Enough with the Nones?

Dating back to October, when the then most recent Pew Study came out, there has been increasing chatter about "The Nones" -- the perhaps 20% of respondents who told Pew that they were not part of organized religion in modern America.  Over those months, there has been growing clamor over what this means (Has decline of all religious institutions no set in?  Has secularization in the form of militant secular humanism now not just taken root in the United States, as it has in Europe, but also starting to bloom?), as well as (at times in a tepid manner, at times overtly) linking the Nones to the Millenials (and thus, crafting a narrative of the current and future decline of organized religion, or at least a lost generation).

But, as I and others have pointed out, maybe this narrative isn't quite what some (in particular as put forth in some sensationalistic journalistic accounts) have made it out to be.  Indeed, if you spend time with the Pew study, you quickly find that the Nones they focus on aren't anti-religious at all.  And for every story about the decline of a particular church, you also find many that are growing (and full of young families to boot).  One of the arguments I tried to make in The Mainline was that we focus, in American Religious History on decline that we often miss out on stories that don't fit that narrative (hence the importance of a new Mainline for the twenty-first century).

No sooner did my most recent post go up Saturday night (where it has helped the blog garner some attention in Latvia apparently -- Es ceru, ka kādu dienu mēs varam apspriest maģistrālēm, un salīdzināt amerikāņu reliģijas vēsturē ar to, kas ir nesalocītā Latvijā.) than Professor Rodney Stark entered the fray.  The Baylor University professor has a new book out in which he talks about polls such as the one Pew conducted and why it (and they) may very well be skewed against actually counting the religious voice of the nation.  You can read Stark's interview with St. John's University Law School's Center for Law and Religion Forum here.  It is well worth the read, and well worth thinking about when it comes to the Nones and everyone else.