{"id":65162,"date":"2015-01-26T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T14:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=65162"},"modified":"2014-12-01T13:30:37","modified_gmt":"2014-12-01T18:30:37","slug":"americans-are-fleeing-religion-and-republicans-are-to-blame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/01\/26\/americans-are-fleeing-religion-and-republicans-are-to-blame\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans Are Fleeing Religion and Republicans Are To Blame"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past 40 years, Americans have become increasingly likely to deny an affiliation with a religion. The graph below shows that people with “no religious preference” rose from about 5% of the population in 1972 to about 20% today. Overall, however, Americans do\u00a0not report a corresponding decline in the a\u00a0belief in God, life after death, or other religious ideas. What’s going on?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/p>\n

Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer — the guys who made the graph above — argue<\/a>\u00a0that the retreat from religious affiliation is essentially, a retreat from the political\u00a0right. Religion has become strongly associated with conservative politics, so left-leaning people are choosing, instead, to identify as “spiritual but not religious.”<\/p>\n

Here is some of their evidence. The data below represents the likelihood of rejecting a religious affiliation according to one’s political views.\u00a0The more politically liberal one is, the more likely they have come to reject religion.<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Using fancy statistical analyses, they explain:\u00a0“generational differences in belief add nothing to explaining the cohort differences in affiliation.” That is, people haven’t lost their faith, they just\u00a0disagree with\u00a0religious leaders and institutions. \u00a0Hout and Fischer conclude:<\/p>\n

Once the American public began connecting organized religion to the conservative political agenda \u2014 a connection that Republican politicians, abortion activists, and religious leaders all encouraged \u2014 many political liberals and moderates who seldom or never attended services quit expressing a religious preference when survey interviewers asked about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Democrats have wondered how to break the association of the right with religion and claim a little bit of moral authority for themselves. It looks like they may not need to or, even, that having failed to do so has\u00a0a surprise advantage.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past 40 years, Americans have become increasingly likely to deny an affiliation with a religion. The graph below shows that people with “no religious preference” rose from about 5% of the population in 1972 to about 20% today. Overall, however, Americans do\u00a0not report a corresponding decline in the a\u00a0belief in God, life after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[253,85,42],"class_list":["post-65162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-politics","tag-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/11\/36.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65162"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65167,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65162\/revisions\/65167"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}