Turning Against Organized Religion

Secular Americans, once apathetic about religion, are becoming more hostile

A few years ago, I made the joke that America is so religious that even our atheists believe in God. At the time, I was commenting on the discrepancy between religious identity and belief. Surveys consistently find that a small but significant number of atheists report that they believe in God.  

Early work documenting the beginning of America’s religious decline found that, while people were readily relinquishing their formal affiliations, they retained some spiritual inclinations or religious beliefs. From these early findings emerged new religious categories — the “spiritual, but not religious” and “unattached believers” — to describe groups of indeterminate size and questionable cohesion. Efforts to characterize this important constituency met with limited success. In The Atlantic, Caroline Kircher suggested that they, “reject organized religion but maintain a belief in something larger than themselves. That ‘something’ can range from Jesus to art, music, and poetry. There is often…