American Nones: New Typology of the the Non-Religious and their Quest for Meaning

Using a newly collected dataset of over 12,000 non-religious Americans, and a k-means clustering algorithm, this work devises a new typology of non-religion in the United States. Instead of using the crude categories of atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, this new approach focuses on posture toward religion, views of spirituality, and other relevant factors. Further, this paper will explore how non-religious Americans make meaning in their lives.

Americans have always been deeply religious, which predates even the founding of the United States. The Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower because they had been persecuted for their puritanical beliefs in Anglican England. Two centuries later, French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in search of what was working in the young country. In his massively influential book, Democracy in America (1835/1840), he pointed to religion as the glue that held together the American experiment with republican democracy: “There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (United Kingdom: Longmans, Green, 1889), 308.)

Christianity – particularly mainline Protestantism – had incredible momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century, so much so that in 1900 the editor of the Christian Oracle changed the magazine’s name to the Christian Century, believing that “genuine Christian faith could live in mutual harmony with the modern developments in science, technology, immigration, communication and culture that were already under way.” (Linda-Marie Delloff, “Charles Clayton Morrison: Shaping a Journal’s Identity,” Christian Century (January 18, 1984), 43.) He wasn’t wrong – Christianity had a good run in the twentieth century: according to the General Social Survey, among people born in 1900, nearly all of them – 94 percent, to be exact – identified as Christian. However, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren would not be so attached to the Christian faith. Among respondents to the GSS who were born in 2000, just 62% said that they identified as a Christian of any kind. 

While Glenn Vernon was imploring his fellow sociologists to start thinking about the growing share of non-religious Americans in the 1960s, that admonition was almost completely ignored for the next several decades, and for good reasons – there just weren’t that many Nones to be found in surveys. When the General Social Survey started asking people questions about their religion in 1972, just 53 people out of a total sample of more than 1,600 indicated that they had no religious affiliation. But just thirty years later, the rise of the Nones was something that everyone wanted to talk about. Philosophers and social sciences were beginning to develop the contours of the “secularization thesis” – the belief that the world would become less religious as science and a materialist worldview overwhelmed the ancient superstitions of religion. But instead, the end of the twentieth century saw the rise of religious fundamentalism around the globe, leading prominent sociologist Peter Berger, among others, to recant his earlier commitment to the secularization thesis in 1999: “The assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today…is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.” (Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 2.)

One of the most difficult questions for a demographer of American religion to answer now is: has religion declined over the last half century? It all comes down to how one thinks about the concept. Yes, it is undoubtedly true that the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has exploded in recent years. It was just five percent of the country as late as 1990, but that figure is much closer to 30 percent today. So, yes - the ascendance of the Nones is a statistical certainty. 

Thus, the need to understand religious and non-religious Americans has never been more acute. While there are hundreds of sociologists, historians, and religious studies scholars who have poked and prodded the largest Christians traditions in academic books and journal articles, the Nones have largely remained a black box. Before 1972, there’s scant data about the share of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. Even from the 1970s through the early 2000s, there were no longitudinal surveys that asked people what type of Nones they were. When the Pew Research Center began giving three options for non-religion: atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, that allowed academics to generate a bit more nuance. But even that was incredibly reductive. Basic questions – Are Nones spiritual? Do they pray? Do they have real animosity toward religion? – went unanswered even as this group swelled to 100 million Americans. 

That’s the primary aim of our work: to understand the Nones. Who they are, what they believe, and how they meet the spiritual needs that have traditionally been fulfilled by religion. We surveyed thousands of Americans, collecting an extraordinary amount of information on the Nones. In this paper, we will unfurl our reams of data in ways that we hope will make sense and be helpful to scholars of religion and social scientists who study American religiosity.