Amerika

Conservatives like to talk about America as a “Christian country,” but this seems to have fallen by the wayside under diversity, where any assertion of values that is not universal — applies to and is accepted by everyone — becomes rapidly unpopular.

While the growth is not vast, a steady pattern can be seen of Americans leaving Christianity over the decades:

In 1972, when the GSS first began asking Americans, “What is your religious preference?” 90% identified as Christian and 5% were religiously unaffiliated. In the next two decades, the share of “nones” crept up slowly, reaching 9% in 1993. But then disaffiliation started speeding up – in 1996, the share of unaffiliated Americans jumped to 12%, and two years later it was 14%. This growth has continued, and 29% of Americans now tell the GSS they have “no religion.”

Since 2007, the percentage of adults who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” in the Center’s surveys has grown from 16% to 29%. During this time, the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has fallen from 78% to 63%.

It is “safe” to be agnostic, atheist, or nothing-in-particular and generally “spiritual but not religious,” as became popular to say in the 1980s. This denies the faith or lack of faith of anyone else and allows a laissez-faire “anything goes” attitude.

Most interestingly, even recent (historically speaking) immigrant groups have found themselves negating their conventional faith:

The latest AWVI 2021 report shows that the historical foundations of stability in American religion are becoming increasingly shaky. For example, the percentage of U.S. Hispanic adults who self-aligned with the Catholic faith has been sliced in half, from 59% to 28%, in the last 30 years. And those former Hispanic Catholics are not flowing into Protestant churches, but are leaving Christian institutions altogether.

At the same time, the proportion of “Don’ts” (i.e. people who say they don’t know, don’t care, or don’t believe that God exists) among Hispanics has increased tenfold in the last three decades, rising from 3% in 1991 to 31% today, the research found.

This growth of “Don’ts” among Hispanics parallels what is happening in American faith more widely. According to the CRC worldview research, the number of U.S. adults who qualify as “Don’ts” has nearly tripled in the past decade, rising to 34% in 2021. Millennials (ages 18 to 36) are driving much of that shift, with 43% rejecting the existence of God.

What would make contact with a civilization drive out religion? Occam’s Razor means that often the first commonsense thought is the most complete answer: religion is incompatible with that civilization or at least is a disadvantage, even if that simply means missing Sunday morning television to go to church.

You can see why the experts get nervous when they can graph a curve that shows increasing rejection of Christianity:

Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009.

The big point here is that a country that was once almost entirely Christian is now separated into different groups which may not share much in common. This leads the experts to consider that a projection shows us the future, namely far fewer Christians:

Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.

My guess is that there is a threshold in here somewhere, meaning that a certain percentage of the population will always hang on to Christianity unless it gets officially discriminated against in a way that will endanger their livelihoods, as it was in the Soviet Union (which, other than the AK-47, seems to have been a non-stop screw-up).

However the larger point may be the rise in nones who are the “spiritual but not religious” people who follow no particular tradition:

A recent study by the Springtide Research Institute found that 68% of this generation’s members consider themselves religious and 77% say they are spiritual, yet they “define spirituality as autonomous and faith unbundled … inclusive of all faiths and practices.”

While this is close to perennialism, it seems to mean something more significant, which is that people are detached from any kind of religious organization and practice, but in that grand airy way that modern people “identify with” things, claim spiritual belief as a sort of afterthought.

The clues toward this appear through declining attendance at religious institutions:

Three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services every week (21%) or almost every week (9%), while 11% report attending about once a month and 56% seldom (25%) or never (31%) attend.

Among major U.S. religious groups, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also widely known as the Mormon Church, are the most observant, with two-thirds attending church weekly or nearly weekly. Protestants (including nondenominational Christians) rank second, with 44% attending services regularly, followed by Muslims (38%) and Catholics (33%).

At first glance, this seems bad for conservatives because conservatives are associated by most people with Christianity. However, this is more of an association between conservatism and religion: to be religious, you need to have an appreciation for realism, and through that the cause-effect study of order that reveals the divine.

Liberals do not need religion because they have a substitute which is the moralism of ideology. For them, working toward Utopia is the only Heaven, and those who achieve this goal or die in its pursuit are granted a type of immortality and angelic status through the social approval of the group.

Conservatives cling to Christianity because it is all that they know, but it is not all that they have. Like the other Abrahamic religions — Islam and Judaism — Christianity replaces the pagan concept of an esoteric world with an exoteric one in which morality is a set of clearly-defined methods, such as “thou shalt not murder.”

Paganism, on the other hand, valued outcomes alone; this is the whole point of The Odyssey, in that Odysseus attempting to impose a moral judgment over the ways of nature led to his downfall, and his relinquishing this allowed him to see the simple path forward to what he actually needed instead of finding ways to make his ego feel better.

The Abrahamic religions introduced universalism to the ancient world, or the idea that there was One Truth that is the same for all people and can be used to pass moral judgments, like in a court of law or lottery. If you follow the right methods, you are blameless regardless of the outcome, even losing and dying like Jesus Christ allegedly did.

Abrahamism at its core believes in one universal truth which is more important than reality. While this seems to be an attempt to control the divine by cramming it into category and symbol, those in power saw this as a very useful method of controlling their laborer castes, who thanks to agriculture now outnumbered everyone else.

This made for better means of centralized control — limiting methods in order to keep people harmless and inert while compelling obedience — because it gave the powers that be an on/off symbol. Switch the symbol on and you offer a talisman; switch it off and you create a scapegoat which the herd will then destroy.

Binary morality of this nature made it easy to control a herd by weaponizing it against itself. Flip the off switch on any member and he gets destroyed, so everyone clamors for a chance to win the on switch by further extending the power of the herd, its morality, and its religion.

In contrast, the pagans believed in an esoteric universe. Reality was what it was; truth was a human construct and existed only in a single mind that could not be extended. People could gesture at, signal, or symbolize reality through “truths” but at best those depend on the cooperation of the receiver and that person having a similar mindset.

Within the esoteric view, reality is what it is, and all perceive it at different levels, with some seeing more. This inherently hierarchical view showed us how people were revealed by their deeds, and could not be taken at face value or the value of their words, and therefore that the only “meritocracy” was life itself, not tests or other symbolism.

That offends the egalitarians because it is based on innate abilities and character, not obedience and avoiding “bad” or “evil” methods, and therefore it cannot be controlled by humans. In fact it affirms a lack of human control over reality or the divine, both of which are left suspended in mystery for some to discover more than others.

When modern day people complain about something being unequal or Calvinist they are refering to the pagan wisdom that we are our heritage and our choices. Peasants cannot become kings, and each of us has a role dictated by biology in which we have some duties and corresponding privileges.

Abrahamists find that offensive because it does not make us all equal before God, but what is that but an attempt to reduce humanity to a single mind so that it can manipulate the tangible symbol of the divine? Under universal morality, methods are more important than results or goals, and signals, tokens, gestures, categories, and emotions rule the day.

Conservatism not only can survive the collapse of Christianity and organized middle eastern religion (OMER) but will come out stronger. Without universalism, realism becomes the principle of our society, and this rewards methods that achieve good results like the time-honored, common-sense, and cause-effect reasoning conservatives prefer.

Tags: abrahamism, abrahamist, catholicism, christianity, generation z, protestantism, religion, religiosity