Explainer
America
Comment
6 min read

The Cold War, the Internet and America’s nones

How does a culture lose religion so rapidly? Stephen Bullivant investigates the American phenomenon of ‘nonversion'.

Stephen Bullivant is a professor of theology and sociology at St Mary’s University, UK, and the University of Notre Dame, Australia.

Image from the series South Park

Those even passingly familiar with American religious trends over the past couple of decades will have read or heard the phrase ‘rise of the nones’ countless times. And with good reason. While in Britain the proportion of people telling pollsters they have ‘no religion’ grew rapidly over the twentieth century – it was already 43% when the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983; it tipped 50% a little over a decade later – in America the figure stayed stubbornly low. According to Gallup polls, only 5% of American adults identified with no religion in 1975. Twenty years later, in 1995, it was still 5%.

But then, seemingly very suddenly, things started to change. Beginning in the late nineties, then rapidly accelerating in the early 2000s, each new survey showed the nones getting bigger and bigger. Depending on which survey one looks at, nones now account for  somewhere between a quarter and third of American adults. Even at the lower end, that amounts to some 60 million people. And they’re still growing.

This raises a natural question: Why now? Or rather, what is it about the nineties and early 2000s that pushed or pulled large swathes out of thinking of themselves as religious? Various ways of measuring American religiosity all indicate that something significant must have happened around then. But what

A prior, deeper puzzle

That, at least, is the obvious way of approaching things. And to be fair, it has much to recommend it: something, or rather a combination of somethings, certainly did happen to American religion in those critical years. But this in itself raises a prior, deeper puzzle: why hadn’t the numbers of American nones already risen before the late nineties or early naughts? In all manner of other, quasi-comparable countries – Britain, Canada, Australia, France – the nones started growing steadily from the 1960s onwards. Yet while the sixties had all manner of other disruptive and destabilizing effects on American culture, society, politics, and religion, the proportion of nones grew only a little bit, then stopped.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, if one were to look for a sufficiently big ‘something’ within American society, mostly absent from those other countries, which could plausibly have kept non-religiosity artificially low in these decades, then there is an obvious candidate: the Cold War. Or more specifically, the precise and peculiarly religious way in which it was framed in the USA. 

A final, all-out battle

We Brits were as up to our neck in the Cold War as anyone. But only in America, I think, was the Cold War ever popularly framed as a “final, all-out battle between commu­nistic atheism and Christianity”, to quote Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Remember too that it was only in the mid-1950s that Congress adopted “In God We Trust” as America’s official motto, and “under God” was added to the Pledge. During the Pledge debates in Congress, the Democrat Louis C. Rabaut’s summed up a common view on both sides of the aisle:

“You may argue from dawn to dusk about differing po­litical, economic, and social systems but the fundamental issue which is the unbridgeable gap between America and Communist Russia is a belief in almighty God.”

This wasn’t just an issue with wide bipartisan and popular support view, it was thoroughly ecumenical too. While McCarthy and Rabaut were Catholics, it was a Presbyterian president, Eisenhower, who signed the “under God” bill into law. As Eisenhower himself put it during his 1952 election campaign:

“What is our battle against communism if it is not a fight between anti-God and a belief in the Almighty?”

Embellishing the city on a hill

It was also during the Cold War that presidents began likening America to the biblical “city built on a hill” – all the better positioned, one presumes, to scour the horizon for incoming Soviet missiles. Kennedy was the first US president to use it. Reagan, adding his own embellishment of “shining,” would make it his, and many of his countrymen’s, own. Taken together, all this helped lay down a deep, implicit association between being un-religious and being un-American. Atheism itself bore the brunt of this, but it more generally ruled out as­sociated ideas and identities – including thinking of oneself as having “no religion” – as live options for the great majority of Americans.

Riven fault lines

Meanwhile, the cultural fault lines that begin obviously opening up in the late sixties – gender equality, sexual liberation – kept on widening, with new generations socialized into ever more liberal baselines. This created a growing values gap between traditional Christian views and the wider mainstream culture, on topics that were very personal to, and thus felt very deeply by, people on all sides. This meant that, while churches tended to be most visible on the 'conservative side' of various battlegrounds, they were also often deeply riven by internal versions of the same debates. Not surprisingly, church attendance, at least within Catholic and mainline churches, started falling steadily in the seventies and (except where immigration has helped fill the pews) has never really stopped.

The Internet of ideas and identities

On this basic account – and there is much that could be, and elsewhere has been, added to it – the thawing of the Cold War is obviously significant. Note that it is the Millennial generation, only the youngest of whom are able to remember the Cold War (and even then mostly from holiday reruns of Red Dawn and Rocky IV), who were at the vanguard of the rise of the nones. They were also the first generation to be true digital natives, opening many of them up to a much wider range of ideas and identities than hitherto available. This has been especially effective at chipping away the walls of some of America’s stronger religious subcultures. My ex-Mormon interviewees, especially, cite “the wonderful thing called the internet” as being “the game-changer”.

Serious discussion and South Park

The Millennials started coming of age, and indeed responding to pollsters’ surveys, in the early 2000s. This was also around the time when, arguably for the first time since maybe the hugely popular writer and speaker  Robert “The Great Agnostic” Ingersoll a century before, unbelief was being seriously discussed everywhere from primetime talkshows to episodes of South Park. The bestselling books of the New Atheists – principally Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens – evidently hit upon some long pent-up demand. They were also, significantly here, able to position atheism, and 'no religion' more generally, as a panacea for a world awash with religion. Harris, for example, makes much of how he started writing The End of Faith on September 12th. Dawkins made no secret about his wanting to run adverts with an image of the Twin Towers and the tagline “Imagine no religion…”.

Cultural space opens

Whatever one makes of such arguments, similar rhetorical moves would have had less intuitive appeal to earlier American generations, learning to duck and cover from atheists’ H-bombs: the stuff of Americans’ nightmares were now those with too much religion, rather than not enough. While the long term impact of the not-so-New Atheism is hard to judge – many nones are keen to distance themselves from what they saw as its “dogmatism” and “extremism”, even while agreeing with much of it – it certainly helped open up ‘cultural space’ for being both American and non-religious that the Cold War had (outside of various enclaves, such as college towns and certain big cities) largely sealed shut. As we have seen, it is one that a good quarter of American adults are quite comfortable placing themselves within.

So yes, new somethings indeed happened in the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: and these helped drive the uptick of nones. But these happened at the same time as the none-inhibiting effects of a much earlier something had more or less worn off, especially among the emerging genera­tions most affected by the new somethings. It is this combination of factors— akin to pulling one foot off the brake as you slam the other down on the accelerator— that explains quite why the nones rose so suddenly and (seemingly) out of nowhere.  

 

Article
Comment
Film & TV
Politics
Purpose
4 min read

BBC scandals turn the spotlight on its lost mission

When it's good it's great but when it's bad it’s Babylonian

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tim Davie in a blue suite smiles
Tim Davie, BBC boss.

I’m a great fan of the BBC. Generally speaking, I like and admire its journalists and its output and, occasionally, I take its and the licence-payer’s shilling. 

I may be increasingly unusual in choosing to be woken by Radio 4’s Today, but love it because of, rather than despite of, its presenters’ impertinent and interruptive style with politicians. Its radio drama is seductive. I admit to having assiduously followed The Archers, until (literally) I lost the plot at Covid. Short radio drama series can be compulsive listening, such as Al Smith’s first-class Life Lines, featuring Sarah Ridgeway as an ambulance call handler. 

As for TV, I’m showing my age – The Repair Shop, Antiques Roadshow and Professor Alice Roberts’ archaeology in Digging for Britain. Ancient Top of the Pops repeats accompany Friday evening drinks. 

But back to the journalism. Say what you like, the BBC’s news output is the world’s benchmark. It has consistently hired best-of-breed reporters, particularly on the foreign stage. Whatever politicians of both the left or right claim, depending on their circumstance, it is even-handed in its analysis.  

Newsnight under Victoria Derbyshire is immeasurably improved by its slick, half-hour, after-dinner sofa format. It disassembles the pompous and hypocritical, from Trump apparatchiks to Jeremy Clarkson at a farmers’ demo, his stammering and panicky “classic BBC” attempted dismissal now cheekily deployed in its own advertising. 

But – and you’ll know the “but” was coming – there’s the dark side. There has recently been a litany of managerial let-downs, any of which could have put a more commercial enterprise out of business. Conservative governments have customarily been most prone to traducing the BBC, possibly because they think it should know its place, which is not so much below the salt as serving at their table. 

So it’s quite the new thing for a Labour culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, further to undermine the credibility of its Director-General, Tim Davie, by listing its “catastrophic” failures on his watch. The BBC has just had to apologise (an occurrence now as regular as Gary Lineker’s controversial tweets) for failing to discover, let alone disclose, that the 13-year-old narrator of documentary Gaza: How to survive a Warzone was the son of a Hamas high-up. 

A separate external review has also found that BBC bosses failed adequately to protect staff on MasterChef from presenter Gregg Wallace’s invasive behaviours. And the corporation has had to apologise this month for broadcasting antisemitic chants by the vile act Bob Vylan at Glastonbury. 

It’s not all about Davie’s alleged shortcomings. As the BBC itself might put it, other director-generals are available. George Entwhistle resigned over a Newsnight crackpot report on a child-abuse scandal; Greg Dyke over Lord Hutton’s report into how the BBC reported the David Kelly suicide affair under the Blair government. Then there was the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand “prank”. Let’s not, please, lift the coffin lid on Jimmy Savile again. And so, one is forced to say, it goes on. 

Is the BBC uniquely wicked and/or mismanaged? No. But it’s huge and visible. I have a theory that it’s a British institution which, like others, is a victim of its imperial past. It was nurtured in a post-Reith period, when being of the BBC was like carrying a British passport (“His/Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…”). It not only believes in, it was a child of, its own propaganda. The derring-do of its great foreign correspondents was founded on the unquestioned might of empire. 

That leads, inevitably in a post-imperial age, to hubris. It’s like Babylon, the metaphor rather than the great Mesopotamian city. Once indestructible under emperors such as Nebuchadnezzar, sacker of Jerusalem, it was destroyed by its own vulnerabilities. The scriptural allegory from Genesis is that Babylon raised the great tower of Babel to reach the sky and oversee a world that spoke its one, true language. In his wrath at their pride, God scattered its people, now unable to understand each other, for they’d come to form their own languages. 

See how that works? The BBC has come to believe in itself, rather than its mission. And consequently, it has lost the ability to communicate, both internally and externally.  

It’s not alone. The Church of England has the same post-imperial problem. So does any elected government after about a decade. It’s the jobs of Archbishop of Canterbury and Prime Minister, as well as Director-General of the BBC, that can only end in tears. 

They should get together, these people. Work out accountable corporate structures that can work in the 21st century. Create top leadership jobs that are possible to do, rather than appoint emperors who turn out to have no wardrobes. 

The point surely is not that they are humiliated, but that they have to be humbled. They need to demolish their towers, stop babbling at each other and learn to speak a common language again.  

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