Nones and Spirituals: Update from a College Survey

by Gary Berg-Cross

Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture recently emailed an online survey to about 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country.This is the group that release the the September 2009 report called  American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population (based on the American Religious Identification Survey 2008).  

They have followed up this with a new survey analysis (drawn from the larger ongoing American Religious Identification Survey, the 2013 National College Student Survey but conducted in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry - Yea!), that had a pretty broad swath questions about  spiritual/non-spiritual, political and moral values. These ranged from belief in God and worship attendance, which was an obvious focus, to climate change and same-sex marriage. And as one might expect these allowed a search for some correlated  patterns between opinions.

The survey asked some simple what-kind-of-person-are-you-questions such as:

   “In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person?

Notice the inclusion between religious and secular of an in-between category of  "spiritual". These are not so much church-mosque or temple goers, and may not believe in a personal God, but in a "higher beyond-the-natural power." They might seek a spiritual experience but not in a temple. They are big on homeopathy, faith healing, numerology, astrology, amulets, etc. Only 1% or so of Mormons & Muslims fall into the spiritual group.

The gross result is that interviewees pretty evenly divided between the 3 categories:

About a third, (32%), relied as true religious believers. Another 32% or are spiritual but not religious. And 28% consider themselves secular.  Yes, it doesn't add up to 100% so there are as many "none of the above or others" as there are any of the main triad. 

This survey provides some update on the rise of what these authors had earlier popularized as the “nones,” or people when asked what religion they belonged to replied 'none'. This is generally expressed negatively as is a-theist so they are described as "unaffiliated" that is lacking in affiliation -alas how these things are framed.

 In this survey update more light is shed on the majority (2/3rd) of the nones who fall into the secular grouping (yep the other third say they are "spiritual"). As the authors report:

“This finding is a challenge to the notion that the Nones are just ‘religiously unaffiliated’ or religious searchers who have not yet found a religious home. This survey clearly revealed that today’s students with a Secular worldview, who are mainly Nones, are not traditional theists.”

And the Nones seem to  be the growing faction of students they have doubled in recent decades which is even more than self identified atheists.

It is interesting that the authors make much of the in-between category of spiritual. Spirituals are mid-way between Religious and Secular in believing in miracles or the afterlife. It's something like an 80 to 40 to 8% belief from Religious to Spiritual to Secular.  They have some leaning on the supernatural - 44% accept the existence of spiritual beings like angels. Outside of the religious category female students are more likely to be spiritual while male students are secular. Well it turns out that they are not a simple middle ground on all things and it gets interesting when we leave typical Christian belief and add ideas from other religions.  Take the idea of reincarnation.  The students who say they are religious don't much believe in it (9%), but Spirituals are twice as likely to believe in such things (21%). OK, I can imagine this mixed dating of male seculars with female spirituals.  It happened in my day too and the relation to political beliefs sounds familiar too:

"Some 44 percent of seculars dubbed themselves as liberal, 20 percent as progressive, and only four percent as conservative. Among spirituals, 11 percent identified as conservative, 17 percent as moderate, and 35 percent as liberal."

So again if a progressive, secular guy has to date outside his traid, a spiritual gal is a bit better fit with a spiritual gal. Overall, the Spirituals are closer to the Religious when it comes to the supernatural, but closer to the Seculars when it comes to some hot button social/political issues like abortion or assisted suicide. 

The authors draw out some composite pictures contrasting the points n the triad:

"Religious students go to church, are more likely to believe in creationism or intelligent design, and oppose assisted suicide, adoptions by same-sex couples and gun control. Secular students, of course,  do not believe in God, endorse evolution, accept assisted suicide as moral, say gay couples should be able to adopt and want more gun control.,,,

Spirituals are more than twice as likely as the Religious to see religion as a source of conflict, but considerably less so than the Seculars."

It's nice to get this updated view of where college students are and it will be very interesting to use these results as a base from which to judge movement over time. Perhaps the Spirituals will parallel growth in Europe where extra-spiritual beliefs provides an intermediate position from established religion and allows exploratrion of  incremental growth to progressive and secular humanism over time.

For more go to: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.kN1jYEDe.dpuf

"An End to the Holy See's Privilege?"

This letter was published in the current issue of Conscience, the quarterly journal of Catholics for Choice (Vol. XXXIV - No.3 , 2013) ----

"In 1984 I was among the plaintiffs who challenged President Ronald Reagan's decision to extend US diplomatic recognition to the Holy See, elevating one faith over all others in violation of the separation of church and state. In Joanne Omang's excellent article, 'Playing Hardball against Women's Rights', (Vol. XXXIV, No. 2), she rightly states that the Holy See's permanent observer status at the UN privileges one religious body over all others -- especially when the Holy See uses (misuses?) that position to block international efforts to advance women's and children's rights. Pope Francis should change the Holy See's position at the UN to match that of other faith and nongovernmental groups.

"Incidentally, Bennett Elliott's informative review of Eric Berkowitz book, Sex and Punishment, from the same issue, reminded me of a lecture I attended more than 50 years ago with Dr Alfred Kinsey at his Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. During the informal gathering Kinsey let it be known that the institute boasted the largest library in the world on all matters sexual, except for one even larger -- the Vatican's. He asserted that the church had tried to amass information about sexual behavior as a first step towards deciding what to condemn as sinful and what regulations to make.

"Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty, Silver Spring, MD"

Catholics for Choice and its journal Conscience cannot be praised too highly. The current issue contains a remarkable collection of "Essays from around the world" -- literally from all over North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia -- titled "Why I Am Prochoice". For well over 30 years this organization and journal have been in the forefront of the struggle to defend and advance women's rights of conscience.

Edd Doerr

Separation of Sports and State

by Edd Doerr

Separation of church and state has been  good for religious liberty, and, for good or ill, it has enabled religion to flourish in the US. Now maybe we should seriously consider the separation of sports and state. What provokes this remark? Two important articles in the current (Oct) issue of the venerable Atlantic magazine: Gregg Easterbrook's "How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers" and Amanda Ripley's "The Case Against High-School Sports". To paraphrase Ben Franklin, "If a Sports League is good, it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not choose to support it, so that its patrons call for the help of government subsidies, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one." If it is wrong for government to force us taxpayers to support religious institutions, then why should government force everyone, including the many millions of us who do not worship in the Grand Temple of the Most Holy Pigskin, to part with our hard-earned cash for the benefit of the wealthy and politically connected owners of football (and basketball, baseball and ice hockey) teams?

Easterbrook spells out the multi-billion dollar details in his article, while Ripley shows how "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per-high-school athlete than per high-school math student -- unlike most countries worldwide." (While I gave Ripley's new book, The Smartest Kids in the World", only a so-so review on Sept 10, I think her Atlantic article is really great.)  Ripley makes the very valid point that only a small percentage of high school kids get any exercise benefit from school sports. (When I was in high school, and I played in the marching band, football games were played on Friday afternoons for the benefit of students, but now they are played on Friday evenings for the benefit of the parents.) Across America school budgets are being slashed, teachers and other school personnel are being laid off, class sizes are being increased, college costs are rising, and pseudo-reformers are busily at work privatizing, voucherizing, charterizing and messing up public education, but anyone who suggests that we reduce public subsidies for huge sports stadiums or school or college athletic departments is likely to be called an unAmerican Islamist/communist.

In addition to the above, we might note that high school, college and professional football leads to no small amount of head and brain injuries, unlike virtually all other common sports.

Fire-Dragon

by Edd Doerr

For 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World, Spain built full-size replicas of the three ships and sailed them to our shores. When they put into Annapolis, Maryland, two visiting Norwegian friends and I drove over to see them. The harbor was crowded with tourists. Approaching from  the car park we found also tied up at the dock a small Viking ship, not one of the ocean-going sort but one designed for sailing around the Baltic Sea.

The name of the Viking  craft was spelled out on it in Old Norsk runes, which translated became Fyrdrake (Fire-Dragon), pronounced "Fear-Drahkah". The four-man crew were dressed like Vikings, complete with swords. We asked them what they did. Their joking reply, "We sail up and down the Chesapeake raping and pillaging".

The papers reported that when the three Spanish ships arrived to Annapolis and the crew disembarked they were greeted by the four Vikings, who told them  "We got here first".

The crowds were so large that we were unable to board the Santa Maria, but we did get aboard one of the two smaller vessels. It was appallingly small for an ocean-going  vessel and did not even have a completely covered deck. In answer to my question one of the Spanish crew members told me that the little ship had a crew of either 22 or 23.

Diane Ravitch Attacked

by Edd Doerr

Diane Ravitch's important new book Reign of Error, which I reviewed quite favorably on several blogs on Sept 5, hit the bookstores on Sept 17. But the conservative attacks on her defense of public education and critiques of the school pseudo-reformers have begun in earnest. One of them, by conservative hack columnist Kyle Smith, appeared on Sept 15 in Rupert Murdoch's sleazy New York Post.

Here is the response I sent to the Post: "Kyle  Smith's smear of Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error is unworthy of The Post. Ravitch offers positive recommendations for improving our public schools while exposing the fallacies and foibles of the pseudo-reformers. Ravitch's opposition to school privatazation is supported by more than two-thirds of Americans, as shown by the 2013 Gallup/PDK poll and 27 statewide referendum elections from coast to coast. Smith ignores the 2/013 Stanford CREDO report showing that two-thirds of charter schools are either worse than of no better than regular public schools, despite their skimming advantage."

Letters to editors are necessarily very brief and polite. The Post on Sept 17 printed only my second sentence, along with my name and identification as president of Americans for Religious Liberty, but they also printed two longer letters from New Yorkers  defending Ravitch.

As the attacks on Ravitch and her book will surely be widespread, readers of this blog might care to email me (arlinc@verizon.net) such attacks. I will be happy to try to respond to them.

What? In the New York Times? Aaargh!

by Edd Doerr

On September 14 there appeared a rather longish op ed piece in the New York Times (!) titled "Overpopulation Is Not the Problem", authored by one Erle C. Ellis,  who is  identified as a biologist serving on the faculties of not one but two distinguished universities that would probably be embarrassed to be named. The gist of  Ellis's rather dreadful and certainly unsceentific screed is that there is no problem with human overpopulation: "There is really no such thing as a human carrying capacity." After my initial shock wore off -- after all, this was not April Fool's Day -- I stumbled to my computer and dispatched this letter to the estimable New York daily, which has yet to publish it:

"Erle Ellis's 'Overpopulation Not the Problem' op ed (Sept 14) is out of sync with science. It ignores climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, deforestation, desertification, carbon dioxide build-up, and global political messes and inadequate action. The Ford administration's 1975 National Security Study Memorandum 200 report spelled this out in detail when world population was only half what it is today. Ellis's piece is as irresponsible as loony climate change denial." (Letters to editors have to be very short.)

This reminds me of an incident that took place in Indianapolis back in the 1950s. I was asked to be on a Sunday evening radio talk show to discuss the population problem, which was even then being discussed by scientists like Julian Huxley. (The show's topic had been my suggestion to the show's producer.) The other guests on the show were the head of Indiana Planned Parenthood and a liberal Presbyterian minister. The show went well, but the following morning we were greeted by a screaming newspaper headline "Population Bomb Backfires". The show's host was fired for daring to discuss such a topic in public. In fact, none of us guests on the show ever mentioned the words "contraception" or "birth control". And I ended up being blackballed to teach in the city's public schools.

Anti-Choicers' "Fetal Pain" Ploy

by Edd Doerr

In their 40-year jihad against women's rights of conscience and religious freedom regarding abortion the anti-choice movement has resorted to pushing through laws to ban the procedure after 20 weeks on the ground that fetuses can feel pain then. Since 2010 a dozen states have passed laws to enshrine that notion into law, and congressional Republicans approved such a bill in June.

Today's (Sept 17) New York Times has an excellent report by Pam Belluck ("Complex Science at Issues in Politics of Fetal Pain:") detailing what scientists have to say on the subject. Their consensus is that fetuses cannot register pain until some time after 24 weeks, simply because the cerebral cortex is not sufficidently developed until that late in gestation. About 90% of abortions are performed before 24 weeks (90% by 13 weeks) and procedures after 24 weeks are performed only for serious medical indications affecting the woman and/or the fetus. I urge you to read the Times important piece.

On May 30, 1987, Americans for Religious Liberty sponsored a one-day conference in Washington on the subject of fetal "personhood". The conference featured addresses by Catholic and Protestant theologians, attorneys, and scientists. All participants agreed that assigning "personhood" to fetuses before some time after 28 to 32 weeks of gestation made no sense. The papers presented at the conference were published by ARL in the book Abortion Rights and Fetal "Personhood", edited by psychologist James Prescott and myself (Centerline Press, 1989, 1990). The book was plugged by Isaac Asimov, abortion rights pioneer Lawrence Lader, NARAL executive Kate Michelman, Catholics for Choice president Frances Kissling, sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, and The Humanist (May/June 1989).

The conference's science findings were incorporated in the ARL-sponsored amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court in the 1988 case Webster v Reproductive Health Services. The brief was signed by 12 Nobel laureate scientists (including DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick) and 155 other distinguished scientists (all listed on the brief). The Prescott/Doerr book is out of print, but the amicus brief to the SCOTUS is included in John M. Swomley's 1999 book Compulsory Pregnancy: The War Against American Women (Humanist Press), still available for $10 from ARL, Box 6656, Silver Spring, MD 20916.

(Edd Doerr has headed ARL since 1982)

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

by Edd Doerr

On September 15 the Washington Post had a section on the middle period of the Civil War, the battles of Gettysburg Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Chattanoga, etc. It devoted most of a page to Lincoln's November 1863 Gettysburg Address, one of Lincoln's most memorable speeches. The Post printed the whole (short) speech, which concludes  (the Post says "Below is the text as it appears in his [Lincoln's] copy of the speech.") with these words, "we here highly resolve that . . . the nation shall have a new birth of freedom."

However, the version of the speech on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington contains the words "under God" after "THIS nation", and Samuel Eliot Morison's monumental Oxford History of the American People (1965) agrees with the Memorial text.

As there were no tape recorders or television cameras to capture exactly what Lincoln said, we have an interesting mystery here. Can anyone shed any light on the matter? We know that Lincoln never joined a church, though he often attended Washington's New York Avenue Presbyterian Church (at which in 1993 I was one of the speakers at the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights celebration of the 20th anniversary of Roe v Wade), and that he liked  Tom Paine's Age of Reason.


(Edd Doerr is president of Americans for Religious Liberty and a former president of the American Humanist Association.)