If you’re not familiar with the term the nones, you should get acquainted with it. 

One of the best ways to do that is by reading Ryan P. Burge’s book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.

The nones represent both the demographic group in this country most likely to be reached with the gospel and the group most resistant to its appeal.

The reason behind that apparent contradiction lies in a quirk in the way that social scientists describe religious affiliation in this country, generally placing Americans in one of seven categories:

• Evangelical Protestant
• Mainline Protestant
• Black Protestant
• Catholic
• Jewish
• Observant of other faith traditions
• Nonaffiliated

The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going by Ryan P. Burge

These nonaffiliated Americans, the “nones,” are lumped together even though their situations differ. As a whole, they represent the fastest-growing category, and Burge is one of the leading experts on their rise. A pastor in the American Baptist Church, he is also a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University.

When raw data from the 2018 General Social Survey (GSS) came out, he began to crunch the numbers. “It had finally happened: the nones were now the same size as both Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants,” Burge wrote. “That meant that the religiously unaffiliated were statistically the same size as the largest religious groups in the United States.”

Burge put together a graph showing the trend, tweeted it, and, when he checked his phone later, found it had been retweeted almost one hundred times.

“What followed was one of the busiest periods of my life,” he wrote.

Reporters lined up to interview him. Most major news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, carried the story. C-SPAN interviewed Burge on Easter Sunday.

“Journalists, podcasters, and pastors were all asking me the same questions: How did this happen? And what does this mean for the future of American religion?” Burge wrote.

The Nones provides some of the answers, but there is still much to learn, including the number of nones. Estimates vary by as much as twenty million people.

Burge described the GSS as “the gold standard in measuring religious change in America,” largely because it has been asking questions about religious affiliation in basically the same way since the survey was created in 1972.

But it does not ask people who describe themselves as unaffiliated if they are atheist or agnostic. The Pew Research Center, on the other hand, offers three options for the religiously unaffiliated: atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.”

In 1972, just one in twenty Americans said they had no religion. In 2018, the GSS indicated that group had grown to one in four. As the group has grown, it has become more diverse and now represents every segment of our society.

Mainline Protestants have declined from 30 percent of the population to 10 percent in about four decades, but Burge said it would be too simplistic to give this as the sole reason for the rise of the nones. Many factors seem to be at work, including secularization, politics, and the internet.

However, he wrote, “In essence, moderate Protestants are going extinct, while conservative Christianity is holding the line.”

Instead of people growing up in a religious tradition, drifting away from it in their teens and twenties, and then returning to it as they age, Burge wrote, “More people are entering adulthood without a religious affiliation, and they become more likely to stay a none as they age.”

He continued: “It’s clear that every successive generation starts out less religious than the one prior, but that’s only a part of the puzzle. As these young people [have] become more outspoken about their move away from religious affiliation, that gave permission to older people who had been sliding to disaffiliation to finally declare their true religious attachments. If this is truly the case, then many more nominal Christians are going to check the ‘no religion’ box going forward, and that’s not necessarily true just among the youngest Americans.”

Atheists and agnostics are much more likely to be openly hostile to religion than Americans who would check the “nothing in particular” box. And that’s of more than academic interest.

Burge put it this way: “If one wants to identify the harvest for new religious converts, it can be found in the one in five Americans who say that they are nothing in particular.”

Denison Forum

When I was twelve years of age, I took on a summer responsibility of managing the houses of vacationing neighbors. It was their idea, not mine. Three families that lived side by side were planning to be out of town for a month. They each needed someone to cut their lawn, feed their pets, water their gardens; in sum, make sure their properties were cared for. They invited me to take the job. More accurately, they asked my dad to ask me to take the job. He didn’t ask me. He told me. I didn’t want to do so. After all, I had Little League games to play, a bike to ride and, uh, uh, uh…those were the only two reasons I could muster. They got me no traction.

You Were Made for This Moment: Courage for Today and Hope for Tomorrow by Max Lucado

Before I knew it, I was sitting down with each of the families, making a list of the tasks I needed to manage on their behalf. I recall walking home from their houses feeling something I’d never felt before. I felt overwhelmed. Forgive me if my weight seems nothing compared to yours. Keep in mind, I was only twelve years old. To cut grass, feed pets, and make sure doors were locked in three households for a month? I mean, one family had a goldfish. I’d never fed a goldfish. I envisioned finding the little fellow floating on his side, dead from being under or over fed.

But there was no getting out now.

On the first day of my unsolicited career, I hurried home from baseball practice, jumped on my bike, and pedaled like crazy to the residences. Three lawns needed mowing. Three houses needed attending. Three sets of locks needed checking. Three families whose pets needed feeding. Three gardens needed watering. This was too much for any human being to handle.

Just when I was about to learn the meaning of the phrase “panic attack”, I saw it. Parked in front of the middle house. White, wide, and fresh off a day in the oil field. My dad’s pickup. He was there. The garage door was open, and the lawn mower was on the driveway.

“You start cutting the grass,” he said. “I’ll water the plants.”

With those words, everything changed. The clouds lifted. I could face the task because my father was facing it with me.

Your Father wants to do the same with you.

Seasons of struggle can be a treacherous time for the human heart. We are sitting ducks for despair and defeat. We turn away from others, turn our backs on God, and turn into fearful, cynical souls. Despair can be a dangerous season. But it can also be a developing time, a time in which we learn to trust God, to lean into his Word and rely on his ways.

The choice is ours. To help us choose the wise path, God gave the wonderfully wild story of Esther. The setting is Persia, 5^th Century BC. King Xerxes declared a holocaust. He plans to destroy all the Jews of his vast empire. Unbeknownst to him, his Queen Esther and one of the members of his court, Mordecai, are Jewish. Both have disguised their ancestry. Upon learning of the decree, Mordecai stripped himself of his Persian disguise. He cried out to Esther to intervene.

She resisted. Dare she risk her life and make an appeal to the fickle Xerxes? Mordecai’s reply was surprisingly sober.

“If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:13-14)

Relief will come! How did Mordecai know relief would come? I can only assume that he stood on God’s Word. He remembered God’s promised deliverance of the Jewish people.

God would:

• Be their God and God would be their people. (Jer. 32:36ff)
• Gather them from all the countries. (Eze. 37:24ff)
• Send a king through them and to them to establish an eternal kingdom. (2 Sam. 7:16; Mt. 1:21)

He recalled the covenants and the covenant-keeping character of God.

Relief will come! This was Mordecai’s message for Esther. And this is God’s message for you. Feeling undone by the struggle? Then let God unleash the power within you to face it. Shift your focus away from the challenges at hand and ponder the power of your almighty God.

Don’t measure the height of the mountain. Ponder the power of the one who made it. Don’t tell God how big your storm is. Tell the storm how big your God is. Your problem is not that your problem is so big, but that your view of God is too small.

The next time you feel the weight of the world, talk to the One who made the world. As your perception of God grows greater, the size of your challenge grows smaller. If God can sway the heart of a Persian monarch and reverse certain death into victorious life, do you not think he can take care of you?

Relief will come. Your Father will give you strength to meet the day. By the time you reach your assignment, he will be there to help you.

Denison Forum