The "nones" of 87 years ago

Most of the debates about the "nones" have had to do with interpretation. The question is, who are they? The question is, what does it mean?

A question that hasn't been so prominently raised is whether this new thing is really so new.

Charles Richter, of (Ir)religion in America, has turned up some evidence it's not. From the University of Illinois student newspaper in 1926, a letter from a student questioning the interpretations of a survey of university students' religious affiliations. According to the letter, only one student out of more than 10,000 identified as an atheist, but there were more than a few that were religiously unaffiliated.

The letter writer, who signs A.B.C, argues:

Shall we say that only one is an atheist and the rest are religious, but merely indifferent to church attendance, or shall we take into consideration the deadliness of Christian intolerance and admit that some of the 1,828 did not register as atheists for fear of ostracism? I am an atheist, but when I registered I did not admit that fact because I knew the registers would be made public, and some enthusiastic religionist might bring the information to the attention of the Great Christian Majority, to my discomfort.

There's a familiarity of this argument -- atheists need to "come out," and so on. This is a very contemporary debate, happening 87 years ago. While clearly the ranks of the unaffiliated have swelled since the days when less than two percent of university students said they didn't belong to any specific religion, the category of those who don't fit comfortably into a religious demographics survey, it turns out, is not new.

It's just that they didn't have a clever name for it in 1926.

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Understanding the "nones" as a demographic dissent

Some people are very uncomfortable with the category of race. Whether for personal, biographical reasons, they just feel like they don't fit any particular category, or for political or philosophical reasons, they get the US census at the beginning of every decade and balk at the question, What is this person's race?

This reticence, interestingly, does not show up in the final results. The final census doesn't list some small percentage of people as not having a race or as not having answered the question. This is because, as NPR recently reported:

When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.

A similar phenomena has happened with the new studies of religious demographics, where an increasing number of people have refused to answer the question, the now notorious "nones." Analysts have tried to interpret this response in various ways. The fundamental mistake that has been made, as I have argued, is to treat the people who answer the religious affiliation question this way as a unified group of people.

The problem may go deeper than that, though.



My interpretation of this group has been to insist on pluralizing the "nones," and talk about how cultural shifts have allowed for a new variety of ways to position oneself in relationship to religion. I.e., there are more people willing to self-identify as atheists and humanists, but there are also increased numbers of religious people who understand themselves to be religious but who aren't affiliated with any group, there are those who are affiliated but uncomfortable with public identification, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and so on.

When I have done that, though, I was still insisting on reading this group as defined in terms of ways of affiliating and belonging, as essentially being a complicated subset of a category but still, despite the complications, in that category of religious affiliation. Perhaps, though, that is what the "nones" object to.

Another way to understand this group is as objecting to religious classifications. Not strictly religious affiliations, though there's some of that, but to the project, in general, of religious demographics. 

Elizabeth Drescher, who I have criticized on this before, makes this point excellently in a recent piece, "None" means "None". After re-reading her more recent piece, and reflecting back on a point that Michael J. Altman made about the implicit problems of understanding the "nones" in terms of affiliation, I'm having to rethink my approach. It still seems fairly accurate, as far as it goes, but the unwieldy complication of the taxonomies of (dis)affiliation cause me to suspect I'm missing the point when someone says "none."

Drescher reports on one interview with a young "none" that's specifically enlightening in this regard:

When I asked if he would see himself as 'spiritual but not religious,' he rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically.  

'I don't want you to be thinking of me in terms of spirituality or religion,' he continued. 'Not my religion—if I have one—not your religion. These designations just should not be part of how we relate to each other no matter what we believe.' So, he eventually concluded, 'You can go ahead and call me ‘none.’ But only if you know I really mean "none" by that.'

The suggestion, I think, is quite interesting: rather than thinking of this group as religious in a specific way, might we not think of them as simply dissenting from the category?

Perhaps the "nones" aren't mainly to be thought of as religious or non-religious in a new or different way, but as a group that has a problem with the question, in much the same way that some protest self-identifying with a particular race.

Those people aren't themselves a new demographic, but rather are saying that they think the category is a problem.

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The faiths of Congress

From the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

The new, 113th Congress includes the first Buddhist to serve in the Senate, the first Hindu to serve in either chamber and the first member of Congress to describe her religion as “none,” continuing a gradual increase in religious diversity that mirrors trends in the country as a whole. While Congress remains majority Protestant, the institution is far less so today than it was 50 years ago, when nearly three-quarters of the members belonged to Protestant denominations.

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Culturally contested Christmas

A curious historical fact: the first people to work to "take the Christ out of Christmas," as it were, were not atheists, or crass materialists, or secularists/pluralists trying to diminish the role of Christianity in American culture. They were Protestants.

Protestants were very conflicted about Christmas in the 1800s.

For one thing, many were opposed to the "mass" part of Christmas, i.e., the Catholicism implicit in the holiday. If December 25 was a religious holiday, that seemed to mean accepting the Catholic tradition of the church calendar and the Catholic idea of tradition, the same tradition that led to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope and the church councils, and all the sundry things Protestants argued should be rejected because they're not in the Bible. The Bible which says nothing about a gift-giving solstice holiday.

At the same time, Protestants felt a strong impulse to take the cultural practice of the day -- the Christmas of the tavern, the Christmas of the department store -- and repurpose them as devotional practices.

This meant that they were at the same time critical of the non-religious celebrations of Christmas and leery of the religious celebrations too.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays:

Through much of the nineteenth century, the Christianization of Christmas was a quite fragile proposition, tentative and fragmentary. Every time a pastor tried to remind his congregation that Christmas was a solemn religious event that 'should be observed in the heart as well as at the hearth, in the temple as well as at the table,' he seemed to have to admit that the most visible observances of the season were 'rioting and vain amusement' -- shooting guns, callithumpian music, practical jokes, heavy drinking and the like. The churches were invariably hard pressed to communicate the devotional dimension of Christmas; the raucous plebeian version of the celebration always threatened to drown them out.

Confessedly, these Protestants in the Puritan mold were partially to blame for the sorry state of Christmas devotion in the colonial and antebellum worlds. The tradition of holiday purgation, long shared in by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and many Methodists, bequeathed a model of thorough desacralization that actually helped Christmas go its secular way in American culture. Time and again these Protestants insisted that Christmas was just like any other day, that it was without 'any peculiar sanctity.' At best, Christmas was an object of 'mistaken piety'; at worst it was the occasion of superstition and corrupt tradition. Given these presuppositions about the idolatry of the ancient church calendar, when low-church Protestant began their home-centered recovery of Christmas in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they often welcomed it back explicitly as a 'social holiday,'not as a 'religious observance.' As one Sunday School publication, the Baptist Teacher, editorialized in 1875, 'We believe in Christmas -- not as a holy day, but as a holiday.'

As has been regularly pointed out, the so-called "war on Christmas" is pretty specious. It is the case, though, that the meaning of Christmas is and has always been culturally contested. In its practice, this holiday is often conflicted, with multiple meanings, divergent rituals, discordant customs, and perpetually competing interpretations.

It's common today, for example, to find evangelicals at once upset that Christmas has been "commercialized" and that Wal-Mart clerks don't recognize the religious nature of the celebration in their standard customer greetings. This isn't a new thing, though; the conflict over what Christmas is has a long history. And it's not only the case of a conflict between the American Protestant majority and others, be they Catholic or non-religious. The conflict runs even through American Protestantism itself.

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