent and parasitic "looters". But she did not make a big issue out of her atheism.

However, her contemporary Madalyn Murray O'Hair was more than willing to own up to being an atheist, but she was intolerant of just about everybody who deviated even the tiniest bit from her party line, including people inclined to agree with her, and she never became the central figure of a big movement.

After the tumult of the Sixties, the Religious Right arose, and it attempted to undo that cultural revolution. Liberal Xians have had a very weak response to it. Consider Barack Obama's unwillingness to state that literalism is a dumb way to interpret the Bible, and the lack of big crowds packing school-board meetings and the like in response to Religious-Right efforts, chanting slogans like "The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go".

-

But then it happened. The  Revolutions of 1989. Communism fell in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was gone, broken up into its 15 republics, and East Germany had reunified with West Germany. Yugoslavia gradually broke apart, and Czechoslovakia soon split in two. Communism was gone from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and the short 20th cy. had ended.

Elsewhere in the world, China was becoming a bunch of capitalist roaders, while at the time, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea continued to be much more orthodox Communists. But those nations were far from the big villain that the Soviet Union had been.

As Communism faded, Islamists rose, getting militant and violent for the sake of Islam, a religion much like its Abrahamic cousins Judaism and Xianity. The US Religious Right got stronger and stronger, insisting on violating the "don't ask, don't tell" social consensus in their favor, while liberal religionists continued their cowardice, despite being vilified by Religious-Right leaders as phonies and frauds who deserve eternal damnation.

The Internet was gradually growing, and providing more and more opportunities for distributing heretical opinions and letting people with such opinions meet and organize. The centralization of mass media was getting undone; the Internet was becoming the ultimate vanity press. The result was what Clark Adams had called "the degraying of freethought", and the emergence of a new atheist activism, young activists and all.

-

So in summary, I think that Susan Jacoby has the right idea, with anti-Communism and centralized media being the main anti-atheist influences over the short 20th cy.

 

[bilby]

The problem of course is that people need something to believe in. So what will we replace the church with? Will we repeat the step in secularization that Europe made in the 20th century and kill millions of our own people before we figure our shit out?

I have never understood that claim, which appears to me to be completely false, just as a matter of personal direct experience (which I accept is poor evidence, but seems to be just as good as most of the evidence presented by theists, so I guess it's good enough). I have never been a believer in anything, and never felt any lack as a result.

It seems to me that people who have been raised in a belief often feel the need for something to believe in; Which makes it no so much a law of nature, as an example of Stockholm Syndrome.

BTW, The millions of deaths in Europe in the 20th Century are overwhelmingly concentrated in the first half of that century; While the secularization of Europe is overwhelmingly concentrated in the second half. If secularization was the cause, we must wonder how it managed to be preceded by the effect.

 

[lpetrich]

Report Finds Young People in Europe Are Abandoning Organized Religion in Droves – Friendly Atheist and 'Christianity as default is gone': the rise of a non-Christian Europe | World news | The Guardian noting Europe's Young Adults and Religion - 2018-mar-europe-young-people-report-eng.pdf

Fractions of "Nones" for people aged 16 - 29, from the European Social Survey:
Czechia 91%, Estonia 80%, Sweden 75%, Holland 72%, UK 70%, Hungary 67%, Belgium 65%, France 64%, Denmark 60%, Finland 60%, Norway 58%, Spain 55%, Russia 49%, Switzerland 46%, Germany 45%, Portugal 42%, Ireland 39%, Slovenia 38%, Austria 37%, Lithuania 25%, Poland 17%, Israel 1%

Fractions who attend religious services at least weekly vs. in between vs. never outside of special occasions:
Poland 39% 49% 12%, Israel 26% 42% 32%, Portugal 20% 45% 35%, Ireland 15% 59% 26%, Holland 9% 31% 60%, Spain 8% 32% 60%, Switzerland 7% 54% 39%, Slovenia 7% 64% 29%, UK 7% 34% 59%, Germany 6% 52% 42%, Norway 6% 47% 47%, France 6% 38% 56%, Belgium 5% 37% 58%, Finland 5% 54% 41%, Russia 4% 59% 37%, Sweden 4% 51% 45%, Denmark 4% 52% 44%, Austria 4% 63% 33%, Lithuania 4% 74% 22%, Czechia 3% 27% 70%, Hungary 3% 46% 51%, Estonia 2% 57% 41%

The same sort of statistics about prayer:
Poland 50% 33% 17%, Israel 44% 21% 35%, Ireland 31% 38% 31%, Germany 25% 32% 43%, Portugal 23% 36% 41%, Holland 22% 12% 66%, Switzerland 21% 36% 43%, Austria 20% 46% 34%, Slovenia 18% 34% 48%, UK 18% 19% 63%, Hungary 16% 25% 59%, Spain 15% 21% 64%, France 14% 21% 65%, Belgium 14% 23% 63%, Russia 14% 40% 46%, Finland 13% 36% 51%, Norway 12% 23% 65%, Lithuania 10% 47% 43%, Sweden 10% 20% 70%, Denmark 9% 24% 67%, Estonia 7% 26% 67%, Czechia 6% 14% 80%

From The Guardian article,

Religion was “moribund”, [Bullivant] said. “With some notable exceptions, young adults increasingly are not identifying with or practising religion.”

The trajectory was likely to become more marked. “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good — or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.

...
According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them.”

 

[lpetrich]

With that wonderful pile of data, I decided to look for correlations in it, to see what was most correlated with what. I did a Principal Components Analysis, and I found that the strongest correlation is between having no religious affiliation, never attending religious services, and never praying. There was a weaker correlation between frequently attending and frequently praying, and these activities were negatively correlated with iess frequency of doing those activities.

Looking at List of countries by irreligion - Wikipedia, I found a noticeable correlation between general lack of religion and youth lack of religion. Meaning that the younger citizens of the countries surveyed were much like their elders.

Poland is the odd one out, for whatever odd reason.

 

[Underseer]

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!! Islam is rising in France!

Quick, everybody panic before they take over the country and implement Sharia law and then destroy all of Europe!

---

It really is good news. No matter what arguments or sales pitches someone uses, there's nothing which can overcome the objection of "I don't give much of a shit about what you're saying". As religion becomes less and less a core part of society, there is a corresponding rise in the number of people who just don't give a shit about what religious people are saying and that causes the numbers to drop even further with less chance of the religions being able to stage a comeback.

That being said, people do tend to gravitate towards religion in times of crisis and we're always really only one major incident away from being thrown back into the Dark Ages.

People who panic about that aren't looking at the numbers.

If you compare apples-to-apples and compare Muslims born and raised in a Western country to Christians born and raised in that country, the rate at which they deconvert to atheism is about the same. The only reason the numbers look different between Muslims and Christians is because of the influx of Muslim immigrants.

 

[Underseer]

The problem of course is that people need something to believe in. So what will we replace the church with? Will we repeat the step in secularization that Europe made in the 20th century and kill millions of our own people before we figure our shit out?

I have never understood that claim, which appears to me to be completely false, just as a matter of personal direct experience (which I accept is poor evidence, but seems to be just as good as most of the evidence presented by theists, so I guess it's good enough). I have never been a believer in anything, and never felt any lack as a result.

It seems to me that people who have been raised in a belief often feel the need for something to believe in; Which makes it no so much a law of nature, as an example of Stockholm Syndrome.

BTW, The millions of deaths in Europe in the 20th Century are overwhelmingly concentrated in the first half of that century; While the secularization of Europe is overwhelmingly concentrated in the second half. If secularization was the cause, we must wonder how it managed to be preceded by the effect.

If people don't believe that pixies make the flowers open, then they will just believe something else just as idiotic, therefore it is reasonable for me to believe that pixies make the flowers open. Why do you act like it is unreasonable for me to believe that pixies make the flowers open?

And no, I don't want to have that tiresome discussion about "burden of proof" again. As I said many times before, it is your burden to prove that pixies don't make the flowers open, and you have failed to meet that burden. Good day to you, sir!

 

[lpetrich]

Reminds me of Carl Sagan claiming that some people once believed that morning-glory flowers open by divine intervention. God says "Hey, flower, open." I couldn't find a source for that claim.

The Number of Americans with No Religious Affiliation Is Rising - Scientific American -- "The rise of the atheists", by Michael Shermer.

In a paper in the January 2018 issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science entitled “How Many Atheists Are There?”, Will M. Gervais and Maxine B. Najle, both psychologists at the University of Kentucky, contend that there may be far more atheists than pollsters report because “social pressures favoring religiosity, coupled with stigma against religious disbelief..., might cause people who privately disbelieve in God to nonetheless self-present as believers, even in anonymous questionnaires.”

To work around this problem of self-reported data, the psychologists employed what is called an unmatched count technique, which has been previously validated for estimating the size of other underreported cohorts, such as the LGBTQ community. They contracted with YouGov to conduct two surveys of 2,000 American adults each, for a total of 4,000 subjects, asking participants to indicate how many innocuous versus sensitive statements on a list were true for them. The researchers then applied a Bayesian probability estimation to compare their results with similar Gallup and Pew polls of 2,000 American adults each. From this analysis, they estimated, with 93 percent certainty, that somewhere between 17 and 35 percent of Americans are atheists, with a “most credible indirect estimate” of 26 percent.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Even among atheists and agnostics, belief in things usually associated with religious faith can worm its way through fissures in the materialist dam. A 2014 survey conducted by the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture on 15,738 Americans, for example, found that of the 13.2 percent who called themselves atheist or agnostic, 32 percent answered in the affirmative to the question “Do you think there is life, or some sort of conscious existence, after death?” Huh? Even more incongruent, 6 percent of these atheists and agnostics also said that they believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead. You know, like Jesus.

That's not surprising. It takes the failure of a present belief to make the belief go away.

People are moving away from traditional religious affiliation but still exercising their imaginations and dreamware like typical humans always have.