The Stickiness of Religion

Social science fiction—this was Albert Murray’s term of art for the kind of “pseudo-scientific” analysis he saw applied to black life in the 1960s. Too many, he observed, were tempted “to mistake the jargon of social science for insight into the nature and condition of man.” The result was “social science fiction fiction,” namely, novels posing as gritty, revelatory art that merely rendered in narrative form the pathologies and policies proposed by “current survey methodology.” By contrast, Murray’s approach was “distinctly proliterary,” that is to say, humanist in its presumption “that interpretations of human behavior in the raw require at least as much respect for the complexity of human motives as the interpretation of a poem or play or a story.”

Although Murray, a distinguished critic and novelist himself, was primarily concerned with the subject of race in America, his point stands as well for the academic study of religion. Murray may not have known what a “wonk” was, but had he seen one coming down the street, he would have turned and run on the spot.

Ryan P. Burge is the premier wonk of American religion today. A professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and the author of the Graphs about Religion Substack, Burge has contributed to just about every major newspaper and religious or political magazine. When journalists want to know what’s going on with American religion—usually evangelicalism or Catholicism—they turn to Burge and his trove of ready-made charts. He was at the forefront of popularizing and explaining “the rise of the Nones” and co-operated in the study, published two years ago in The Great Dechurching, that found forty million American adults who used to attend church but no longer do so.

Like any academic with a public readership, Burge is a skilled code-switcher. Sometimes he falls into the trap Murray warned of: proclaiming truths from on high, in big, bold letters, “debunking” and “correcting” “misinformation” while predicting the future with confidence. Just as often, though, he foregrounds the frailty of his tools and the limits of his knowledge, even its ascetic character. After all, social science research has a narrow object of study and even narrower ways of knowing it. While you can’t blame Burge for indulging in the first mode—we all play the game and the man’s got to eat—he’s at his best in the second. And for the most part, his new book, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future, opts for ascesis. It’s an exercise in scholarly restraint, even epistemic reticence. Burge shows (for the layman and the student, not for fellow scholars) what “we” can reasonably claim to know about religious membership, belief, and practice in America—today, for now, based on survey data. It is far from the whole picture, and Burge makes sure readers know that from the opening page. Thankfully, then, there is only a little social science fiction in evidence.

Besides the opening and closing chapters, which introduce methodology and definitions before concluding with a modest forecast of continuing trends, the book consists of twelve chapters, each of which is dedicated to a particular religious tradition: Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, and so on. The final two concern the Nones (those who select “none of the above” in religious surveys), divided into atheists/agnostics and “nothing in particular.” This organization makes the book accessible, especially for dipping in and out based on interest (e.g., How do surveys distinguish ethnic from observant Judaism? What are American Hindus’ birth rates? What is the average age of Muslims in America?). But it also makes it repetitive, which for a work like this is unavoidable. The writing is clear; the analysis is cogent; the charts and graphs are, as advertised, simple to understand and genuinely interesting. I am not so allergic to the social sciences as to be unable to see, and to say, that there is an art to amassing, collating, and presenting the data in such accessible and even elegant form. I have no doubt that I will use this book as a resource in my writing and teaching. Anyone who wants to understand religion in America, past, present, and future, is in Burge’s debt.

The only way to offer others a glimpse into what The American Religious Landscape has to offer is to provide a sampling, randomly ordered if not randomly chosen. Here are ten items that stuck with me.

Whereas, or perhaps because, “Hindus enjoy the highest standards of living of any religious group in the United States,” their birth rates “are not reaching replacement level.” The only two routes even to maintain their current quite small numbers are conversion and immigration.

In terms of racial composition, Muslims are probably the most evenly distributed religious group in the country: thirty-seven percent black, twenty-five percent white, twenty-one percent Asian, and seventeen percent other. And while the older members of the tradition are more reliably “regular attenders” of weekly worship, younger Muslims buck this trend; as Burge puts it, “they are not drifting away.” The expectation, or fear, that secular America will sap their faith or absorb them into an amorphous consumerist blob appears, for the moment, to be unfounded.

There are ten times as many Mormons in America as there are Orthodox Christians. In fact, the United Church of Christ, with around three-quarters of a million members, is larger than every American branch of Orthodoxy combined. Nor is it clear that converts to Orthodoxy are outpacing ethnic defections, meaning second- or third-generation immigrants who finally drop the cultural connection to the religion of their grandparents’ ancestral homeland. At the same time, weekly attendance at the Divine Liturgy is on an upward trend, and the average age of an Orthodox American is younger than that of many other Christian traditions. Much will depend on whether young, native-born families raise devoted children who remain in the fold as adults.

“Even today,” Burge writes, “as our ties to our birthplace and family continue to loosen, the stickiness of religion is still profound. Most Americans, even those born in the last several decades, will die claiming the same religious affiliation of their childhood.” A word of hope for this father of four.

Jews remain the largest religious group in America that is not Christian, granting the poly­semy of Jewish identity and the far greater size of non-religious groups. Yet—to my surprise—the Jewish share of the American population has been in gradual decline since the 1970s, from about three percent to a little less than two percent. Burge argues that, in contrast with Catholicism, this is not a failure of retention. The problem isn’t defection so much as intermarriage. Children raised as Jews do not discard their Jewishness as adults. But when they marry Gentiles, their children and grandchildren are more likely to leave Jewish identity behind.

The ruin of the Protestant mainline is nearly complete. In 1958, more than half “of all Americans aligned with a mainline denomination.” Today it is ten percent. Given these trends, Burge predicts that by 2030 it will be five percent and, purely in terms of numbers, all the way to zero by 2040. He grants that the Episcopalians won’t simply vanish—do progressives believe in the Rapture?—but it remains a shock to see the forty-five degree angle in every liberal Protestant graph rocketing down into demographic oblivion. An elite boomer born into the mainline at its apex could not have imagined living long enough to see its statistical death. Whether what remains is best understood as a zombie, a vampire, or a wealthy patient resigned to hospice care, it is clear that the end is nigh.

On the one hand, American Catholicism is in a similar place as the mainline. For example, “a Catholic today is half as likely to attend weekly Mass compared to a Catholic in the 1970s.” Defection is a problem: unlike evangelicals, who leave the faith entirely if they leave at all, many Catholics exit for some form of Protestantism. Further, huge numbers of lay Catholics either don’t know what the Church teaches or, knowing it, reject it. And in the wake of Vatican II, overall birth rates have not been markedly higher than the general population, albeit with a modest uptick since the late 1990s. On the other hand, Catholicism’s share of the American religious pie cannot be overstated. Its size is “orders of magnitude larger than any other religious group”: nearly sixty-two million members. It is so big that “there are more American Catholics than the next five religious denominations in the United States combined.” The saving grace, relative to the mainline, is immigration. In brief, “the Church is experiencing a decline in regions where White Catholicism predominates while witnessing growth in states with a higher proportion of Hispanic immigrants.” Absent high immigration from Latin America and other Catholic-dominant countries (whether African or southeast Asian), Catholicism in America might be in freefall.

Non-mainline American Protestantism both black and white remains what Christian Smith once labeled it: embattled and thriving—plus entrepreneurial and adaptable, biblicist and leveling, morally and doctrinally conservative, sizable and relatively stable yet undeniably in numerical decline. In terms of regional strength, white and black alike map squarely onto the old Confederate states. It is no secret that white evangelicalism has been slowly shedding members in the last two or three decades. It is unnerving to realize the same trend has come for the black church: “just three in five Black Americans identify as Protestant”; the share of all Americans who are black Protestants is now around six percent “and likely headed downward in the next decade or so”; and there is a forty percent drop from the oldest to the youngest black respondents who identify as Protestant. In other words, only a third of the youngest black Americans identify as Protestant (we might say Christian instead, given how few black Catholics and Orthodox there are in this country). This is unqualified bad news. In an interview last year, the Reverend Charlie Dates of Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago acknowledged the loss of young black Christians, especially among social activists, but professed confidence that they would return to the faith as they grew older. Burge’s research suggests he’s wrong, but we should pray that he’s right.

The buried lede so far is the sole growing group in religious survey data (excepting “nondenominational” evangelicals, whose growth appears to be intra-Christian transfers, or “religious switching”): the Nones, who now make up at least one-third of Americans, and more than two out of five younger adults. While Burge identifies a “bit of a ceiling” to the rate of increase, even without any further growth this marks a “sea change” in American religion. Gone are the days of an unofficial established church; at most there soon will be a bare majority of Christians, if that. In fact, Burge predicts that Americans who are “nothing in particular” will soon surpass the number of Protestants and, furthermore, will become “the plurality choice of Americans in the next fifteen or twenty years.”

The role of education, family formation, and income in these trends is curious. With greater education, for example, one is more likely either to be agnostic/atheist or to be a highly involved member of a local congregation. But those without a college degree are far likelier to be “nothing in particular,” neither vociferously anti-religion nor connected to any particular religious community. They are also, on average, more likely to be white, to be male, to be unmarried, and to work lower-paying jobs. Burge comments that such people have decided to “opt out” of traditional social institutions as a whole. Better, I think, to say that they have dropped out, passively and largely unnoticed, failed by the suite of institutions that ought to make a decent life possible. As for how Christians should respond to this fresh mission field, that is the question of the hour. If any tradition could make serious inroads with working-class young men and two-shift single moms, that mythical American phenomenon—revival—would surely be afoot.

As I read, I asked myself, Should I live to see my children’s children and peace upon Israel, will I find them, on a given Sunday morning, in the liturgy, in a local restaurant, or still in bed? As for Burge, at least in this book, the backdrop is sociopolitical: “American democracy,” which is ever “more diverse and pluralistic.” This is to be expected, given the genre and audience of the work. But the tacit norms it assumes and endorses without explanation or argument are notable enough to warrant comment.

For example, Burge is very concerned with American animus toward specific religious groups as well as animus between and among them. He believes this to be at best a type of prejudice rooted in ignorance and at worst a kind of fear or hatred built on lies. If the former is akin to a sheltered child thinking other languages “sound weird,” the latter is effectively no different than racism. In either form, therefore, it must be rooted out, social peace being impossible without civic tolerance of this sort.

Is this true, though? And can it be true when viewed from within a particular religious tradition rather than (per impossibile) from a neutral point outside of any tradition? At least in the case of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the answer is no. Those who claim Abraham and his God as their own believe idols to be dangerous fictions or demonic entanglements; either way, they constitute an outrageous blasphemy against the only true God. The Scriptures aren’t ambivalent about the status of idolatry: It should come to an end, immediately. By extension, the idols that beg for worship and sacrifice deserve to be destroyed.

Must Jews, Christians, and Muslims have “warm” feelings toward idols, their worship, or those who worship them? Is their lack of warmth based on ignorance or deceit? I don’t see that it is. To be sure, I’ve left open how this understanding of idols might play out in a polity like America’s. Paul did not smash the idols of Athens; he was aghast at their number and proclaimed a God unknown to the philosophers. His actions preserved a fragile civil and religious truce, true, but he did not soften his judgements about false gods or false worship. So-called “social contact theory,” according to which regular exposure to or friendship with the religious other will lead to greater acceptance, was not true for Paul, much less for any other Jewish teacher in the scriptures. By my lights, this theory applied generically is an ideal type of Murray’s social science fiction. Familiarity is as likely to provoke hostility as approval.

In a word, social science is in no position to lecture or moralize about these things, so long as it endeavors to remain above the fray. No American is morally bound to like Scientology, or Satanism, or atheism—or Catholicism. In this the ferocity of the New Atheism was a breath of fresh air. Hitchens and Dawkins weren’t wrong to give vent to their contempt for Christianity and Islam; they had reasons and stated them forthrightly. That is both more honest, intellectually, and more civil, politically, than the pretense of feigned respect. I can have a conversation with someone who is honest about his disgust with the Torah or disdain for Christ. The same cannot be said for someone who affects to respect all religions equally.

Albert Borgmann once remarked, “The champions of good procedure post guards at the doors of city hall to prevent undemocratic types from entering. Inside, the tables and chairs have been arranged to achieve an order of equality and openness. But no one, in fact, enters, sits down, and begins to converse. . . . The preparatory efforts forever get in the way of what they try to make room for.” So for religious difference and animus in a liberal society.

“Belief in a God is instinct,” wrote Lichtenberg, “as natural to man as walking on two legs; in many it is modified, to be sure, and in many even stifled altogether. In the normal way,” though, it is not only “present” but “indispensable.” For all its wonted fractiousness, the United States has always exemplified this instinct. Burge may be right that this is changing, permanently and irreversibly so: “The future of America is not secular; it’s primarily nonreligious.” And yet, most American adults who are “nothing in particular” still believe in God: One in five are certain of his existence, and nearly that number still attend religious services of some kind. In short, the instinct hasn’t died just yet. As long as our neighbors walk on two legs, neither evangelism nor catechesis will have to start from scratch. In God’s mercy our grandchildren may still believe.