culture

You’ve probably seen more than an ad or two this fall for DraftKings or FanDuel, two massive online fantasy sports websites valued at over $1 billion each. Since 2009, the number of fantasy sports players has doubled, and, as of August, 56.8 million participated in the United States and Canada (according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association). It’s not all fun and games, though. The New York Attorney general launched an investigation into these sites, and a recent feature in The New York Times highlights how deep the rabbit hole goes for illegal online gambling on fantasy sports. It is easy to focus on scandalous stories of crime rings, big winnings, and crushing losses, but these sites are not just about gaming the system. Sociologists emphasize that they are also powerful social communities driven by cultures of masculinity and fandom.

Eric Leifer argues that the history of sports fandom in the U.S. is place- and team-based—fans supported the team in their town or region as a marker of community membership. Fantasy leagues and social media challenged this by shifting the focus from entire teams to individual athletes’ performance.

• Eric M. Leifer. 1995. Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America. Harvard University Press.
• John P. McGuire, Greg G. Armfield, and Jeff Boone. 2012. “Show Me the Numbers! Media Dependency and Fantasy Game Participants.” pp. 275-287 in Sports Fans, Identity, and Socialization ed. Adam C. Earnheardt, Paul M. Haridakis, and Barbara S. Hugenbeg.
• Matthew David and Peter Millward. 2015. “Sport and New Media” pp. 388-397 in Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Sport ed. Richard Giulianotti.

Sociologists, especially, focus on the racialized and gendered nature of sport-based communities. Members often forge strong social ties in male-dominated spaces that emphasize knowledge and expertise, and the groups can privilege racial stereotypes and racialized assumptions about athletic performance.

• Nickolas W. Davis and Margaret Carlisle Duncan. 2006. “Sports Knowledge is Power: Reinforcing Masculine Privilege Through Fantasy Sports League Participation.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues. 30(3): 244-264
• Adam Love and Matthew W. Hughey. 2015. “Out of Bounds? Racial Discourse on College Basketball Message Boards.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(6):877–93.

Fantasy sites (and the betting that ensues on them) are in line with other case studies that show how online socialization is not “less real” or consequential than offline social interaction—both teach everything from harmless play to deviant behavior. We see the power of online interaction in everything from hackers developing their own open-source political theory to online peers teaching others how to download music for free and sport message boards reinforcing racial stereotypes.

• Gabriella Coleman. 2012. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press
• George E. Higgins, Catherine D. Marcum, Tina L. Freiburger, and Melissa L. Ricketts. 2012. “Examining the Role of Peer Influence and Self-Control on Downloading Behavior.” Deviant Behavior 33(5):412–23.

Of course, gambling is tied up in these social structures. While American society has “medicalized” compulsive gambling, treating it as an individual and treatable problem, more recent work shows how social environments create what gamblers want most: a chance to be in the “zone” and play for long periods of time. The strong communal aspect of fantasy sports websites makes them a perfect space for sustained play.

• John Rosecrance. 1985. “Compulsive Gambling and the Medicalization of Deviance.” Social Problems. 32(3):275-284
• Natasha Dow Schüll. 2012. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

In the ongoing battles around whether to defund Planned Parenthood, Lindy West and Amelia Bonow created the Twitter hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion to encourage women to share their abortion stories, express their experiences, and recognize the stigma that often silences women who have an abortion. Consequently, many have criticized the hashtag and attacked the women involved. Supporters of #ShoutYourAbortion argue that sharing real women’s stories on social media produces cultural change around an issue surrounded by legal rhetoric. Sociological research details why women have generally felt compelled to stay silent about having abortions and the potential benefits of speaking up.

Many women believe that disclosing their abortion experiences will lead to negative responses from relatives and friends, due to widely held norms of femininity and motherhood that assert women are “natural nurturers” and the idea that having an abortion negates those qualities. In a classic study of pro-life and pro-choice activists, Kristin Luker notes that abortion is often seen as a “referendum on the place and meaning of motherhood.” For pro-life activists, terminating a pregnancy may be the ultimate example of being a “bad mother.” Rather than face anticipated judgment and condemnation around moral codes of appropriate feminine behavior, women then choose to conceal their procedures.

• Kristin Luker. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Paula Abrams. 2015. “The Bad Mother: Stigma, Abortion, and Surrogacy.” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 43(2):179-191.

A major source of stress and frustration women experience centers on the gendered imbalance of responsibility for contraception and abortion decisions. Research finds that women are often expected be responsible for providing or taking contraception, but are heavily criticized when they take responsibility by choosing to have an abortion. Thus, Sally Brown argues, where women are held responsible for reproductive decisions, “decision making, if ‘decisions’ happen at all, is bound up with notions of hegemonic masculine and feminine roles.”

• Sally Brown. 2015. “‘They Think it’s All Up to the Girls’: Gender, Risk, and Responsibility for Contraception.” Culture, Health, & Sexuality 17(3): 312-325.
• Katrina Kimport, Kira Foster, and Tracy A. Weitz. 2011. “Social Sources of Women’s Emotional Difficulty After Abortion: Lessons from Women’s Abortion Narratives.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 43(2):103–109.

Stigma, however, does not reduce the likelihood that a woman will have an abortion. Cockrill and Nack write that even women who “believe abortion is morally wrong and that women who have abortions are careless and irresponsible will still have abortions.” Instead, the primary consequences of abortion stigma are decreased mental and physical health, strained relationships, and loss of social status. Spaces of affirmation and support like the #ShoutYourAbortion campaign allow women to engage in “collective stigma management,” offering a supportive network where their public presence can work to change social attitudes and shatter the silence surrounding abortion experiences.

• Kate Cockrill and Adina Nack. 2013. “‘I’m Not That Type of Person’: Managing the Stigma of Having an Abortion.” Deviant Behavior 34(12): 973-990.
• Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport. 2014. “Telling Stories about Abortion: Abortion-Related Plots in American Film and Television, 1916–2013.” Contraception 89(5): 413-418.

In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” details the historical development of the carceral state, its consequences on current and formerly imprisoned black Americans, and the unique challenges families face during their absences and returns. Coates cites and interviews several prominent sociologists for their insight into the carceral state’s repercussions for black Americans specifically. We rounded up some of their best work on the topic.

The 1970s saw increasing unemployment and concentrated poverty. Legislators developed “tough on crime” policies that resulted in the start of a massive increase in the number of incarcerated individuals in jails and prisons. Increases in incarceration, however, do not appear to have had a significant effect on decreasing crime rates.

• Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson. 1995. “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality.” In Shaun L. Gabbidon and Helen Taylor Greene (eds.), Race, Crime, and Justice: A Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 177-190.
• Bruce Western and Christopher Muller. 2013. “Mass Incarceration, Macrosociology, and the Poor,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 647(1):166-189.
• Bruce Western. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage.

Mass imprisonment has a wide range of collateral consequences. Those who serve time face health risks, familial struggles, and barriers to employment before and after they are released.

• Christopher Wildeman and Christopher Muller. 2012. “Mass Imprisonment and Inequality in Health and Family Life,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8:11-30.
• Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman. 2013. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Devah Pager. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108(5):937-975.
• Devah Pager. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Volkswagen’s CEO, Martin Winterkorn, recently stepped down amid a scandal over manipulated emissions tests. Researchers at West Virginia University found that VW diesel models used “defeat devices” that activated emission control systems only when being tested—that’s how they dodged emissions standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. To what extent is Winterkorn responsible for this corporate skullduggery? And does the use of these devices constitute a “crime”?

Classic theories about corporate scandal stress “amoral calculus,” where individual decision makers of an organization weigh the costs and benefits of their actions. One example is the Ford Pinto debacle, when the company failed to recall Pintos with defective gas tanks because its “internal ‘cost-benefit analysis’” indicated the financial costs of a recall outweighed the potential cost of human lives (Dowie 1977). The media often responds to these corporate scandals by labeling white-collar criminals “bad apples,” shifting the public’s attention to the guilt of individual decision makers while hiding the social context that shapes norms within organizations

• Robert A. Kagan, and John T. Scholz. 1984. “The ‘criminology of the corporation’ and regulatory enforcement strategies,” In Enforcing Regulation, eds. Keith Hawkins and John M. Thomas, 67-95. Boston, MA: Kluwer-Nijhoff.
• Francis T. Cullen, Jennifer L. Hartman, and Cheryl Lero Jonson. 2009. “Bad guys: why the public supports punishing white-collar offenders,” Crime, Law and Social Change 51: 31–44.

Sociologists show risky decision making stems from the “normalization of deviance” within an organization. Conforming to the culture, work group members can redefine deviant actions as normal or commonplace. In the Ford Pinto case, fuel tank ruptures were categorized as acceptable risk due to prevailing safety priorities and long-standing industry norms. In the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster, escalating levels of technical failure were redefined as normal and acceptable due to increased bureaucratic pressures, NASA’s cultural understandings of risk acceptance, and high levels of organizational secrecy.

• Diane Vaughan. 1998. “Rational choice, situated action, and the social control of organizations,” Law and Society Review 32(1): 23-61.
• Matthew T. Lee and M. David Ermann. 1999. “Pinto “madness” as a flawed landmark narrative: An organizational and network analysis,” Social Problems 46: 30-47.
• Diane Vaughan. 1997. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Other scholarship suggests that the Volkswagen emission fraud will not be labeled as criminal. Our definitions of what is criminal reflect societal beliefs rather than the “objective” dangers and risks posed to us. As such, we tend to emphasize poor or petty “street crime” while downplaying the acts of elites and corporations, or “white collar crime.” These corporate acts, however, result in serious harm and often parallel (or exceed) the harm caused by “street crime”. Fudging emission performance, however, might be defined as “corporate non-compliance,” rather than a criminal act. Subsequently, some of the costs, both physical and social, of corporate crime can go unnoticed.

• Jeffery Reiman. 2008. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 6^th Edition. New York: Allyn & Bacon.
• Elizabeth Moore and Michael Mills. “The neglected victims and unexamined costs of white-collar crime,” Crime & Delinquency 36(3): 408-418.

Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has gained attention for his efforts to refocus the Catholic Church on issues of social justice. His recent visit to the U.S. was met with acclaim from religious leaders and political liberals, but also sparked consternation among cultural and political conservatives. U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), a Catholic himself, boycotted Francis’s address to Congress and accused him of adopting “socialist talking points presented to guilt people into leftist politics.”

The cultural divisions within American Catholicism exposed by Pope Francis’s visit are not new. While Gosar may be more vocal than most conservative Catholics, his protest reveals a split between interpretations of the Catholic faith that have been simmering for generations.

• Andrew Greeley. 1979. “The Sociology of American Catholics.” Annual Review of Sociology 5:91–111.

Mary Ellen Konieczny shows that the narratives American Catholics use to construct their religious identities have profound political consequences. Some congregations use the language of community to structure their worship, while others structure their activities around the concept of family. In parishes where community talk is dominant, social justice is usually the focus of ministry, but in congregations where family is the main narrative, concerns about personal and sexual morality get more attention. Neither model is more Catholic than the other: both types of congregations draw upon doctrines and use ritual practices central to the Catholic tradition. Hence, the variation Konieczny observes has less to do with texts or doctrines than with the ways people interact in group settings.

• Mary Ellen Konieczny. 2013. The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholics. Oxford University Press.

The ideological divide in Catholicism also has historical roots in the relationships between the papacy and states. Gene Burns argues that as European states liberalized in the 19^th century, Popes struggled to retain political influence for the church. Attempts to engage questions of poverty were seen as intrusions into government affairs, but through discussions of personal morality, the Church could carve out a space where its authority still dominated. As a result, the Church’s ideological emphases turned toward sexual morality and family issues, while sociopolitical concerns grew peripheral.

• Gene Burns. 1990. “The Politics of Ideology: The Papal Struggle with Liberalism.” American Journal of Sociology 95(5):1123–52.

The postwar period saw a revitalization of Catholic religious activity in the politics of economic justice. Jose Casanova shows how the Solidarity movement in Poland and letter-writing campaigns among American nuns after Vatican II helped to steer church activity back toward social justice work, and John O’Brien charts the influence of labor activist-priest George G. Higgins on Catholic social thought in the 20^th century.

• Jose Casanova. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
• John O’Brien. 2004. George G. Higgins and the Quest for Worker Justice: The Evolution of Catholic Social Thought in America. Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward.

Pope Francis’s return to social justice issues does not necessarily make him a “liberal” pope. We might better view him as interested in returning the Catholic church to a language of social justice, firmly rooted in Church history, despite being obscured by previous Popes’ focus on other issues.

In 2019, after this post was published, Ryan Adams was accused of engaging in a pattern of manipulative behavior including verbal, emotional, and sexual harassment. You can read more of this coverage here.  (Updated, October 26, 2022)

The release of Ryan Adams’ cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 resulted in a media frenzy about which album is “better” and who deserves credit for the “depth and complexity” that many say Adams brought to Swift’s poppier original. Some reviews argue Adams “vindicated” Taylor Swift as an artist; others argue that emotional depth was already present in Swift’s songwriting and reviews of Adams’ cover operate under gendered understandings of emotions and legitimacy in pop music. Many publications that reviewed Adams’ version did not review Swift’s original. Ironically, the albums will be competing for a Grammy this year, and many think Adams will take it over Swift. Sociological studies of popular music show how gender affects who gets credit for creativity in the industry.

Research finds that male musicians, regardless of genre, are more likely to receive critical recognition and be “consecrated” into the popular music canon. Women are less likely to be seen as “legitimate” artists and are more often judged on their emotional authenticity and connections with “more” legitimate, male artists. Further, newspapers and music critics are more likely to cover music written and produced by male artists.

• Vaughn Schmutz and Alison Faupel. 2010. “Gender and Cultural Consecration in Popular Music.” Social Forces 89(2): 685-707
• Vaughn Schmutz. 2009. “Social and Symbolic Boundaries in Newspaper Coverage of Music, 1955–2005: Gender and Genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.” Poetics 37(4): 298-314

Style doesn’t stem from the artist’s creative mind alone. Musical genres are gendered, as well as raced and classed. Industry norms require women and men to adopt different styles depending on the music genre in which they work. For example, women are more often expected to be sexual and/or emotional in their presentation of self and their music.

• Patti Lynne Donze. 2011. “Popular Music, Identity, and Sexualization: A Latent Class Analysis of Artist Types.” Poetics 39: 44-63.
• Diana Miller. 2014. “Symbolic Capital and Gender: Evidence from Two Cultural Fields.” Cultural Sociology 8(4): 462–482.

For more on gender in culture industries, check out this Discovery on fashion design.

With Apple Music’s launch and services like Spotify and Pandora going strong, music streaming is here to stay. Spotify recently released data on music preferences, giving us a new look into listeners’ lives. Metal rules over pop worldwide with the highest listener loyalty, especially with a tight-knit fan community. On the other hand, rigid genre boundaries may fade away as streaming listeners feel more comfortable trying just about anything. Demographics also matter; listeners “age out” of following popular music, and they do so much faster if they have children. Genres are more than labels on the shelf, though, and have more staying power when they represent social groups. Research shows these changes aren’t just about personal taste—social structure as a stronger effect.

We still use genre preferences to mark out a range of social boundaries. Education and political tolerance relate to “musical tolerance,” but people with these broad tastes are also more likely to say they don’t like music associated with uneducated fans (gospel, country, rap and metal).

• Bethany Bryson. 1996. “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes.” American Sociological Review. 61(5): 884-899

Streaming allows more listeners to quietly cross these boundaries, but fan subcultures remain powerful social groups that encourage devotion—and sometimes deviance. Genre preferences associate with different kinds of substance use, and loyalty to a community of fans can create a strong culture of sharing and collection that sustains music file-sharing.

• Mike Vuolo, Christopher Uggen, and Sarah Lageson. 2014. “Taste clusters of music and drugs: evidence from three analytic levels.” The British Journal of Sociology 65(3): 529-554.
• Kevin F. Steinmetz and Kenneth D. Tunnell. 2013. “Under the Pixelated Jolly Roger: A Study of On-Line Pirates.” Deviant Behavior 34(1):53–67.

Most importantly, genre hopping is not new. The way music marks class and status has changed since the 1980s. While high status listeners used to prefer particular genres, younger generations mark status by “omnivorous” music habits—consuming a wide range of popular and obscure tunes.

• Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61: 900-907.

You may have heard that Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover broke the Internet. The feature publicly introduced Caitlyn’s name and correct gender pronouns, as well as gender presentation. Within hours of the cover photo’s debut, Jenner’s new Twitter account amassed over one million followers, setting the record for the fastest growing Twitter account (knocking previous record-holder President Obama down to second).

The general public has varying attitudes about trans*, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, both as the LGBT group and as distinct identities. Sexual orientation, beliefs about sexuality, adherence to a binary conception of gender, religiosity, and personal contact with sexual and gender minorities best predict attitudes towards lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans* individuals, but also vary based on the distinct group(s) being considered. For example, heterosexual females are more likely to hold positive opinions about gay men and trans* individuals, but are also more likely to hold negative opinions about lesbians.

• Meredith G.F. Worthen. 2012. “Understanding College Student Attitudes Toward LGBT Individuals.” Sociological Focus 45(4):285-305.
• Aaron T. Norton and Gregory M. Herek. 2013. “Heterosexuals’ Attitudes Toward Transgender People: Findings from a National Probability Sample of U.S. Adults.” Sex Roles 68(11-12):738-753.

Though increasing visibility is promising, researchers argue that media representations and discourses of trans* people often still conform to a rigid gender binary that reinforces cultural norms of masculinity and femininity. Jenner’s style choices are already under the microscope, and media outlets are labeling her a “diva” for her Diane von Furstenburg-clad appearances in New York City.

• Kay Siebler. 2012. “Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries in the Digital Age.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 16(1): 74-99.
• Linda Kalof. 1993. “Dilemmas of Femininity: Gender and the Social Construction of Sexual Imagery.” The Sociological Quarterly 34(4):639-651.
• Catherine Connell. 2010. “Doing, Undoing, or Redoing Gender? Learning from the Workplace Experiences of Trans People.” Gender and Society 24(1):31-55.

Limiting the hype about Caitlyn’s cover to her newly revealed gender identity overlooks other reasons why her photo shows up on so many Facebook and Twitter feeds. People already know Jenner as a celebrity, and celebrities arguably fall into a special category when it comes to class, status, and power. Fame can heavily influence individual opinions, but those effects depend on the celebrity in question and a person’s context within the larger population.

• Arnout Van de Rijt, Eran Shor, Charles Ward, and Steven Skiena. 2013. ”Only 15 minutes? The social stratification of fame in printed media,” American Sociological Review78(2):266-289.
• Charles Kurzman, Chelise Anderson, Clinton Key, Yuon Ok Lee, Mairead Moloney, Alexis Silver, and Maria W. Van Ryn. 2007. “Celebrity Status,” Sociological Theory 25(4):347-367.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, states must legally recognize same-sex marriage nationwide. The fight for equality isn’t over, however, as many states do not have explicit protections for same-sex couples against practices like hiring discrimination. The Texas Attorney General also ruled that individual county clerks can refuse to offer marriage licenses to same sex couples on the grounds of their religious beliefs, even if the clerks’ office must ultimately grant the license. This is the challenge with nationwide legislation: laws on the books often differs from the law in action. History shows inequality can thrive in low level bureaucracy, sometimes in spite of national policy.

Policy changes take time to wind through organizations, especially those with large bureaucratic structures like the U.S. government. Autonomous managers in the middle construct their own reasons for adopting policies, often distancing themselves from big changes at the top of the chain. An institutional culture affects the implementation of a policy as much as the policy itself.

• Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton. 1998. “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions.” American Journal of Sociology 104(2): 441-476
• Bruce G. Carruthers. 1994. “When is the State Autonomous? Culture, Organization Theory, and the Political Sociology of the State.” Sociological Theory 12(1): 19-44

We can see these institutional boundaries in broader patterns of hiring discrimination against LGBT citizens that appear in experimental studies, even when employers don’t intend to discriminate. The history of federal regulation in immigration, the military, and welfare policies shows that the U.S. slowly built a bureaucratic system interested in measuring and controlling sexuality long before public battles over LGBT rights came on the scene.

• Margot Canaday. 2009. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton University Press
• András Tilcsik. 2011. “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States.”American Journal of Sociology 117(2):586–626.

Similar bureaucratic patterns happen around race. When the Supreme Court repealed laws against interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia, for example, mixed-race couples still faced clerks who were often unwilling to grant them licenses. While the GI Bill was a sweeping national effort in which many U.S. citizens got better housing and education, veterans of color often had trouble registering for those benefits in uncooperative local offices.

• Peggy Pascoe. 2009. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford University Press
• Ira Katznelson. 2006. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Co.

In mid May, the Pew Research Center released its Religious Landscape Study, using a sample of over 35,000 people to analyze the religious composition of the U.S. population. Some findings got significant media attention, especially one showing that an increase in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans coincides with a sharp decline in mainline Protestant and Catholic identification. Commentators disagree about what the results really mean; The Huffington Post announced that “America is Getting Less Christian and Less Religious,” while The Atlantic countered American religion is “complicated, not dead.”

Religion scholar Peter Manseau articulated a more nuanced take in the New York Times Sunday Review. He writes that since many of the religiously affiliated still believe in God or pray occasionally, the real trend is a move away from organized religion and toward more personal, private forms of spirituality. In this view, the story of religious change in America today is increasing pluralism, not declining religiosity. But is private, churchless spirituality really the same thing as religion? A small share of the unaffiliated population does fit into the mainstream culture of religious pluralism in the U.S., but this ignores the unique impact of both the decidedly nonreligious and the unique political causes of disaffiliation.

Individualism pervades the American religious landscape, from strict Catholic churches to urban Buddhist groups. Congregations rely on individualistic language and practices to develop religious commitments, and while this can lead to both progressive and orthodox forms of religious expression, it also contributes to the politicization of religion. Michael Hout and Claude Fischer argue that politicized religion repels many Americans, especially younger ones.

• Richard Madsen. 2009. “The Archipelago of Faith: Religious Individualism and Faith Community in America Today.” American Journal of Sociology 114(5):1263–1301.
• Michael Hout and Claude Fischer. 2014. “Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987-2012.” Sociological Science 1:423–47.

While many of the unaffiliated do believe in God, pray, or otherwise demonstrate some type of spiritual concern or commitment, but these “unchurched believers” comprise less than half of the unaffiliated population. Chaeyoon Lim, Carol MacGregor, and Robert Putnam find that only about 30% of the unaffiliated retain some aspects of religiosity, standing “halfway in and halfway out of a religious identity.” Their numbers are exceeded by atheists and agnostics who are decidedly nonreligious.

• Joseph O’Brian Baker and Buster Smith. 2009. “None Too Simple: Examining Issues of Religious Nonbelief and Nonbelonging in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48(4):719–33.
• Chaeyoon Lim, Carol Ann MacGregor, and Robert D. Putnam. 2010. “Secular and Liminal: Discovering Heterogeneity Among Religious Nones.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49(4):596–618.