Nonaffiliation and Socioeconomic Status

Abstract

As recently as only 15 years ago, sociologists of religion were declaring that secularization theory – the perspective that had dominated a previous era of scholarship in predicting the inevitable demise of religious belief in the face of growing pluralism and individualism – was outdated and empirically unable to explain the continued religious vitality witnessed among diverse religious communities throughout the world, particularly in the United States (Warner 1993). Some went so far as to proclaim, “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘ requiescat in pace ’” (Stark 1999: 270). The rise of a new tide of religious “nones,” however, began to attract empirical notice by the end of the 1990s (Hout and Fischer 2002), although scholars disagree about the significance of this shift (for a useful review, see Lim, MacGregor, and Putnam 2010). Ultimately dismissing secularization as an explanation, Hout and Fischer (2002) conclude that the growth of religious nonaffiliation, particularly among younger cohorts of Americans, represents a movement away from the organized religious bodies that Americans associated with conservative politics throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the new religious nonaffiliation is particularly noteworthy for its almost exclusively institutional dimensions. For example, Hout and Fischer (2002) find that most individuals who have no religious preference still have relatively stable levels of belief in God and are only slightly less likely to say that they pray than those who are religiously affiliated. The main difference between these nonaffiliated Americans and their religiously attached counterparts, therefore, is that the latter are actually members of a particular religious institution, claiming a relationship with an identifiable religious tradition.