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Choosing Our Religion
The Spiritual Lives of America's Nones
344 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9780199341221
- Published By: Oxford University Press
- Published: April 2016
$29.95
Every semester in my undergraduate courses at the University of San Diego, I task my students with completing an assignment called “Religion in the News.” The prompt is relatively simple: students are to pick a news article that has to do with religion in today’s world, write a short summary and analysis of it, and then present the article to the rest of the class for discussion. There are two things in particular that I like about this exercise. First, it helps students see that our class lessons have real, pragmatic application in understanding our contemporary world. Second, this assignment gives me insight into the sorts of issues, trends, and events that my students find interesting. Over the past year and a half, there has been one topic that students have gravitated toward more than any other: the rise of the religious Nones—those who select “none” as their religious affiliation—in the United States. Each time an article on this trend comes up in class, we inevitably land upon the same set of questions: What factors are driving some Americans to move away from historically prevalent forms of religious affiliation? Is this trend proof that the secularization thesis—which postulates that the rise of science and technology will lead to a decline in religious belief—is true? And, do human beings need religion in order to live moral and ethical lives? Elizabeth Drescher’s Choosing Our Religion provides the groundwork for much deeper and more interesting conversations about who Nones are and how they live their lives. Her book, which is based on narrative surveys with more than a thousand religiously affiliated and unaffiliated Americans as well as extended interviews with more than one hundred Nones from across the country, strives to paint a human portrait of this increasingly important demographic. In doing so, Drescher challenges many of the stigmas that currently exist against the religiously unaffiliated in the United States, such as notions that Nones are a homogenous group of atheists or that they lack moral and ethical frameworks. Two points that emerge in her work are particularly worth noting. The first is that there is a tremendous amount of diversity in how American Nones self-identify, which can include designations such as agnostic, secular humanist, spiritual-but-not-religious, and more (5). Drescher stays true to this complexity throughout her book by noting how each of her interviewees (sometimes confusingly) self-identified rather than forcing her research subjects into broader frameworks of classification. A second major contribution of this book is the manner in which it challenges the reader to think about how porous the boundaries between the affiliated and the unaffiliated can be (10). For example, chapter 7 centers around the ways in which Nones “pray,” which often bear striking resemblances to the practices of religiously affiliated individuals. In this way, Drescher’s project encourages the reader to imagine religion and religious identity in less binary ways. As she writes in her conclusion: “the None-ing of American is not a turn away from religion, but rather the emergence of multiple, sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging narratives of religious and spiritual experience that move through more diverse conceptions of what it means to be human and to be citizens of the nation and the world” (251). For those unfamiliar with current demographic trends surrounding Nones in America today, the first chapter of Drescher’s work contains a helpful overview and analysis of data. Drawing especially from recent surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the researcher notes that 23.9% of Americans say they have no religious affiliation (18) and that unaffiliation is on the rise among all racial, ethnic, gender, and other categories (20). Here, Drescher also points out that while the lived religion approach has enriched scholarly understandings of ordinary religious people and their everyday practices and beliefs, we have heretofore neglected to consider the everyday spirituality of non-religious persons (45). The subsequent chapters of the book seek to remedy this gap in our knowledge by tracing the paths that Nones followed to arrive at their current identities, the different resources (including teachings, writings, spaces, and modes of entertainment) and practices that Nones draw upon to enrich their lives, and more. Drescher’s writing foregrounds the voices of the Nones who she interviewed and her commitment to doing justice to their diverse, complex experiences is admirable. Scholars and educators who want to learn more about Nones’ ethics and morals will find chapters 6 and 7 particularly interesting. In the former chapter, Drescher illuminates the “care ethics” (184) of compassion, cooperation, empathy, and interdependency that characterize many Nones’ interactions with others; in the latter chapter, she analyzes the ways in which None parents inculcate spiritual curiosity and an ethics of care in their children. Choosing Our Religionis the first qualitative study of Nones in America and yet, as Drescher herself acknowledges, one book can “hardly map the whole of unaffiliated spirituality” (8). Consequently, Drescher’s work provides an excellent starting point for deeper conversations about the topics and dynamics that this book briefly introduces. For example, many of Drescher’s research subjects identify as former Christians; thus, future studies of Nones might engage individuals coming from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and other backgrounds. Or, given the rise of scholarship centered around material religion, subsequent projects could more thoroughly analyze the role of material objects in the spiritual lives of American Nones, which Drescher only touches upon in passing (114). Selections of this book could be effectively incorporated into undergraduate and graduate-level courses in religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. For example, chapter 4, which centers around the spiritual practices of Nones, would pair nicely with seminal works in the field of lived religion (by thinkers such as Meredith McGuire, Robert Orsi, and Nancy Ammerman) and chapter 5, about the role that prayer plays in Nones’ lives, could be taught alongside Tanya Luhrmann’s studies of Evangelical Christian prayer. Ultimately, Choosing Our Religionis a versatile, accessible, and novel text that lends much to our understanding of the complexity of religious and spiritual life in America today. Kate Yanina DeConinck is a Teaching Professor at the University of San Diego. Kate Y. DeConinckDate Of Review:April 10, 2018
Elizabeth Drescher is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. Her work on American spirituality has been published in numerous periodicals including America, Salon, Sojourners, and The Washington Post. She is also the authorTweet If You [Heart] Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation (2011) and co-author of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (2012).
Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones was published by Oxford University press in 2016. I spoke with the author, Elizabeth Drescher, at the AAR annual meeting in Boston in November 2017. – Troy Mikanovich, Assistant Editor
TM: Would you like to give me the quick pitch on what is your book about?
ED: Over the last ten years, and really more particularly the last five years, the culture in general has been more and more aware of people who are unaffiliated with religion: the so-called “nones.” And while that awareness has certainly been heightened, most people still don’t understand what a vast range of people are included in that category. People tend to assume that they are either “spiritual but not religious,” whatever that means, or that they are atheists, that they’re either “woo-woo” or godless. Media attention on the nones has tended to focus on young adults. But the fact of the matter is that there is incredible diversity among the nones. There are plenty of people who are fully indifferent to religion. They wouldn’t even identify as atheist or humanist; they’re just indifferent. And then there are people who are anti-religious, sometimes actually hostile to religion. Atheists, humanists, and secularists tend to fall into that category. Choosing Our Religion doesn’t cover all of that landscape, because I was really interested in the stories of people within that broad cohort of the nones who see spirituality as something that is meaningful in their lives. I was interested in understanding how they described what that meant for them—whether they believe in God, or a higher power, or a life force, or something like that, or whether they do not. The book really focuses on this narrower subset within the broader cohort, but it does take on the diversity of the unaffiliated in terms of age, geographic location, religious background, and so on..
TM: Do you see that as being a blind spot in the way we’ve talked about the nones so far?
ED: Yes, because I think that both in academic culture and more widely, the “unaffiliated” category has been conceived as more homogeneous than it is. Because of this, the nones become ciphers for different perspectives on either the implicit durability of religion, or the eroding of religion: the ultimate victory of the secularization thesis. I don’t think this is an intentional lacuna in the field. I think it’s a matter of simply having more people now who are willing to talk about where they are on the nonreligious-to-religious spectrum that is opening up this field of study.
TM: Did your findings lead you one way or the other in terms of the secularization debate? Do you see the group you’re looking at as giving evidence of the fragility of religion or of its enduring strength—or both or neither?
ED: This idea of the nones being markers for certain views of religion and secularity was so prevalent when I started the research on the book. The Pew study had just come out in the wake of the Obama election, and at that time, the nones were seen as a new political force, as representing some kind of new zeitgeist. On the one hand, you had Susan Jacoby in the New York Times saying (I’m paraphrasing here) that we should forget the spiritual-but-not-religious as evidence of a durable, if mutating, religiosity in America, that if you hold these people upside down and shake them, an atheist is going to pop out. They haven’t yet been able to accept their own identity as atheists, but soon they will. And on the other hand, you had people saying that the nones are all spiritual-but-not-religious: vapid, self-absorbed Sheilas (as described in Bellah’s book, Habits of the Heart) who are exploiting and thereby ruining religious and spiritual traditions.
But if you look at the nones in another way, they may be providing the space to see that religion is becoming something other than what scholars have said it is, or what people in religious institutions have said it is. If this is the case, then it’s not a matter of saying that the nones are abandoning religion. Some of the people I interviewed identified as atheist or secularist or humanist, but they saw spirituality as something that hearkened to the human spirit or the planetary spirit, and they felt it needed to be cultivated and nurtured. To use the language of one of the people that I interviewed, spirituality needed to be “reclaimed from religious people.” There were also people I interviewed who looked to me like Christians. They used Christian language, they loved Jesus, they talked about Jesus with other people. But they refused to call this “religion” or “Christianity” in any conventional institutional sense. They insisted that they could define for themselves what it was. I think that all of this together says that, if we take seriously what people are saying about their own lives and experiences and understandings of them, religion and spirituality are becoming something other than what we’ve been looking at for a very long time.
TM: What’s the most interesting aspect of the “rise of the nones” for you? The fact that it’s an element of contemporary religion? Its trajectory in the history of American religion? Or its relevance for how we study religion?
ED: All of it! As a scholar, I’m really interested in where the subject of my research—religion—is moving in the world, so I’m very interested in what the unaffiliated are telling us about what religion is and what it does. If you are an agnostic or an atheist who says that you pray on a regular basis, that would indicate that that language is meaningful for you, that it’s capacious, that it holds a range of emotional and relational experience that doesn’t fit in other words that we have in the lexicon. If you claim that, and you use that, and you share it, and that term transfers across the culture, what does that say about what prayer is? What does it mean if prayer has no reference to a supernatural being? That’s interesting to me as a scholar of religion.
Also, at least in the United States, where I did my study, religion has done all sorts of social, cultural, and political work in the world, most of it in institutional forms. Whether you’re a fan of religion or not, its institutional structure is being changed dramatically. So, then, there’s a question for those institutions, given their various commitments: How do they enact their mission in the world in different ways? It’s important for people in religious leadership to be paying attention to what religion and spirituality and faith are becoming, not by way of drawing back or capturing the nones, or any of these hostile, colonializing terms that are often used, but by way of understanding that your stock in trade is no longer what you thought it was.
TM: How did you acquire your data?
ED: I did a large survey, and I did several focus groups. I had a couple thousand people involved in that. It wasn’t depth data. There was some narrative data in the survey, and of course in the focus groups as well, and that helped me start to shape an idea of what practices were included in the spirituality of the nones. That data also helped me identify people I might interview. That was the starting point for my interview pool. Ultimately, I interviewed a little more than a hundred people across the country. In broad demographic terms, in terms of gender, ethnicity, and race, it’s a fairly representative group, but it’s still only a hundred people. I mean, I’ll let my hundred people stand up to anybody else’s hundred people, but it’s still a hundred people. Because of the way that people came into my research pool through the survey and through my own professional and to some extent personal networks, the group probably skews at a higher class level than the population in general. People with less than a college degree are not well represented in the study. I think it’s really important that there be more research on what being a none means across class categories, and I didn’t explore that in the book. There are also differences in racial categories. For a long time there has been—and still is—this pervasive narrative that African Americans are just more religious than whites, and that’s seeming to not be true. The Pew data is showing that.
TM: As you mentioned earlier, the nones are something of a constructed group. It’s a box. There’s nothing “real” about the group as it’s been constructed. Did the people you interviewed ever talk about all the attention that the nones were getting? Did they actively identify with that definition?
ED: When I first started doing the research for this book, I used long hyphenated terms to talk about the nones, and to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about nuns, the sisters in the habits. The first couple years that I was doing research, I constantly had to define what I was looking at. Then after the 2012 Pew report, people got it. They would come to me and say, “I’m a none, I’m absolutely that.” One of the women I interviewed said, “I was so relieved when all the stuff about nones came out because then I had a category.” I had a case where an Episcopal priest was really furious about the language of nones. She was concerned that scholars and demographers were assuming that people were spiritually vacuous, but among the folks that I interviewed, generally speaking they thought that there was space in that word that there isn’t in words like “atheist” or “humanist.” There’s something nice about having a constructed category to hold all of these people. You can define it however you want, and you’re going to be defined by others in various different ways, but you’re not going to have to argue with people about Locke and Hume, and you don’t have to have a God’s eye or patchouli candles all over. You can hold that space for yourself. I think people found a lot of freedom in letting go of what were often very pejorative labels like the “unchurched,” “heathens,” or “pagans,” and being able to say, “No, I’m in a space where I’m not religious. I’m a none, and that’s OK.”
TM: Who is not at this conference that you think would really benefit from reading your book?
ED: As I said before, I think that people in religious leadership who are trying to understand what religion is today from the perspective of the people who seem to be most actively defining it in American culture could learn a lot from these stories. I get feedback from people in organizations that are nonreligious—atheist or humanist groups—who said that this is a slice of who we are. They especially like the chapters that deal with ethics and the rearing of children. My research makes clear that it’s perfectly possible to be an atheist and not be out boosting cars or shoplifting at an early age, and that your children are not inevitably going to grow up to be serial killers. I think that it’s been meaningful for those communities to have scholarly testimony to that.
TM: Is there anything else that you wanted to mention about your book?
ED: I think the most powerful through line for me in this research was that while we’re looking at where the dial is on religion and secularism in the United States, there really is a pronounced, developing baseline of a new kind of religious and spiritual cosmopolitanism that is developing. I think that cosmopolitanism, as much as anything else, is shaping what religion and spirituality are today. So, I think that’s certainly where my attention is focusing next in my own work. What does it mean to be religious in a cosmopolitan landscape? I think the nones are starting to tell us what that looks like.