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
Identity
Nationalism
Sport
6 min read

The Euros and the problem of nationality

In a world of populist nationalism, should you support your national team?

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Two England fans stand in stadium seeting holding up their flag.
England fans at Euro 2024.
@FBAwayDays.

Tony Cascarino was a footballer in the 80’s and 90’s, playing for various clubs including Aston Villa, Celtic and Chelsea. He also won 88 caps for the Republic of Ireland scoring 19 goals. A good but fairly unremarkable career was turned on its head in 2000 when it came to light that he was never actually eligible to play for Ireland. After being rejected for an Irish passport in 1985 and learning on his Irish grandfather’s deathbed that he was not the natural father of his mother, Cascarino did not tell anyone and just kept playing international football. He only went public after he retired and published an autobiography. Quite simply he represented the Republic of Ireland without being Irish. 

Sport is a key marker for national identity in most nations’ cultural imaginations. Whichever nation wins this year’s Euro football tournament will have millions watching and tens or hundreds of thousands lining the streets for a victory parade, with national flags, politicians and celebrities in tow. The case of Tony Cascarino, however, exposes the shaky foundations of national identity. 

The general rule of international sport is that if you are born in a country, have a parent or grandparent born there, or have lived in it for a certain number of years, you can represent that country. Over the years this has led to some odd scenarios like 23 of 39 players in a recent Scotland rugby squad being born elsewhere or England’s 2005 Ashes hero Kevin Pietersen speaking in a broad South African accent. My children could technically represent Zimbabwe at international sport through a grandparent born there, even if they never set foot in the country. Declan Rice will be at the heart of England’s midfield in this tournament, but even he represented the Republic of Ireland three times at senior level, being able to switch teams because those matches were only friendlies. Gareth Southgate once commented: ‘first we had to convince him it would be a good decision [to switch to England].’ Far from being core to our identity, it seems as if nationality can often be chosen after weighing up the pros and cons. 

The best Christian teaching on identity undercuts both sides of the culture wars in a way that also avoids a centrist fudge.

Identity is a key aspect in dominant cultural discourse at the moment. The phrase ‘identity politics’ is often thrown at those who are perceived to locate the most important aspects of identity in one’s sexuality, gender or skin colour. Those on the other side are just as keen to define identity, but will stress the importance of national heritage along with accompanying national values. 

What does Christianity contribute to debates about identity? It is not hard to find activist Christians on both sides of these debates, especially on social media. Yet Christian belief has something more distinctive to say than the usual tropes in wider society. The best Christian teaching on identity undercuts both sides of the culture wars in a way that also avoids a centrist fudge. 

Jesus speaks about being ‘dying to yourself’ and being ‘born again’ when someone starts to follow him. While some associate these loaded phrases almost solely with a question of  eternal destiny after death (heaven or hell?), surely their meaning goes beyond this to the central question of identity. In essence, Jesus tells people that the things that used to be central to their identity actually become less important once you enter the kingdom built around him – you literally die to them and are born again. The centrality of national identity is relativised in parables like the good Samaritan where it is the enemy nation rather than the compatriot who offers help. The role of women is often flipped on its head as they provide the model of discipleship where the male disciples fall short. Wealth is stripped of its cultural power as Jesus’ followers are commanded to share and hold things in common. The allure of social status and significance is shorn of its potency as we see ourselves in the light of a God who made and cares for all of us without exceptions, and indeed holds special favour for the lowly and ‘unimportant’ in the eyes of everyone else. A Christian is not supposed to allow things like nationality, wealth, status or gender be too important in comparison to her identity in Jesus Christ and the community she enters when she begins to follow him. 

No other ideology or -ism in history has centred this self-giving relationship (not just ‘relationality’) at its heart. 

Both sides of the culture wars – what have become known as ‘woke globalism’ and ‘populist nationalism’ – have their own promises of community. Yet neither ultimately escape the rampant individualism of our culture, the unmistakable product of Enlightenment thinking. On the ‘liberal left’, personal preferences and choices are advanced as the central parts of identity. Yet on the other side, the logic of nationalism and even patriotism, however, is still built around the self – drawing a picture of the world which looks and sounds like me as much as possible. A Christian vision of identity is founded outside of the self - on God. Christian thinking has always been wary of any self-oriented ideology because it will be unsustainable in the long run. 

Other ideologies can offer a vision of identity beyond the self – communism, fascism, capitalism, for instance; all promise a fulfilling life if you submit yourself to them just as Christianity does. At their heart, however, these ideologies are simply that – ideologies without a face. Christians have always maintained that the living Jesus can never be separated from his teaching as if it is an ideology. At the heart of this faith and promise of identity is not first and foremost a way of life but a person with whom you can have a relationship. The mode of relationship is also in line with the teaching and life he lived – laying his life down for others. This, in turn, is the model for Christians – in humility considering others better than ourselves. No other ideology or -ism in history has centred this self-giving relationship (not just ‘relationality’) at its heart, and has therefore ever been able to offer as deep and fulfilling vision of identity and fellowship. 

Will I be supporting England, the country of my and my parents’ birth, then? Of course I will. The call to die to yourself and the things that used to define you does not mean I can exist as a Christian without any other cultural framework that makes up my existence in the world. I am not a citizen of ‘nowhere.’ I was born in England, and have lived my life here. I understand certain cultural references, humour, enjoy certain foods. These are not bad things, and indeed create community and shared understanding. From this perspective, I will join with other English men and women to cheer Southgate and his team over the coming weeks. 

But what I will resist is some deeper meaning and identity in my nation where my life and all that is important to me are seen through its lens. My Englishness is there, it has some influence in my life, but ultimately it must be subservient to my identity in Jesus Christ. It is one thing among many that in New Testament language must be ‘put under his feet’. When there is a choice between serving my nation and serving Jesus Christ, I will always choose the later and assume there will be times when this choice is a real one. I will watch this summer’s Euros with members of my church who come from various nations of the world. We will join together without denying our respective nationalities and cultures – as we do every week – but in a manner where these cultures do not get in the way of genuine fellowship as we seek to embody what the Bible speaks of as a ‘new humanity.’