Fake fact: America is not secularizing

Posted on November 19, 2009 by David Hume

religattend-738836The whole post is at Gene Expression, but the chart to the left is the core of it. 1980-2008 can to a great extent be labelled a conservative era, when the New Right set the terms of the national debate on politics and culture. And yet concomitantly there was a massive secularization process, as 1 million Americans left religious affiliation per year in the in the 1990s, and half a million per year in the 2000s.

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4 Responses to Fake fact: America is not secularizing

  1. Stopped Clock says:
    November 20, 2009 at 7:25 am

    Yes, there’s a definite trend towards secularization and rejection of Christianity, and anyone who argues against it is in denial. Moreover, it’s happening all over the Christian world, not just in America. I would say, though, that it’s not a foregone conclusion that this one will be “permanent”, as things like this have happened before. After all, in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s we had a crop of Presidents that weren’t really Christians, not in the sense of believing that Jesus was the Son of God, at least. And Christianity came back.

  2. David Hume says:
    November 20, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    right, but the masses were always christian. what happened was that the presidency became a more populist position. no surprise that the first orthodox christian in the white house was andrew jackson. also, detailed litmus tests about personal faith are new. william howard taft was a unitarian, while adlai stevenson was nominated and ran for president twice as a unitarian (winning states only in the ‘solid south’ as a democrat).

  3. david heddle says:
    November 21, 2009 at 3:52 am

    Of course there is no way, that I can see, of estimating how many of those leaving the church were self-identified Christians but who were actually in-the-closet unbelievers. Perhaps (who knows?) this is a sizable group, one that is beginning to come out of the closet as the stigma of being a non-believer wanes. Those cases, however many there may be, are a win-win: better for the church they have left, better for society that they feel comfortable enough to stop the masquerade.

    Likewise a plot of what percentage of Americans label themselves gay—I haven’t seen one—but if there is an upward trend since the 1970’s would it prove that America was less heterosexual?

  4. JGP says:
    November 23, 2009 at 11:25 am

    @david heddle
    better for the church they have left, better for society that they feel comfortable enough to stop the masquerade.

    I’m not so sure this is true. It’s possible that having a certain percentage of communicants who were skeptical or pragmatically oriented had a leavening effect on religions, causing them to be less fanatical. This is, of course, debatable but it’s interesting to note how the public profile of evangelicals has risen as society becomes more secular in comparison to the 1950s. Just a thought.

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