In the latest issue of Culture (pdf, p. 12), Christopher McKnight Nichols takes an “historical approach” to accounting for the surging numbers of Americans professing “no religion”:
In a preliminary way, I suggest that the growing tendency of people who are not necessarily atheists to reject a religious identification reflects at least three political and cultural transitions. First, over the past few decades there has been a marked trend toward sharper polarization among religious outlooks. With the decline of membership in the so-called liberal churches, explicitly and unabashedly faith-centered political factions have grown and brought their views to bear in the public square on an array of social, political, legal, and economic issues.
[…]Second, diverse changes on the geopolitical stage have had profound impacts on images of public religion. From the 1930s through 1989, Americans imagined their enemies as deeply “godless”: first, Germany and Japan, then, the godless atheism of the communist Soviet Union. The apparent “opponents” to the U.S. in the twenty-first century, most notably Islamist extremists fostering terrorism, are suffused in religiosity and the languages of political theology.
Continue reading “The New No Religionists” here. [Via Keith Goetzman at Utne Reader.]
