On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true.
I’d climb the stairs to the pulpit and smooth my long skirt. I’d smile and share my “testimony,” as the church calls it. I’d say I knew God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, prayer, spirits and miracles were all real. I’d express gratitude for my family and for my ancestors who had left lives in Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains. When I had finished, I’d bask in the affirmation of the congregation’s “amen.”
In that small chapel by a freeway in Arkansas, I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure.
I had that, and I left it all.
I never really wanted to leave my faith. I wasn’t interested in exile — familial, cultural or spiritual. But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university. There, I tried be both religious and cool, believing but discerning. I didn’t see any incompatibility between those things. But America’s intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick.
My story maps onto America’s relationship to religion over the last 30 years. I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity. Around 40 million Americans have left churches over the last few decades, and about 30 percent of the population now identifies as having no religion. People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.
That’s what I did, too. I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.
America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.
Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.
In Washington, religious conservatives are ascendant. President Trump claims God saved him from a bullet so he could make America great again. The Supreme Court has the most pro-religion justices since at least the 1950s. Nearly half of Americans believe the United States should be a Christian nation. In Silicon Valley, tech bros have found God. Downtown hipsters have embraced Catholicism. And the singer Grimes recently said “I think killing God was a mistake.”
Even in the institutions where conservatives are sure that elite liberals are indoctrinating youth with godlessness, something is changing. “I have served as a chaplain at Harvard for 25 years, and the interest in and openness to religion and spirituality has never been higher on campus,” said Tammy McLeod, the president of the Harvard Chaplains.
I have spent the last year reporting on belief, interviewing hundreds of people. I’ve visited dozens of houses of worship, spiritual retreats and wellness centers. I also heard from more than 4,000 Times readers who responded to a survey. Many of the demographers, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians I spoke to offered the same explanation: Americans simply haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion.
For all the real attractions of a life outside of institutional faith — autonomy, time back, a choose-your-own-adventure adulthood — there are important benefits that have been lost.
The Rise of the ‘Nones’
I remember the first time I saw Richard Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion.” I was in middle school, at a Barnes & Noble in a strip mall down the street from my church. I think I was there to buy the latest Harry Potter. I stopped in front of the shelves, confronted with an astonishing possibility: It was an option not to believe.
Mr. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, intended to provoke. He was one of the patriarchs of New Atheism, a movement that began around the turn of the century. Disruptive forces — technological change, globalization and the attacks of Sept. 11 — invited people to question both their relationship to faith and the role of religion in society. The New Atheists’ ideas, spread in best-selling books and viral videos on a young YouTube, helped make that interrogation permissible.
Religion was no longer sacrosanct, but potentially suspect. By 2021, about 30 percent of America identified as “nones” — people who have no religious affiliation.
Scholars like the sociologist Steve Bruce said the United States, long an exception among Western countries, finally seemed to support the “secularization thesis,” the idea initially posited by Max Weber, which holds that a society’s modernization and economic development leads to the decline of religion. The Brookings Institution said churches were in “their twilight hour.” The Washington Post speculated about when Protestant churches would be empty.
But even as people left religion, mysticism persisted. More people began identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” In 2015, researchers at Harvard began studying where these Americans were turning to express their spirituality. Reporters did, too. The answers included: yoga, CrossFit, SoulCycle, supper clubs and meditation. Oprah tried sound baths. Gwyneth Paltrow advertised energy healing. More than a third of American women under 30 have downloaded the personal astrology app Co-Star, according to the company.
“Secularization in the West was not about the segregation of belief from the world, but the promiscuous opening of belief to the world,” said Ethan H. Shagan, a historian of religion at the University of California, Berkeley.
Some religious groups saw this as a call to redefine — or, depending on how you look at it, dilute — their offerings: They focused more on an inclusive spirituality and less on divisive or polarizing doctrine. Some congregations went “god-optional.” Other groups, like “Nuns and Nones,” developed creative ways to bring young people back to a faith community.
Secular organizations tried to provide the same benefits of religion, but without any theology. A few years ago, I biked on a warm summer morning to the meeting of one such organization, Sunday Assembly. I sat in the back and watched people sing pop songs by Miley Cyrus and Adele instead of hymns and give talks about morality. Afterward, I ate cookies and chatted with other attendees. They had all left religion in some form and were looking for another community, a new space to access and express their spirituality. I kept in touch with a few of them. None of us became regulars.
Happier, Healthier, More Fulfilled
Religion provides what sociologists call the “three B’s”: belief, belonging and behaviors. It offers beliefs that supply answers to the tough questions of life. It gives people a place they feel they belong, a community where they are known. And it tells them how to behave, or at least what tenets should guide their action. Religious institutions have spent millenniums getting really good at offering these benefits to people.
For the last few decades, much of the world has tried to go without God, a departure from most of recorded history. More than a billion people globally and about a third of Americans have tried to live without religion. Studies in recent years have offered insights into how that is going. The data doesn’t look good.
“There is overwhelming empirical support for the value of being at a house of worship on a regular basis on all kinds of metrics — mental health, physical health, having more friends, being less lonely,” said Ryan Burge, a former pastor and a leading researcher on religious trends.
Pew’s findings corroborate that idea: Actively religious people tend to report they are happier than people who don’t practice religion. Religious Americans are healthier, too. They are significantly less likely to be depressed or to die by suicide, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular illness or other causes. In a long-term study, doctors at Harvard found that women who attended religious services once a week were 33 percent less likely to die prematurely than women who never attended. That’s because, said Tyler J. VanderWeele, an author on the Harvard study, “they had higher levels of social support, better health behaviors and greater optimism about the future.”
Religiously affiliated Americans are more likely to feel gratitude (by 23 percentage points), spiritual peace (by 27 points) and “a deep sense of connection with humanity” (by 15 points) regularly than people without a religious affiliation, researchers found this year. The latter is particularly important: Positive relationships are the single most important predictor of well-being, according to the longest-running study on human happiness in the world.
This isn’t true for everyone, of course. About a third of Americans who have left religion appear to be doing just fine, according to a new study from Burge, the former pastor and researcher. Many are civically engaged, find joy in nature and spend time with their friends and families. But in aggregate, the data shows that people without religion are faring worse than those who practice one.
The pandemic, with its doomscrolling and isolation, seemed to awaken many Americans to their dissatisfaction. That is what I heard, again and again, in my reporting: Dana Bocus, a 38-year-old living in Ashton, Md., was raised Catholic but stopped attending church in adulthood. “Then the pandemic happened and I had two children and the weight of the world felt too heavy to carry alone,” she said. “I was starved for community, so I gave an international Christian church a try.”
Jessica Moyer, a 41-year-old mother in South Hadley, Mass., said: “During that year of exhaustion and constraint, I would daily find myself simply collapsing to my knees in the kitchen, or walking back and forth in the back yard, praying or singing a hymn.”
Church attendance rates have been slipping for decades. But since the pandemic began, the number of people attending religious services — either in person or virtually — has remained consistent at about 40 percent. About a quarter of Americans told Pew that the pandemic had strengthened their existing faith. “Covid may have cemented or reinforced the importance of religion to people who were already religious,” said Alan Cooperman, an author of the Pew report.
The political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have a theory to explain this: Religion flourishes in times of “existential insecurity,” they say, and withers in times of peace and bounty. Other scholars say this may be particularly true in the United States compared with other wealthy countries with stronger social safety nets.
There is plenty of evidence, though, that people aren’t just religious because of insecurity or instability. Highly educated people are more likely than people who attended only high school to go to religious services weekly. Additionally, Hindus, Jews, Mainline Protestants and Muslims are all more likely than religiously unaffiliated people to have at least a college degree. These are people who tend to have good jobs, higher incomes and private health care. They are going to religious services because they are getting something they value out of it.
Answering Hard Questions
A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Dawkins, the famous atheist whose book had so shaken me all those years ago. I wanted to know what he made of the fact that America’s secularization had stagnated.
He remained hopeful that secularism can replace religion. “It seems to me, should be reasonably easy to sort out,” he said. For ethics, he encouraged people to take civics classes and host a weekly discussion club. For community? “Play golf.”
He said he understood that churches in particular could provide moral instruction (and he said he valued the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man). But he insisted people should be able to fulfill their spiritual desires outside of faith: “It should be quite easy to show documentary films: David Attenborough films, Carl Sagan films, Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are lots of substitutes to spirituality that those can provide.”
But many of the people I have spoken to say those kinds of alternatives aren’t enough.
In a country where most people are pessimistic about the future and don’t trust the government, where hope is hard to come by, people are longing to believe in something. Religion can offer beliefs, belonging and behaviors all in one place; it can enchant life; most importantly, it tells people that their lives have a purpose.
People also want to belong to richer, more robust communities, ones that wrestle with hard questions about how to live. They’re looking to heady concepts — confession, atonement, forgiveness, grace and redemption — for answers.
Erin Germaine Mahoney, a 37-year-old in New York City, was an evangelical Christian for most of her life. She left her church in part because she disagreed with its views on women but said she has struggled to find something to fill the void. She wants a place to express her spirituality that aligns with her values.
She hesitated before saying, “I haven’t found satisfaction.”
“That scares me,” she added, “because I don’t want that to be true.”
Religion, she said, offered her a way to contend with the complexity of life, in all of its mystery and possibility, and she hasn’t found that in her pursuit of wellness.
“Nones” like Ms. Mahoney aren’t necessarily going back, en masse, to their previous faiths. Many say they left religion because they moved to places, like major cities, where people were more hostile to it. They felt uncomfortable or embarrassed about that part of themselves. Others cite a misalignment of values: They had left religion because they disagreed with something in it politically or socially. They said they still felt that way. And in today’s political climate, it can be difficult to be part of a group that doesn’t align precisely with your personal preferences or the identity you’ve created for yourself. That can make the kind of obligation — and faith — that religion so often requires feel especially difficult.
But many of these “nones” have had a dawning recognition that they had thrown “the baby out with the baptismal water,” as my colleague Michelle Cottle said.
“I would love to find a way to have what I had then without compromising who I feel I am now,” Ms. Mahoney told me.
Like Ms. Mahoney and many other “nones,” I too feel stuck. I miss what I had. In leaving the church, I lost access to a community that cut across age and class. I lost opportunities to support that community in ways that are inconvenient and extraordinary — when the baby arrives, the moving truck comes or grief overwhelms. I lost answers about planets, galaxies, eternity. I still find it odd to move through the world, going to the gym and sending Slack messages, with these questions threatening to overtake me. Shouldn’t I be dumbstruck, constantly? Shouldn’t we all?
But I don’t feel I can go back. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me. Most importantly, though, my beliefs have changed. I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church.
I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.
For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.
Lauren Jackson is an associate editor and writer for The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter.
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