“The use of the category of “Nones” in surveys pertaining to religion should be replaced with “Buts”—that is a category for those who will say something like “I am Catholic, but…” The results of such surveys would be much more enlightening.”

If one wants information on large numbers of people, it makes perfect sense to use survey methods yielding statistical data. Depending on the nature of the data, one can then make correlations between, say, religious affiliation, age, gender, income, location and party registration. If you are running for political office, start a local church, or sell a product or a service, this information can be very useful. Some data of course are available from public sources, such as party registration in a locality. But most surveys are looking for information that can only be obtained by asking individuals for their self-identification, opinions and behavior—so, you are a Democrat, what is your view of the Obama foreign policy, are you in favor of sending ground troops to Iraq? You may also be interested in the religious factor: You are Catholic, what is your party registration, are you in favor of sending in ground troops? And so on. The trouble with such survey data is that they come from responses to pre-set questions that may miss the nuances in the respondent’s view of things. That is a particular problem in the area of religion. I think that qualitative methods are more likely to catch the nuances. All the same, competently handled survey data about religion can be very informative. One of the most competent source for religious data from many countries is the Pew Research Center in Washington, specifically its division “Religion and Public Life”, directed by Luis Lugo.

On April 4, 2015, Pew issued a document titled “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050”. Some of the findings are very interesting indeed, assuming that current demographic trends continue:

• Christianity will continue to be the world’s largest religion, but Islam is growing faster (it is generally true that strongly religious people have more children, but I daresay that polygamy is demographically helpful).
• By 2050 the global numbers of Christians and Muslims will be nearly equal.
• Four out of every ten Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa.
• India will still have a Hindu majority, but it will surpass Indonesia as the country with the largest number of Muslims.
• In the United States Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two- thirds in 2050.
• Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion; Islam will. [A little while ago Pew issued a special report on American Jews, which generated many debates in the Jewish community. Speaking demographically only, the most promising group within that community are the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox—the more ultra, the better.]

Needless to say, all these shifts will have significant consequences for international and US domestic politics. But in this post I want to focus on the group that is categorized as “religiously unaffiliated”. This group consists of people who, when asked about their religious affiliation, say “none”. They are, not too happily, called “Nones” (no, my dear—they are not Catholic sisters—on the contrary!). They are concentrated in countries with less fertile and aging population. They have been declining from 16.4% to 13.2% of the global population (still a hefty billion). They have been rising in the U.S. from 16% to 26% of the total population. The U.S. figures have been hailed by the shrinking number of scholars still adhering to so-called secularization theory (which proposes that modernity means less religion); they take the rise of the Nones as evidence that the US too is heading toward European secularity (never mind all those noisy Holy Rollers in the allegedly more backward regions of the republic).

A more refined breakdown of the Nones differentiates between “atheists”, “agnostics”, and those who simply identify themselves as “unaffiliated”. What do these terms actually mean in America today? There is indeed a small group of self-described atheists, some of them affiliated with organizations/”churches” also so described. Some are quite militant, going to the federal courts to claim First Amendment rights or to have Christmas displays dismantled in public parks. There is a whiff of fundamentalism about these people, an attitude of superior certitude (an atheist could be defined as an individual who heard a voice from heaven with the message that heaven does not exist). Though it must be said that most Americans who insist on their right to be atheists (“freedom from religion”) are not as intolerant as the “godless” activists who carried out anti-religious propaganda in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

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