Razib Khan talks to Lyman Stone, a demographer, about the history and decline of religion in America. They discuss the rise of religious 'nones' and the decline of social conservatives in the Republican party. They explore the uniqueness of America's founding and the separation of church and state. They also delve into the decline in church attendance, religious behavior, and nominal religious affiliation in the US.
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America's Religious History
America was not a "church nation" at its founding, becoming more religious over time, peaking around the 1960s.
This contradicts common assumptions about America's religious history.
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Radical Disestablishmentarianism
America's disestablishmentarianism at its founding was radical, separating federal governance from explicit religious denominations.
This approach, driven by religious pluralism and concerns like those of Patrick Henry, was unique for its time.
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Socialization over Rationality
Lyman Stone suggests idiosyncratic socialization factors primarily shape religious beliefs.
Childhood environment and experiences outweigh rational arguments or competition in determining faith.
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Today Razib talks to Lyman Stone, a demographer and Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, about the fall, rise and fall of religion in America. In 2020, Stone published a report, Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline, where he outlined the demographic and religious history of the US, and its possible future. They first cover the historical context of American religion in the 18th century, reviewing the elite rise in secularism, the radicalism of the founding’s Disestablishmentarianism and the early 19th-century legislation against the mixing of church and state. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early 1800’s that the US combined religious pluralism on a social scale, high levels of personal piety and governmental secularism. This was a sharp break from European traditions, and Stone addresses the thesis whether this explains why America still remains much more religious in terms of observance than nations like England and Germany.
But despite America’s comparative religiosity, it has become much more secular in the last generation. Razib talks to Stone about the rise of the religious “nones” across the Western world, and the decline of social conservatives within the Republican party. Stone points out that for most, religious identity and level of practice are established during the teen years, with religious education (or lack thereof) being the biggest predictor of religious adherence (or lack thereof). The relative secularism of Zoomers and Millennials, Americans born after 1980, presages a much less Christian America as the 21st century’s first half progresses. But Stone argues that this is not necessarily the final state of American religiosity; secular America in 1800 underwent the Second Great Awakening, which led to a much more evangelical nation by 1900. Rather than a linear progress toward an end state, religious history seems cyclical.
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