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14 March 2023

6 min read

The Cold War, the Internet and America’s nones

How does a culture lose religion so rapidly? Stephen Bullivant investigates the American phenomenon of ‘nonversion'.

Stephen Bullivant

Stephen Bullivant is a professor of theology and sociology at St Mary’s University, UK, and the University of Notre Dame, Australia.

Those even passingly familiar with American religious trends over the past couple of decades will have read or heard the phrase ‘rise of the nones’ countless times. And with good reason. While in Britain the proportion of people telling pollsters they have ‘no religion’ grew rapidly over the twentieth century – it was already 43% when the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983; it tipped 50% a little over a decade later – in America the figure stayed stubbornly low. According to Gallup polls, only 5% of American adults identified with no religion in 1975. Twenty years later, in 1995, it was still 5%.

But then, seemingly very suddenly, things started to change. Beginning in the late nineties, then rapidly accelerating in the early 2000s, each new survey showed the nones getting bigger and bigger. Depending on which survey one looks at, nones now account for somewhere between a quarter and third of American adults. Even at the lower end, that amounts to some 60 million people. And they’re still growing.

This raises a natural question: Why now? Or rather, what is it about the nineties and early 2000s that pushed or pulled large swathes out of thinking of themselves as religious? Various ways of measuring American religiosity all indicate that something significant must have happened around then. But what?

A prior, deeper puzzle

That, at least, is the obvious way of approaching things. And to be fair, it has much to recommend it: something, or rather a combination of somethings, certainly did happen to American religion in those critical years. But this in itself raises a prior, deeper puzzle: why hadn’t the numbers of American nones already risen before the late nineties or early naughts? In all manner of other, quasi-comparable countries – Britain, Canada, Australia, France – the nones started growing steadily from the 1960s onwards. Yet while the sixties had all manner of other disruptive and destabilizing effects on American culture, society, politics, and religion, the proportion of nones grew only a little bit, then stopped.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, if one were to look for a sufficiently big ‘something’ within American society, mostly absent from those other countries, which could plausibly have kept non-religiosity artificially low in these decades, then there is an obvious candidate: the Cold War. Or more specifically, the precise and peculiarly religious way in which it was framed in the USA.

A final, all-out battle

We Brits were as up to our neck in the Cold War as anyone. But only in America, I think, was the Cold War ever popularly framed as a “final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity”, to quote Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Remember too that it was only in the mid-1950s that Congress adopted “In God We Trust” as America’s official motto, and “under God” was added to the Pledge. During the Pledge debates in Congress, the Democrat Louis C. Rabaut’s summed up a common view on both sides of the aisle:

“You may argue from dawn to dusk about differing political, economic, and social systems but the fundamental issue which is the unbridgeable gap between America and Communist Russia is a belief in almighty God.”

This wasn’t just an issue with wide bipartisan and popular support view, it was thoroughly ecumenical too. While McCarthy and Rabaut were Catholics, it was a Presbyterian president, Eisenhower, who signed the “under God” bill into law. As Eisenhower himself put it during his 1952 election campaign:

“What is our battle against communism if it is not a fight between anti-God and a belief in the Almighty?”

Embellishing the city on a hill

It was also during the Cold War that presidents began likening America to the biblical “city built on a hill” – all the better positioned, one presumes, to scour the horizon for incoming Soviet missiles. Kennedy was the first US president to use it. Reagan, adding his own embellishment of “shining,” would make it his, and many of his countrymen’s, own. Taken together, all this helped lay down a deep, implicit association between being un-religious and being un-American. Atheism itself bore the brunt of this, but it more generally ruled out associated ideas and identities – including thinking of oneself as having “no religion” – as live options for the great majority of Americans.

Riven fault lines

Meanwhile, the cultural fault lines that begin obviously opening up in the late sixties – gender equality, sexual liberation – kept on widening, with new generations socialized into ever more liberal baselines. This created a growing values gap between traditional Christian views and the wider mainstream culture, on topics that were very personal to, and thus felt very deeply by, people on all sides. This meant that, while churches tended to be most visible on the 'conservative side' of various battlegrounds, they were also often deeply riven by internal versions of the same debates. Not surprisingly, church attendance, at least within Catholic and mainline churches, started falling steadily in the seventies and (except where immigration has helped fill the pews) has never really stopped.

The Internet of ideas and identities

On this basic account – and there is much that could be, and elsewhere has been, added to it – the thawing of the Cold War is obviously significant. Note that it is the Millennial generation, only the youngest of whom are able to remember the Cold War (and even then mostly from holiday reruns of Red Dawn and Rocky IV), who were at the vanguard of the rise of the nones. They were also the first generation to be true digital natives, opening many of them up to a much wider range of ideas and identities than hitherto available. This has been especially effective at chipping away the walls of some of America’s stronger religious subcultures. My ex-Mormon interviewees, especially, cite “the wonderful thing called the internet” as being “the game-changer”.

Serious discussion and South Park

The Millennials started coming of age, and indeed responding to pollsters’ surveys, in the early 2000s. This was also around the time when, arguably for the first time since maybe the hugely popular writer and speaker Robert “The Great Agnostic” Ingersoll a century before, unbelief was being seriously discussed everywhere from primetime talkshows to episodes of South Park. The bestselling books of the New Atheists – principally Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens – evidently hit upon some long pent-up demand. They were also, significantly here, able to position atheism, and 'no religion' more generally, as a panacea for a world awash with religion. Harris, for example, makes much of how he started writing The End of Faith on September 12^th. Dawkins made no secret about his wanting to run adverts with an image of the Twin Towers and the tagline “Imagine no religion…”.

Cultural space opens

Whatever one makes of such arguments, similar rhetorical moves would have had less intuitive appeal to earlier American generations, learning to duck and cover from atheists’ H-bombs: the stuff of Americans’ nightmares were now those with too much religion, rather than not enough. While the long term impact of the not-so-New Atheism is hard to judge – many nones are keen to distance themselves from what they saw as its “dogmatism” and “extremism”, even while agreeing with much of it – it certainly helped open up ‘cultural space’ for being both American and non-religious that the Cold War had (outside of various enclaves, such as college towns and certain big cities) largely sealed shut. As we have seen, it is one that a good quarter of American adults are quite comfortable placing themselves within.

So yes, new somethings indeed happened in the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first: and these helped drive the uptick of nones. But these happened at the same time as the none-inhibiting effects of a much earlier something had more or less worn off, especially among the emerging generations most affected by the new somethings. It is this combination of factors— akin to pulling one foot off the brake as you slam the other down on the accelerator— that explains quite why the nones rose so suddenly and (seemingly) out of nowhere.

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Politics

Virtues

27 September 2024

8 min read

The emerging frontier: renewing courage in geopolitics

Narcissistic moralising needs to stop, and we can learn from Churchill too.

Emerson Csorba and Gal Treger

Emerson writes on geopolitics. Gal is a tech investor.

Military personnel, wearing camoflague uniform crowd round a computer monitor.

U.S. Space Force guardians assess a threat.

U.S. Space Force.

In August 1939, the Polish poet Kazimierz Wierzyński reflected on a “Peaceful bliss which had become Europe’s chloroform.” Yet, then as now, crises shake us from moments of calm, especially when we abandon vigilance. We let our guards down, nonchalance replacing serious deliberation toward action.

A shroud of darkness has descended on the world over recent years, with new conflicts emerging just as – or perhaps because – democratic populations turn inward. These conflicts – whether the Russia-Ukraine War, the Israel-Gaza War, or the US-UK led battles in the Red Sea – demonstrate the courage of peoples sacrificing for their nations, families, histories, and traditions.

Yet, in much of the political West, narcissism – rather than courage – has become the focal point of our culture.

Christopher Lasch describes this narcissism in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations as a conceit of the present. Lasch notes that we have become a consumer society focused on individual self-absorption that leads to present-focus, sense of isolation, and disconnection from history.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argues in The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil that narcissism is an attachment to “self-image,” which “distorts rational judgment.” Yet, Fromm later reflects “If the feeling which the Greek poet expressed in Antigone’s words, ‘There is nothing more wonderful than man,’ could become an experience shared by all, certainly a great step forward would have been taken.”

This wonder of man is in the freedom to act in a world that is yet to be determined.

This is a position of “deep faith.” It encourages full participation in the world, affirming the self through action, though always in relation to something much greater.

The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich similarly states “this is just what participation means: being a part of something from which one is, at the same time, separate. Literally, participation means ‘taking part,’ in the sense of ‘sharing’ or ‘having in common.’” We play, as legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne once said, "For everyone that came before us, and everyone that will come after us."

If common history is needed as our foundation for current action in geopolitics, to what then might we turn?

We propose a refocusing and modern renewal of alliances underpinned by Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a project he initiated in the early 1930s as the threats of Nazism and Fascism had taken centre stage.

This refocusing reprioritises courage in geopolitics, maintaining the light amid descending darkness. It is badly needed given the modern tendency to look inward rather than to sources of value outside of the self.

This is a pathway to vigilance in anticipation of the thief in the night, who may arrive at an unexpected hour.

Churchill – recently demonised by influential conspiracy theorists – emphasises the common cultural and political heritage of the English-Speaking Peoples, including the rule of law, individual rights and parliamentary democracy, which shaped the modern world.

Churchill reminds us of the global influence of English-Speaking Peoples in spreading democratic ideals and governance structures across the world, believing that the global spread of these ideas was instrumental in shaping modern life. He underscores the unity of the English-Speaking Peoples in facing global challenges, particularly in the context of the World War he foresaw. And he viewed the cooperation between the UK, the US, and other Allied nations as crucial to the survival of freedom and democracy.

It is important, now as much as ever, that we remind ourselves of Churchill’s wise words, building on them to address with courage the challenges of our present times.

Specifically, we must adapt Churchill’s emphasis on the English-Speaking Peoples to a focus on nations working at the frontiers of Western civilisation to resist rising darkness which seeks to corrupt the good. Ones not necessarily actually speaking English too.

Building on these unique and complementary strengths, these agile nations united as upholders of the values of English-Speaking Peoples should reindustrialize, rearm, redraft and recommit to a common goal in a world of increasing geopolitical conflict.

The sharing of expertise and overall close collaboration between these agile nations can facilitate rapid preparation for conflict at any moment, proactively addressing Wierzyński's dangerous “peaceful bliss.”

In other words, this is a pathway to vigilance in anticipation of the thief in the night, who may arrive at an unexpected hour.

Renewed partnership is necessary between these nations. There is a need for these nations to re-assert their historical courage, underpinned by vital modern capabilities.

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Alongside the United States as the focal point, these nations are Canada on the Arctic frontier; the United Kingdom as a Northern frontier; Poland as the Eastern frontier; Israel as the Southeastern frontier towards the Eurasian landmass, and Australia, with its recent experiences confronting neighbour China, on the Far East frontier.

Each of these nations serves as a regional center of power and influence: Canada in the Arctic and Atlantic; the US into the Caribbean and broader Latin America; Israel in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords and North Africa; Poland into Central and Eastern Europe, and Australia in the Indo-Pacific. Each of these nations possesses vital agility, given their small geographical sizes or populations.

These frontier nations respond to United States CIA Director William Burns’ 2023 Ditchley Lecture, in which he focused on “[hedging middle power countries who] see little benefit and lots of risk in monogamous geopolitical relationships. Instead, we’re likely to see more countries pursue more open relationships than we were accustomed to over several post-Cold War decades of unipolarity.” The focus here is courage with a long-term view, building a frontier-focused alliance rather than seeking relations based on short-term material interest only.

In this frontier model, it is currently Israel demonstrating the courage to uphold the values captured in Churchill’s account of the English-Speaking Peoples. Hamas’ brutal October 7th attack was predicated on the notion that over the last decades, Israel transformed into a consumer society, focused on short-term economic incentives and leisure pursuits. Israel provides technology and experience in fighting modern wars of various types, as well as persistence and proactiveness that other nations must quickly recover.

Canada is historically a frontier nation of courage, reflected for instance in its contributions to WWI and WWII victories, as well as in the often-quiet contributions that Canadians make to peacekeeping efforts across the globe. But Canada can take bolder action, given its strategic Northern location and proximity to the Arctic, with its vast natural resources including critical minerals supply and its vast freshwater reserves. It can become a more influential global player amid trade wars, helping reduce dependence on Chinese resources.

The United Kingdom’s combination of common law, property rights, financial markets and freedom of the press are important strengths. As Nigel Biggar finds in his Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, the UK has historically championed free markets generating economic opportunities for diverse peoples; established peace where internal strife previously existed, protected the rural poor from wicked landlords, and provided civil service and judiciary systems to reduce corruption.

Poland, as noted by Radoslaw Sikorski in a recent speech, shares with the United Kingdom “the same strategic vision. It is based on the fundamental assumption that international law is the guardian of peace and stability.” Poland also “consistently supports close, comprehensive cooperation between the UK and the EU’s security and defence frameworks” with continued focus on strengthening its military capabilities. And, of course, Poland is keenly aware of the threat of war which which is ever-present on its border.

Australia has, over the last decade, demonstrated evident success in facing the threat of China on its doorstep, this ever-present threat producing a group of leaders across government, private and media sectors that are as sharp, worldly and realist in nature as any in the Commonwealth.

Renewed partnership is necessary between these nations. There is a need for these nations to re-assert their historical courage, underpinned by vital modern capabilities. C.S. Lewis, in his famous Screwtape Letters, shows that “courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” Each of these frontier nations has historically demonstrated success in the face of testing.

Our focus cannot be narcissistic moralising – too often the case in today’s geopolitics – which is the product of the serpent’s advice in the Garden of Eden, in which our eyes will be opened as we “become as gods knowing good and evil.” We must not allow others to twist our sense of history, such that we begin to exalt ourselves in the present moment rather than adopting attitudes of service, sacrifice and worship of that which is unfathomably greater and farther-reaching.

Instead, it must be – as we have seen with Churchill, and as described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his incredible commentary on the story of the Garden of Eden, to act.

As Bonhoeffer writes, “If the Holy Scripture insists with such great urgency on doing, that is because it wishes to take away from man every possibility of self-justification before God on the basis of his own knowledge of good and evil… The error of the Pharisees, therefore, did not lie in their extremely strict insistence on the necessity for action, but rather in their failure to act. ‘They say, and do not do it.’”

The frontier model we propose facilitates such action, prepared with the necessary capabilities and coordination for the considerable challenges before us.

We must remember that to participate in the world with deep faith – courage – has been and always will be the basis for human freedom.

Indeed, this is the task of the nations: united by the common heritage of English-Speaking Peoples, acting with faith in the good, always at the frontier.