Near the end of the vice presidential debate this past week the moderator asked Vice President Joe Biden and his opponent, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, how their shared Catholic faith influenced their views on abortion. Ryan, the wunderkind darling of the tea party right, said, “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.”
Biden, not about to be “out-Godded” by Ryan, responded, “My religion defines who I am. I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life.” Both candidates gave their party’s respective boilerplate positions on abortion and used “faith” as an opportunity to pivot to other issues – especially economic ones, with the vice president focusing on Catholic social doctrine in particular.
For a country as steeped in religion as the United States, pretty standard stuff; but unmentioned by either the moderator or the candidates was a rather startling research finding hinting that questions like this one may become a lot more dangerous to ask in the future. That is because, as the Pew Forum announced in a report released the same day as the debate, Americans are abandoning organized religion in droves – especially young people.
According to Pew, atheists and agnostics together amount to 13 million Americans – 6 percent of the population. Those who declare they are of no particular faith but may still believe in some type of God or otherwise say they are spiritual, account for a further 33 million Americans – 14 percent of the population. Taken together, 1 out of 5 Americans have no attachment to any form of institutionalized religion. If you take into account the number of people who say they are “Catholic,” “Jewish” or whatever for what are largely cultural and community reasons as opposed to actual belief, the number is probably far higher.
Furthermore, this growth in unbelief and non-affiliation has happened very quickly – by a third in nearly five years, making unbelief America’s fastest growing religion. Behind this rapid growth is the cruel arithmetic of generational replacement. Put simply, younger Americans are far less religious than their parents and grandparents. According to Pew, 32 percent of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation, compared to the 90 percent of those aged 65 and older who do. The faithful, in other words, are not being fruitful and multiplying even though they have more children than heathen unbelievers. Indeed, it would appear their children don’t actually keep the faith they are born into, meaning the faithful are dying out as one generation replaces another.
A generation of unbelievers
However, this does not mean religion will cease to be important in American politics. Instead, it is likely religion will become an even bigger fault line for conflict for two reasons. The first is that growth in unbelief is not distributed evenly by region, class or political party. As one might suspect, unbelievers and the non-affiliated vote largely for Democrats and are concentrated in traditional Democratic strongholds. Though there is a strain of libertarian atheism that can be found in some Republican circles – most clearly among devotees of Ayn Rand – the reality is that the GOP has effectively become the party of religious conservatism. This has led to an outpouring of unbelievers from that party to the Democrats, and today unbelievers and the religiously unaffiliated vote as heavily for Democrats as white Evangelical Protestants do for Republicans.
The second reason is that research on religious sects further reveals that it is not the most conservative faiths that lose members. Rather, it is the opposite, as there is a well-documented correlation between strict, dogmatic and conservative faith and membership retention. This is because faith of this sort actively deters those who are less committed to the group’s theology from joining. It also punishes those who stray and limits member contact with alternative points of view. This, in turn, creates an insular solidarity among group members that increases the ability of the group to work toward collective goals. Strong, conservative faith essentially builds groups that can literally move mountains – for good or for evil.
The hold that white Evangelical Protestants have on the modern GOP is a case in point. Though only a relatively small part of the overall population, Evangelicals have effectively taken over the party at the grass-roots level. Republican voters are “values” voters – driven to the polls on issues like gay marriage and abortion. These are the committed folks who knock on doors, hand out fliers and show up to vote in primary elections. They are the people who elected George W. Bush twice and who gave Mitt Romney such a tough time this time around. The Mormons are another example – a relatively new faith that has built a religious empire in the American West.
A country with a split future
So, taken together, these trends actually are quite foreboding. Concentrated in one political camp and geographic region are religious conservatives, while concentrated in another are the non-religious. Furthermore, as lukewarm believers and the only tangentially attached are bled away from religious organizations and groups, those groups will increasingly be filled with isolated, dogmatic, religious conservatives – making them even less likely to change or compromise than they are now. The American Catholic Church is a case in point, filled as it is with apparatchiks who condemn abortion and contraception and the politicians who vote for them, but otherwise turn a blind eye to rampant pedophilia in their own ranks.
Thus, in the future we will have a country that is likely to be even more divided on issues of faith, religion, morality and culture than it is today as religious conservatives hunker down in their remaining institutional bunkers as unbelief arises outside them. We will have two parties, divided by religion, who will see each other as an anathema to the very idea of what they think America means. More importantly, the issues these two constituencies will fight over are not amenable to compromise. You can divide a budget in a lot of different ways and hope for economic growth to make up the difference. You can’t, however, negotiate on the existence or non-existence of God, especially when the result threatens deeply held notions of cultural identity and tribal loyalty.
What this points to is deeply troubling. Imagine a country divided into two camps along religious, political, economic and geographic lines. Imagine these two camps being driven by identity politics in a way that makes them unable to compromise or even admit to the legitimacy of the other’s point of view. Imagine the two sides becoming increasingly distant from and suspicious of the other. Imagine a political system so locked up in regional and partisan division that the national government is effectively hamstrung on most issues of importance. A man once said that a house divided in such a way could not stand. If trends continue, we may be testing that proposition sometime soon once again.