- Why did the rise of the “nones” begin in the 1990s?
- Thoughts about how science fiction is, or is not, a “genre”.
Here’s an article I stumbled upon today, from 2019 in The Atlantic, by a writer I’ve see a lot of lately but apparently had not noticed back then. And this relates to yesterday’s lead item.
The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, 26 Sep 2019: Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why?, subtitled “‘Not religious’ has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right.”
The 1990s were, we realize in retrospect, the first sign of the “nones,” the earliest signs that many people were stepping away from organized religion (in the United States). Why would this be? Before reading this, I might speculate that it has something to do with the backlash to the conservative backlash to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It took three decades, but as more and more people realized how retrogressive the conservatives and the traditional religions were — against civil rights, among other things — the more they stepped away.
But that’s my speculation. Let’s see what Thompson said, in 2019.
The idea of American exceptionalism has become so dubious that much of its modern usage is merely sarcastic. But when it comes to religion, Americans really are exceptional. No rich country prays nearly as much as the U.S, and no country that prays as much as the U.S. is nearly as rich.
America’s unique synthesis of wealth and worship has puzzled international observers and foiled their grandest theories of a global secular takeover. In the late 19th century, an array of celebrity philosophers—the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud—proclaimed the death of God, and predicted that atheism would follow scientific discovery and modernity in the West, sure as smoke follows fire.
Here we see echoes, or foreshadowing, of yesterday’s item about the rise of secular society.
Stubbornly pious Americans threw a wrench in the secularization thesis. Deep into the 20th century, more than nine in 10 Americans said they believed in God and belonged to an organized religion, with the great majority of them calling themselves Christian. That number held steady—through the sexual-revolution ’60s, through the rootless and anxious ’70s, and through the “greed is good” ’80s.
But in the early 1990s, the historical tether between American identity and faith snapped. Religious non-affiliation in the U.S. started to rise—and rise, and rise. By the early 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t associate with any established religion (also known as “nones”) had doubled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of atheists, agnostics, and spiritual dabblers had tripled in size.
So what happened around 1990?
This story begins with the rise of the religious right in the 1970s. Alarmed by the spread of secular culture—including but not limited to the sexual revolution, the Roe v. Wade decision, the nationalization of no-fault divorce laws, and Bob Jones University losing its tax-exempt status over its ban on interracial dating—Christians became more politically active. The GOP welcomed them with open arms. The party, which was becoming more dependent on its exurban-white base, needed a grassroots strategy and a policy platform. Within the next decade, the religious right—including Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority—had become fundraising and organizing juggernauts for the Republican Party. In 1980, the GOP social platform was a facsimile of conservative Christian views on sexuality, abortion, and school prayer.
And at least two other major social and political shifts. I can’t quote the entire article; here’s one more that closes the thought I expressed.
But the liberal politics of young people brings us to the first big reason to care about rising non-affiliation. A gap has opened up between America’s two political parties. In a twist of fate, the Christian right entered politics to save religion, only to make the Christian-Republican nexus unacceptable to millions of young people—thus accelerating the country’s turn against religion.
At the same time there is the difficulty of replacing religion with other social institutions.
The deeper question is whether the sudden loss of religion has social consequences for Americans who opt out. Secular Americans, who are familiar with the ways that traditional faiths have betrayed modern liberalism, may not have examined how organized religion has historically offered solutions to their modern existential anxieties.
Making friends as an adult without a weekly congregation is hard. Establishing a weekend routine to soothe Sunday-afternoon nerves is hard. Reconciling the overwhelming sense of life’s importance with the universe’s ostensible indifference to human suffering is hard.
Although belief in God is no panacea for these problems, religion is more than a theism. It is a bundle: a theory of the world, a community, a social identity, a means of finding peace and purpose, and a weekly routine. Those, like me, who have largely rejected this package deal, often find themselves shopping à la carte for meaning, community, and routine to fill a faith-shaped void. Their politics is a religion. Their work is a religion. Their spin class is a church. And not looking at their phone for several consecutive hours is a Sabbath.
This is the bottom line. Religion has served social functions for the entire history of the human race; indeed, religion might be defined as the combination of humanity’s predilections for detecting patterns and agency in the world and ascribing them to imaginary deities in the sky, with the utility that shared values serve to bind together tribes, without which humanity would not have grown and spread over the entire planet. Religion is a social function — and nothing more.
The issue now is: as the supernatural claims of the religions have become discredited, in ways that are increasingly obvious to even the average citizen, how do we save the social functions of religion without the need for subscribing to outlandish supernatural premises? Remember, even in politics: the more outlandish a lie you tell, the more people will believe it.
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Thought from Fri 19jul24
I scribbled a comment in my notebook on that day that I haven’t gotten around to expanding here until now.
Is science fiction a ‘genre’ or not? Of course that depends on what ‘genre’ means. But when people say something is ‘generic,’ they mean that any one example is of a class of interchangeable examples. But whether something is interchangeable with others depends on perspective. You can call classical music a genre of music, within the context of all music; but within classical music are all sorts subgenres, or historical movements, from baroque to ‘classical’ to romantic to 12-tone to minimalist, and on and on.
Within all literature, science fiction is a genre, I suppose, compared to mysteries and westerns and literary (or ‘mainstream’) fiction in the modern age (not to mention historical modes of fiction); but within science fiction is a sequence and flowering of subgenres much like those of classical music. There is a march forward of complexity and sophistication; there are branchings and dividings of subgroups deciding to emphasize different things.
The major misunderstanding ordinary people have about science fiction is that it’s generic, that it’s all variations of the same few ideas — space travel, interstellar empires, aliens, time travel, and all told in similar manners. This is partly because the Hollywoodization of media SF, with so many similar simplistic premises and storylines, and all the same special effects in any given decade. And the books all written in bestseller plain prose — from Michael Crichton to Andy Weir.
Whereas in fact there are great depths to science fiction, both in media (think directors like Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve) but especially in prose; the best science fiction writers are as diverse and non-interchangeable as the best literary writers. The best science fiction writers are as distinct from one another as are the greatest composers of classical music. After decades, the literary world, and even pop culture, are beginning to recognize this. And one of the motivations for my book is to spell this out.
