The Rise of the Nones

Have you ever heard of the nones?  They are one of the latest hot topics in the area of faith and culture.  Nones, or people who check “none” or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious affiliation, once comprised about 5% of the population prior to 1990.  They now approach the 30% level, rivaling the total population of white evangelicals in America. And the closer you look, the more profound the impact, with the greatest declines occurring among the youngest generations where as little as 8% of white Millennials identify as evangelicals. 

This is a big deal, a true sea change, spawning a lot of thoughtful thinking because, in the words of the PEW authors, “we do not typically see change of anything on that scale in a relatively short period of time.” The significance of this trend, the abruptness of the change, and the need to understand the underlying why makes this one of the most relevant, important, and needed conversations within the church today.

Yet there’s more.  In a different but related survey, the Gallup team recently sent another set of shock waves throughout both church and society.  They found that the percentage of Americans affiliated with a church is now below 50%.  And like the previous data, it’s the speed of change that’s most remarkable, changing from 68% to the current 47% in just 20 years. 

Losing our Religion

Russell Moore recently jumped into this conversation with an article entitled “Losing our Religion.”  He is a familiar voice in faith-culture discussions as the former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and his current position as the editor in chief of Christianity Today.

Russell begins by noting several potential causes for these trends such as liberalizing sexual and cultural norms, decreased fertility and more societal mobility. Yet the impact of sexual sins cuts both ways with nearly every survey of disaffiliating people emphasizing the scandals within the church—most notably the sexual abuse cover-ups and predatory behavior. But the preponderance of data, according to Moore, shows that the politicization of American religion is a main factor behind people dropping their religious affiliation.  

Former Southern Baptist President J.D. Greear, concurs, seeing the problem as cultural, not doctrinal, from a church that’s been hijacked by politics in recent years.  So do others like Jonathan Merritt, himself a millennial and the son of a former Southern Baptist Convention president: “in the minds of many millennials, the evangelical church seems to be known more for what she’s against than for what she’s supposed to be for: bringing light, hope, and great good news to a hurting world.  More American than Jesus, circling the wagons to maintain the status quo than in engaging the challenges and opportunities of our changing world and leading Christians into the future.  As a result, in the public square, the American church has lost her prophetic voice—and now she is losing her future. Millennials are streaming out the door.”

Moore observes that some of the nones even come from those leaving come from the ranks of the committed, those from the inner circle and most committed to traditional church teachings.  Such people are “walking away from evangelicalism…not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings.” He concludes by saying ” we are losing a generation – not because they are secularists, but because they believe we are.” 

Research Support for Moore’s Hypothesis

Michele Margolis in her book “From Politics to the Pews” supports Moore’s contentions by showing how politics rather than religion is now a first cause for people’s beliefs.  Ryan Burge, a pastor/sociologist who has written extensively about the “nones”, agrees noting that “half of Republican Muslims who attend services once a week or more identify as Evangelical.” When everything lies downstream of politics, says sociologist Paul Djupe, “people are going to start to evaluate issues based on those political criteria and not religious criteria” especially when churches take political stands. Church attenders on the margins become the most likely to leave.  

Although technically a “both sides” issue, much of the harm from today’s politically infused faith comes from the right-leaning side of the church. Rising none rates are more common in red than blue states and the more the Christian Right engages in culture war conflicts, the steeper the rate climbs. In the book “Secular Surge,” John Green and colleagues document how many of the “nones” came to reject the faith as a backlash to the religious right. They then backed up this finding through a series of controlled longitudinal experiments measuring people’s religiosity before and after exposure to differing mixtures of religion and politics. 

Is It Worth the Cost?

“And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?”  Jesus asked this haunting question just after calling people “to deny yourselves, take up my cross and follow me.” It’s a call to purity and singleness of purpose, a repeated theme throughout scripture.  To wit: the admonition “Thou shalt have no other God’s before me” leads the ten commandments.  God’s covenant with Israel, when entering the promised land, required avoiding other nations and purging their idols.  The apostle James saw singlemindedness as a measure of our heart’s condition.

But are “gain the whole world” and “lose your own soul” a necessary binary and must these two domains be independent?  What if we could find a middle way, connecting the two for good, accruing gains in the eternal domain through gains in the worldly domain?  Where, for example, the power of the state could be used to advance the eternal domain through policies promoting verities important to the Christian faith?

Who is Discipling Who?

But here’s the problem. We are an impressionable people influenced by the company we keep.  Our yearning for community, for connecting with others, is part of our nature and hardwired within us. It causes our brain to engage in self-reflectance – to take the measure of beliefs, values and attributes of others.   

Our self-reflectance system, through its assessment of the beliefs and values of others, opens the door to an exchange of beliefs.  We think that exchange goes both ways.  But the force of community puts the thumb on the scale through a subversive process mostly unknown to us.  Like the Trojan Horse in Greek Mythology, the weight of community slips through our subconscious and then takes over our identity to align our values with theirs.  This new orientation, achieved through belief harmonization, fulfills our yearning to be liked, loved, and included. 

But with that fulfillment we become new people, discipled into a new way of life.  As our identity is remade, our nature becomes changed through a syncretistic mixture of conflicting kingdoms. We are what we love, and our loves tell a new story of a devotion no longer solely focused on Jesus. 

This syncretistic mixture then blemishes our faith and changes our witness, with outcomes often inconsistent with the gospel. Here’s J.D. Greear, the former Southern Baptist Convention President: “Whenever the church gets in bed with politics, the church gets pregnant. And our offspring does not look like our Father in Heaven.” Pastor Tony Campolo puts it a bit more graphically “Mixing politics and religion is like mixing ice cream and manure; it really doesn’t affect the manure much, but it really messes up the ice cream.”

Messy Ice Cream: Situational Ethics

Seventy percent of white evangelicals in 2011 believed that a public official who “commits an immoral act in their personal life” would be unable to “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Follow up surveys saw this shift dramatically drop upon the emergence of Trump as the leader of the Republican Party, dropping to 28% in 2016 and then 16.5% in 2018.

When primed to think about Trump, only 6 percent of the survey participants said that an elected official who acts immorally in private is incapable of being ethical in public life. But then when primed to think about Bill Clinton, that percentage rose to 27 percent — a 21-point increase.

Question: Will the triumph of a political-induced moral relativism over scripture’s call to be “be holy in all your conduct” slow or hasten the exit of those from an emerging generation because they “think the church doesn’t believe [or follow] its own moral teachings.”

Irreconcilable Polarization

Such situational ethics makes more sense if you sincerely believe that life as you know it will soon end due to the actions of the “other side.” Now that’s the prevailing view of most Americans according to an October 2022 NBC News poll.  To wit: 80% of both Democrats and Republicans see the other side as enemies, posing a threat, if not stopped, of destroying America as we know it. Such affective polarization – the emotional dislike and distrust of people on the other side – creates a binary world of we the good, they the enemy.  It cancels Christ’s call to unity and spurns His two great commandments.  It’s flat-out sin and one of the clearest examples of the Galatians-defined works of the flesh. 

We see examples of this polarization every day in our lives.  In our Facebook feeds, in our discourse with friends and family, and even from our faith leaders such as the thinly disguised declaration by Al Mohler at a highly partisan conference that it’s “absolutely necessary” for all Christians to vote in the 2022 midterms and that any Christian who votes “wrongly” is being “unfaithful” to God.

Yet all of this could instantly go away if Christians on all sides chose to “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” Exchanging their weaponized “biblical worldview” for a life solely lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  Faithful to “a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.  Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” Such unity, undergirded through the fruits of the spirit, is what some call the church’s greatest calling.

Question: Will this apocalyptic mindset of casting one’s opponents as “enemies” – which is really a triumph of the “spirit of the age” over the “spirit of Christ” – slow or hasten the exit of those from an emerging generation “not because they are secularists, but because they believe we [the church] are?” 

Culture Over Faith

Every two years two conservative evangelical organizations, Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research, conduct a survey “to take the theological temperature of the United States to help Christians better understand today’s culture and to equip the church with better insights for discipleship.” They just released the 2022 survey and the results are simply astonishing.  According to their data, 65% of American evangelicals deny original sin and 43% deny Jesus’ divinity. Yet over 90% of evangelicals are against extramarital sex and abortion.

The first and obvious question is are these really committed Christians, or are we seeing evangelicals-in-name-only? We know that the label of evangelical is more and more becoming a cultural rather than a theological statement. With a significant percentage of practicing Muslims self-identifying as evangelicals as well as an increasing number of non-church going people, a simple evangelical identification is no longer instructive.

But no, the survey only included deeply committed evangelicals, people strongly agreeing with the following four statements: (1) The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe; (2) It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior; (3) Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin; and (4) Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

Recall that Jesus said “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  Now Jesus is talking about money, but “treasure” can also mean something precious.  We often hear “follow the money” when getting at the core of an issue. But perhaps we should also “follow the heart” because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

Question: When a church is “known more for what she’s against than for what she’s supposed to be for,” with a heart more interested in cultural “sins” than the resurrected Christ “in whom we move and have our being,” will it slow or hasten the exit of those from an emerging generation?

Avoiding the Elephant

The Servant Christian Foundation, concerned that people, especially young Americans, were growing hostile toward faith and leaving Christianity, recently engaged a marketing firm to find a solution to this “nones” problem. After extensive market research, they found, to no one’s surprise, that although many Americans like Jesus, they don’t think much of His followers. Their solution: a 100 million dollar national media blitz for Jesus with one of the goals “to redeem Jesus’ brand from the damage done by his followers, especially those who say one thing and then do another.”  

I’m sure at least some or even much good will come out of this campaign.  Jesus said that if “I be lifted up I will draw all men unto me” and, in Renn’s language, America is still a positive world when it comes to Him.  But what then happens to those responding to the call?  They need a place to learn and grow but wasn’t it the deficiency in those places that sparked the ad campaign in the first place? 

Yet many of the respondents will meet faithful Christ-followers who have refused to go astray.  By avoiding the thorns of a cultural war-oriented faith, they’ve retained the good soil of pure Christianity.  But the market research show an additional but painful story, one these exiting “nones” know too well. And until we address these deficiencies which are extensive within the church, aren’t we just “doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result?”

I’ve previously presented some of this data but it’s worthwhile to present some more. For like a fog bank diminishing our ability to see, the data keeps telling a story of cultural sensibilities diminishing the salt and light mission of the church.  And like a bad penny that always turns up, we often find Christian Nationalism front and center in this data.

Let’s revisit, for example, one of the previous graphs in this post, showing the percent of Americans who say it’s more important to overcome opponents that to solve common problems.  When we take the same data and sort it according to a Christian Nationalist score, we see a strong association between this polarization measure and Christian Nationalism.

Then when you peek under the tent of this Christian Nationalism associated polarization you find the darkness of a social dominance orientation which privileges people like themselves while seeing racially others as a detriment to our nation.

Final Question: If the church and those gifted for ministry within the church keep avoiding the elephant in the room, avoiding the foundational sin of a politicized gospel, will that slow or hasten the exit of those from an emerging generation?