Religious 'Nones' are now the largest single group in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Religious 'Nones' are now the largest single group in the U.S.

npr.org

47 pointsgeox82 comments

Polls like this are always interesting to me because there's so much that can go into a person's answer to any of these questions.

For instance, per the article most of these "Nones" still believe in God or Gods but don't subscribe to a particular religion. They're definitely not atheists as you might expect from the label.

On the flip side, I know some people who would probably answer this poll as Catholic even though they don't attend church, don't believe that any miracles in the bible literally happened etc.

To add to this even more, there is the lumper/splitter problem of which groups we count as one. As others have pointed out, Christians would outnumber the Nones if they were all put in the same group. But how we decide to slice things up can affect how the results look.

>For instance, per the article most of these "Nones" still believe in God or Gods but don't subscribe to a particular religion. They're definitely not atheists as you might expect from the label.

As an atheist, not that it makes me special in any way, since we're all born tabula rasas, it does work in favor of the slow elimination of blind faith due to the dilution of the importance of strongest way of dissemination of that poison. Personal faith has the capability to dissolve organized religion into nothingness. That is the ultimate succession toward worldwide secularism and hopefully, secular humanism.

Here is a link to the report that the article gets info from (but does not link to for some reason, unless I missed it):

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-no...

Articles rarely seem to link to source material.

Important to note Christians as a whole still vastly outnumber “Nones”.

Why?

Ants outnumber both groups ... although global ant mass is only one fifth the dry weight of all humans.

Addendum: No response to why it matters that christians outnumber others then?

FWiW in Australia Christianity has been a matter of increasing indifference my entire life, it's mainly popular with those over 55 (moreso the over 70's) of European descent.

https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-austra...

In the US, it matters a lot that Christians are, collectively, a majority, because of voting. Christians are not a unified voting bloc, but we have one political party that explicitly supports Christianity. It often uses Christianity as the basis of its decisions, to the detriment of non-Christians.

It's not as simple as a tyranny-of-the-majority by Christians. There are also some nonbelievers who support them, in a way that baffles many observers because they're often explicitly voting against their own best interests.

And there are some Christians opposed to this, though they should be able to use Christianity to support that choice and they don't. This further bolsters the nominally-Christian political party in forcing their version of Christianity on others.

Sorry, very late responding here. I never said it matters to me! I just pointed out the headline is false, unless you split up 'Christian' into separate denominations.

But to answer your question anyway, it's obvious why people are interested in this kind of statistic: because billions of people follow a variety of different religions, which disagree on everything from how the world was created to how one is supposed to spend their free time, and these disagreements continue to cause a lot of violence.

Misleading title. Makes it sound like Nones have a majority, instead of the 28% plurality. Catholics are at 24% and protestants at 27%.

I disagree - "largest single group" is quite explicit. More people probably understand what that means than know the word "plurality".

Headline is misleading. Christianity would be the largest if the survey didn’t separate the branches into Catholics, Protestants, etc.

Christianity would be the largest if they themselves didn’t separate the branches into Catholics, Protestants, etc.

That's a grouping meaningful to Christians themselves, but meaningless to non-Christians, which means it's not a good way for this survey to be grouped.

To group things for statistics, pick the grouping level that is meaningful to all the entries in that same list.

The things people worship now, they don't call God. That doesn't always make them irreligious. I can think of more than one popular modern movement that is deistic, in that it fashions a god-like power out of some idea, a soul-like essence out of another. The church of the subreddit.

That take assumes there's some sort of religious vacuum, that if they don't worship a god then those desires will go into worshiping other things. It's naive in assuming their lack of desire to worship someone or something is a lie. There are many who actually feel no need to worship anything powerful and even some of them assume the powerful are doing well enough to not need worshiped.

I don't think it does. I think it simply poses an analogy between religious activity and the other belief-driven activities that people constantly engage in, even when they are not actively attaching themself to a metaphysics and an afterlife.

I'm not religious but I am spiritual.

I thought you were going to say the Church of, capital s, Science.

Redefining terms doesn't change a metaphor to literal truth.

Now they just need to organise effectively.

But how do you organise a disparate group whose only common characteristic is that they don't believe in imaginary deities?

No, they don’t. They aren’t a group. They’re not anti-religion, they just aren’t yes. Just because you’re not for something doesn’t mean you’re against it for others.

Anecdotally, most people interested in The Network State [0] are nones. Perhaps that could be a "place" to aggregate them (us)?

[0]: https://thenetworkstate.com/

According to the article, a small majority of "nones" believe in God or gods.

You misread the article. They believe in God, they just are not interested in grouping.

So basically exactly the opposite of what you said: They specifically do not want to organize.

Start a subreddit.

I don’t think I’m actually joking.

If the defining principal is you don't trust organization/s/, that might not help:)

We're still about 20 points shy of 1906. 41% of the population considered themselves a member of a religious organization, in 1906, per the Census.

> "Within the Nones, however, atheists and agnostics are more likely to be politically and civically engaged, whereas those who responded that their religion is 'nothing in particular' are far less likely to vote."

> "Pew also found that, overall, Nones are less likely to volunteer in their local communities than religiously affiliated adults."

> "Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service."

I'm getting quite a different picture of these "Nones". Rather than being atheist or agnostic, they believe in God, but just don't care about any kind of group or group activities.

Almost like they have checked out from social public life.

This also connects with surveys about 25% of Gen Z (virtually the same percent as these Nones) are not having sex: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-ad...

31% of Gen Z live with parents: https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/4405595...

There's also huge declines in people going out. (Although not the 25% that matches the other numbers.)

To me this all paints a picture of people who are just tired, depressed, don't care, etc.

I would very interested to know if these groups are all the same people, or if it's just a random 25% of any survey that doesn't care much.

“they believe in God, but just don't care about any kind of group or group activities.“

Is that an American thing? I might be projecting, but over here in Europe (or just Germany?) my impression is that many see some good in organized religion for the community aspects and historical continuity, but all that despite being quite certain that no god actually exists.

I don't need to believe that god exists to consider it nice that our cathedrals and village churches aren't just museums, but living museums. Where professionals do give solace to people in need. Even many (most?) of those professionals seem to consider themselves more as custodians of an idea that does not have to be true to be good than as representatives of truth. They certainly don't go around declaring god is dead, but they certainly appear prepared to more on shared nature of belief than assumed truthfulness.

>my impression is that many see some good in organized religion for the community aspects and historical continuity, but all that despite being quite certain that no god actually exists

Americans don't have a lot of respect for, for example, Jehovah's Witnesses - just look at all the jokes about them knocking on doors.

Same here, but they are not seen as as example of organized religion at all. More as an example of how religion could be, if the established organizations did not exist.

Perhaps it's a particularly lucky situation here in Germany with its almost perfect 50:50 split of Christians between Catholics and Lutherans, which makes neither a fringe group. Fringe groups all too often end up being a little (sometimes a lot) self-radicalizing.

It's an interesting observation for sure, regarding differences in attitude to religion.

It sounds like the lack of toxicity of your religious ones there is on par with the lack of toxicity of non-religious there. Here in the US, religious toxicity seems to have increased non-religious toxicity. I suspect that's the case.

Father/Bishop Robert Barron on the Nones:

The Religious "Nones": https://youtu.be/tSVlZDnu-Uw?si=fBDGw_f_cFk-tgRO

The Rise of the "Nones": https://youtu.be/pG2mtELrxkg?si=ffxZjscRHKx5hJ8d

"Looking for the Nones": https://youtu.be/tuQq3nn15ZE?si=a2xlPemMAl6xbSJl

Signs of Hope with the "Nones": https://youtu.be/Pa_1GQHaGq4?si=oD520IccFaFy1paI

"Nones" Rediscovering the Bible: https://youtu.be/llYrTb4zqFQ?si=weh6iwCY6rlfL-NP

These are great discussions on the topic. One of the challenges nones face is finding a meaningful third place / community.

He is absolutely one of my favourite Catholics and runs a massive worldwide ministry.

Ironically his ministry really took off thanks to the New Atheists back when they were gaining steam with Hitchens and his gang.

As a side note I loved Hitchens as well even if I disagree with his arguments myself. If I had a pick a favourite Atheist it would be him.

The demographics of a lot of religious denominations have got to be painfully inverted pyramid for a lot of them, with ironically, immigration probably being the one thing keeping any inflow into the pews.

And having above replacement rate fertility:)

Funny that the word is the same as the 9th "canonical hour," Nones, which is what I thought at first. Probably because I'm reading a book set in the 15th century.

Note that like 7% of nones are atheists, most are just people that don't prescribe to organized religion.

Lots of anti-religious sentiment being echoed here.

Marx said the right thing for the wrong reason when he described religion as “the opium of the people/masses”. I definitely believe that religion can be effectively misused to pacify people who are suffering injustice. I would imagine in all major religions there are “clergy” (I hate both the word and the concept it represents) who tell people “it’s OK if you’re oppressed and poor while bad people literally get away with murder, everything will be righted in the next life”. Or, even worse, they use religion to whip people up into a frenzy and justify religious wars and genocide. All while amassing wealth and influence for themselves.

However, as a practicing, fairly conservative Muslim, I know first-hand there are many religious scholars who live very modest, even impoverished lives while being a force for good and fighting against all forms of injustice. In fact, I would say the majority of dedicated scholars are not wealthy and not OK with injustice.

The problem isn’t organized religion, it’s that we live in a time, perhaps unprecedented in history, when the world is generally rotten. The existence of charlatans and hypocrites is a reflection of that reality, and the ones who ally themselves with dictators and corrupt politicians are the loudest and most visible.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

>The problem isn’t organized religion, it’s that we live in a time, perhaps unprecedented in history, when the world is generally rotten

I'm a Christian. One belief that I hold to is that all of creation is broken and needs to be fixed - and can only be fixed by the Creator God. Until that happens, we will continue to see people do bad things

Unfortunately, many of those Christians are among the reasons the world is so generally rotten. In some cases, it's directly connected: they feel that God is going to fix it for them, momentarily, and nothing they do matters.

I do not blame Christians in general. People of both faith and lack-of-faith do rotten things, and fail to do beneficial things.

But I would very much like to see Christians do a better job at holding each other to account. There are too many situations where Christians use their Christianity to make the world a worse place, and I will not stand for "God'll fix it!" as an excuse. Neither should other Christians.

What was Marx's "wrong reason"?

I had the impression his point was that religion distracts people from improving this world, not that he had a substitute.

> we live in a time, perhaps unprecedented in history, when the world is generally rotten

It has been argued - I forget by who - that this was the normal view of history across cultures for thousands of years, that there was a golden age before writing now fallen into decay, until Western progressivism became a prominent ideology.

It seems to me there is a lot of religious scripture in support of the idea that history is a cycle of decline, corruption, false prophets, and indiscriminate punishment from God.

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