A follow up to Bradlaugh’s post. In the GSS you can look at religious identification as a function of age. Below the fold is a chart where each bar is a year from age 18 up to 88. 89 and up are aggregated as the last bar on the right. Nothing surprising, but the clarity of the trend is bracing.
One would really like to see this as a time-lapse movie, Mr. Hume. Will those irreligious 18-yr-olds get more pious as they get older? It doesn’t seem likely, but these things move in odd ways.
And of course, as you yourself have said many times, “religion” can be a hard thing to pin down. Church-going? Fluffy nondenominational spirituality? Afterlife but no God? Creationist? There are many mansions.
The overall trend in the modern (post-17C) West has been away from institutional religion, & I’d guess that’s what we’re seeing here; but there have been tides of religiosity superimposed on that trend, ebbing and flowing.
The interesting thing to ponder is whether those innate inclinations to belief in the supernatural identified by the cognitive psychologists will always need some outlet among the majority of human beings, vindicating that famous supposed-quote of Chesterton’s; or whether the non-belief meme can become “fixed.” My guess would be the former, but a guess is all it is.
I just looked at the GSS site for the first time, and it is very cool.
I decided to look at religious preference (RELIG) vs. survey year (YEAR) instead of age and saw something interesting. From a purely visual inspection of the plot it seems that religious preference stayed pretty constant from 1972-1991, but from 1991-2008, None grew steadily at the expense of Protestant.
I hadn’t seen Bradlaugh’s comment when I posted my own, but you could probably do the time-lapse movie pretty easily since you can select by survey year. Just make a series of RELIG vs. AGE plots, one for each year (or integrate over several years to get better statistics). Then just make an animated gif (I know animated gifs are pretty horrible, but it would work).
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Would it be possible to put a label on the x-axis? I assume it runs younger to older, but I don’t know what the lower limit is on age…
Never mind, I see it’s 18-88.
None grew steadily at the expense of Protestant.
other surveys show the same since 1990.
The GSS shows a much higher level of strong (can’t know) agnosticism for Catholics than for Protestants. Likely it’s the greater degree to which Catholic is an ethnic and cultural category. So the posted chart won’t capture as much of any trend towards increased disbelief among self-identified Catholics. So the apparent trend of disbelief taking only from Protestantism may just be an result of definitional differences. Honest pew counts would be best; I know there’s one for Protestant mainline churches; is there one for Catholic churches?
The growth in those of no religion is the headline here I suppose, but I also note that the Catholic:Protestant ratio is approaching 1:1 in the youngest generation.
50 years ago that would have profoundly alarmed a lot of people.
Does this mean that we get more religious as we get older or that we have traditionally been religious?
Looking at that, one sees that the most non religious state is Vermont. Vermont is a pretty white state, or more correctly, probably the Whitest, as in SWPL, state. Such people used to call themselves ‘liberal idealists’ back in the day, and saying such people aren’t ‘religious’ is more than a bit daft, if any Catholic pastor got his congregation as doctrinally orthodox and enthusiastic about Catholicism as such people tend to be about their commonly held ‘ideals’, he’d definitely be a bishop some day. I’d say that ‘no religion’ would be better put as ‘no organized religion’.
“Does this mean that we get more religious as we get older or that we have traditionally been religious?”
I know it’s never safe to assume, but I would guess it is a combination of the two. It would be nice if you could ask the same people the same question from the age of 18-89.
Does this mean that we get more religious as we get older or that we have traditionally been religious?
A particularly difficult question in light of the fact that many people get more traditional as they get older. If their society has a tradition of religion that they bucked in their youth, they may return to the fold as they get older.
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“A particularly difficult question in light of the fact that many people get more traditional as they get older. If their society has a tradition of religion that they bucked in their youth, they may return to the fold as they get older.”
Could you test that?
Would a society that is traditionally non-religious see idealistic religious youth who grow out of it, to become practical, conservative nontheists!
I can’t think of any traditionally non-religious society, unless you count East Asian societies like Japan which is sort of like that in the sense that its not institutionalized. Does religiosity decline with age there.
How about studies across many countries– any of those?