Foreign Affairs, the banner publication of the Council of Foreign Relations, carries in its March-April 2012 issue, an interesting article on religion and politics in the United States. It is by two prominent political scientists, David Campbell (Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard). Their title is “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics is Bad for Both”. I assume that the sexier title on the cover of the journal was composed by the editors rather than the authors: “How the Tea Party Undermines Religion in America”. The material in the article comes from the authors’ highly informative book American Grace (about to come out as a paperback).
At the core of the article is a phenomenon that has drawn considerable attention for a while—the sharp rise in the number of Americans who declare themselves in surveys as being without religious affiliation. People who study religious statistics, and who also have a sense of humor (the two qualities are not necessarily contradictory), call this demographic “the nones”. In the 1960s the “nones” comprised 5-7% of the population; by the mid-1990s they had grown to 12%; in 2011 the percentage was 19%. According to the invaluable data on religion ongoingly posted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the incidence of “nones” is highest in the age group 30-49. A possible explanation, of course, could be that younger people have always been less religious than their elders (the so-called “life cycle effect”). The authors reject this explanation: Today 33% of young people are religiously unaffiliated, as compared with 12% in the 1970s. In other words: Youth as such is not the only factor in making individuals flee the churches. What is more, this flight of the young is rapidly accelerating: In surveys conducted by the authors all “nones” grew by about 18% between 2006 and 2011, but young “nones” grew by about 90%–a truly remarkable difference.
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