Decline of the Fundamentalists - How the 'Nones' are Taking Back US Politics for Democracy

Americans who aren't sure about God are a fast-growing force in politics – and they're typically even more politically active than white evangelicals

GSS study showing increase in American rious “Nones”
('Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion).

With the raucous jabber of evangelicals drowning out other, quieter, more measured voices in American politics, a non-American like me could be forgiven for thinking they are the major force in US politics, and they have had some, hopefully short-term, successes such as getting Trump elected in 2016 and him then stuffing SCOTUS with right-wing Christian extremists who promptly overturned Roe vs Wade. But there are more measured and thoughtful voices also beginning to exert a moderating and humanitarian influence, especially in the Democratic Party. They are the growing number of 'Nones', or people with no religious affiliations.

Of course this include Atheists/Agnostics, but it also includes people for whom religion is a personal thing that doesn't require affiliation to any one organised religion, although studies have shown that 'None' tends to be a half-way house between religious and Atheist as the loss of group affiliation tends to free the individual to look dispassionately at the (lack of) evidence, free from peer-pressure, and draw the rational conclusion - there is no evidential reason for religious belief.

The evidence is that the 'Nones' could have been behind Biden's win in 2020, helping to secure swing states, since 1 in 5 Americans adults and more than 1 in 3 Democrat voters are now 'None', and since 'Nones' tend to be generally more informed, it would be surprising if they weren't having an effect on US politics.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University, USA, gives his assessment of the impact the 'Nones' are now having on American politics. The original article can be read here:

LGBTQ News - More People Rejecting Religious Dogma and Self-Identifying as Gay

LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate

A Gallop poll surveying the number of American adults now self-identifying as gay illustrates the penetration of humanist ideals of tolerance, acceptance and freedom from the stigmatisation that religion inflicts on people, as they increasingly reject organised religions in an increasingly secular society.

Hopefully, the charts I have made from the data hop speak well enough for themselves, but perhaps the most noticeable aspect is how the younger the adults are the more likely they are to self-identify as gay. This is entirely consistent with other data which shows a marked correlation between age and rejection of organized religions, with the younger adults far more likely to self-identify as 'None' or non-affiliated. Very may of these will of course be Atheists or Agnostics.

It is clear that religions are losing their grip on Americans just as surely as they lost their grip on post-war Europeans, and no longer have ownership of the institution of marriage for example with even most 'moderate' Christian churches still opposed to the idea of same-sex marriages. Perhaps this is the explanation for the unedifying spectacle of the evangelical Christian abandonment of any pretence of morality in their desperate support for the odious, morally bankrupted Donald J. Trump and the sniff of political power and influence he gave them, amounting at time to hysterical, messianic worship.

Fall in US Religious Affiliation is Accelerating

U.S. Church Membership Down Sharply in Past Two Decades.

A second poll in a few days has confirmed the sharp, and accelerating, decline in religious affiliation in the USA. Now only 50% of Americans identify themselves as belonging to any particular church, synagogue or mosque, compared to 68% or more between 1937 and the 1990s.

This fell by only 2% between the 1970s and 1990s, but in the last 20 years the decline has accelerated massively to 20% with more than half of that in the ten years up to 2018. Projecting this accelerating trend forward, religious affiliation in the USA should be below 30% within the next 15-20 years.

The 'Nones' Take The Lead in USA

'Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion.

Survey: As many Americans claim no religion as there are evangelicals, Catholics - CNN.

The 'nones' are winning.

Within a few days of one another, we have two major opinion surveys by respected organisation, both showing a huge and growing movement away from religious belief, especially Christianity, towards having no religion. Last week we saw a 46% increase in no belief in the UK between 2011 and 2018 and now we hear that the largest single demographic in the USA is the 'none', who have overtaken the Catholics and evangelicals for the first time.

This latter survey was released last month but has only just found it way into the mainstream news media.

Unreasonable Faith - Robert G. Ingersoll

Why is Robert G. Ingersoll not better known in America, or the rest of the world, for that matter? He wrote and spoke with such power and passion, and regard for truth and honesty above all, that his writing is a joy to read, more lyrical even than that of Thomas Paine and worthy of Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Here he is delivering a 'Thanksgiving Sermon'. This is a cut-down version; the full sermon can be read here.

A THANKSGIVING SERMON.

MANY ages ago our fathers were living in dens and caves. Their bodies, their low foreheads, were covered with hair. They were eating berries, roots, bark and vermin. They were fond of snakes and raw fish. They discovered fire and, probably by accident, learned how to cause it by friction. They found how to warm themselve — to fight the frost and storm. They fashioned clubs and rude weapons of stone with which they killed the larger beasts and now and then each other. Slowly, painfully, almost imperceptibly they advanced. They crawled and stumbled, staggered and struggled toward the light. To them the world was unknown. On every hand was the mysterious, the sinister, the hurtful. The forests were filled with monsters, and the darkness was crowded with ghosts, devils, and fiendish gods.

These poor wretches were the slaves of fear, the sport of dreams.

The Outsider Test Of Faith

Faith - the sure and certain way to tell that all other faiths are wrong.

The Outsider Test Of Faith:

John W. Loftus' challenge to believers to apply the same test they use for other faiths to their own:

If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim right now, say it isn't so? That is a cold hard fact. Dare you deny it? Since this is so, or at least 99% so, then the proper method to evaluate your religious beliefs is with a healthy measure of skepticism.

Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating. If your faith stands up under muster, then you can have your faith. If not, abandon it, for any God who requires you to believe correctly when we have this extremely strong tendency to believe what we were born into, surely should make the correct faith pass the outsider test. If your faith cannot do this, then the God of your faith is not worthy of being worshipped.

To this I would add:

• If you were born in Madrid, New York, Rome or Kansas you would almost certainly be Christian.
• If you had been born in first century BCE Jerusalem you would be Jewish.
• If you had been born in fifth century BCE Greece you would believe in the Greek pantheon.
• If you had been born in pre-WWII Japan you would be Shinto.

Wherever and whenever you were born you would almost certainly have the same faith as your parents.

Unless, that is, you had applied exactly the same standard to your parents' faith as you have to all the others. If you had, you are very unlikely to have any faith at all because, like every other faith, yours has no evidential basis and so would fail John W. Loftus' Outsider Test Of Faith.

In fact, if you were honest, you would admit that you have never really even thought about the other gods and other faiths, let alone applied any of the tests you just assume someone else must have made when they accepted your faith and rejected all the others.

If you disagree, please show your reasoning:

Hint: Arguing that all the other faiths must be wrong because yours is right won't work because that could be used with equal non-validity by all the others.

Debunking Christianity: The Outsider Test.....:

'via Blog this'

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The Agnostic Hypothesis

The Agnostic view of gods is that, while there may be no evidence for them, this does not prove their non-existence; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You cannot prove a negative therefore you cannot prove non-existence.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, the same case can be made for any possible notional idea. The universe of all possible 'truths' is bounded only by the limitations of human imagination. For example, you may imagine your loft to be full of scientifically undetectable hippos.

The Agnostic purist would argue that the hypothesis that this proposition is not true cannot be proven and so we must allow for the possibility that your loft is indeed full of invisible, weightless, odourless hippopotami. Indeed, it would be dishonest, even bigoted, to argue that the idea is nonsense; that there are absolutely no undetectable hippos, in your loft.

Despite the absurdity of the conclusions to which this this argument can lead, it seems, on the face of it, a logical, irrefutable and intellectually honest position to adopt. Certainly you can't prove a negative, so is the Agnostic right to believe that there may indeed be lofts full of undetectable hippos, and there may be gods, even the Abrahamic god of the Jews, Moslems and Christians, and their various offspring sects? Is it right to take the view that those who DO believe those things MAY be right and that their beliefs can't be challenged with science?

But hold on a minute; are we really seeking here to do the impossible and prove a negative? Isn't there an assumption underlying the Agnostic argument that any notional idea MAY have a physical reality? Aren't Agnostics assuming something positive which they must prove, and which IS falsifiable in a scientific manner?

Are they not assuming that there is some mechanism by which anything which can be imagined by the human brain can leave that virtual world of human imagination and gain physical reality?

If so, their claim becomes a positive, testable hypothesis which can be falsified by science.

If not, then what exactly is the basis of the assumption that any proposition which can be dreamt up MAY have a physical reality, the possibility of which should be acknowledged?

So, a challenge for Agnostics: establish by science that this transfer mechanism exists and the human mind can create physical reality by thought alone, and you have proven the underlying assumption behind agnosticism. The test will require you to demonstrate repeatable instances of a physical reality brought into existence by thought alone, which did not pre-exist your imagining it.

I await the result with interest.