“This is not just some academic exercise for me,” said Burge, who pastors a dwindling American Baptist church in Mt. “It’s not a religion.”īurge said the nones are rising as the Christian population declines, particularly the “mainline” or moderate to liberal Protestants. He finds similar fulfillment in his two-story workshop, where he makes the latest of thousands of mandolins he has created over the decades, enabling people to “share the joy of music.” “It just feels so good to be next to something so timeless,” he said, sitting in his yard in the Missouri River town he now calls home. “They practice their own type of spirituality, many of them.”ĭulak still draws inspiration from nature. “They are definitely not as turned off to religion as atheists and agnostics are,” Burge said. Many embrace a range of spiritual beliefs - from God, prayer and heaven to karma, reincarnation, astrology or energy in crystals. “All the media attention is on atheists and agnostics, when most nones are not atheist or agnostic,” Burge said. adults, including Jones and Dulak, is a “nothing in particular.” There are as many of them as atheists and agnostics combined (7% each). These days, if a visiting relative wants to attend church, he’ll go along, “but I’m not prone to listening to anybody telling me this is the way it should be,” Jones said.Ībout 1 in 6 U.S. That’s my spirituality if you want to call it that.” “People should be treated equally as long as they treat other people equally. “They kept sending us letters saying, ‘Why aren’t you sending us money?’”Īlthough he doesn’t believe in organized religion, he believes in God and basic ethical precepts. “They should have come to us and said, ‘Is there something we can do to help you?’” said Jones, 71, of central Michigan. The nones also are people like Alric Jones, who cited bad experiences with organized religion ranging from the intolerant churches of his hometown to the ministry that kept soliciting money from his devout late wife - even after Jones lost his job and income after an injury. So that was kind of like, oh, I didn’t really fit, and people don’t like me.” They’re college students who found their childhood churches unpersuasive or unwelcoming.Ĭhurch “was not very good for me,” said Emma Komoroski, a University of Missouri freshman who left her childhood Catholicism in her mid-teens. They’re a mandolin maker in a small Missouri town, a former evangelical disillusioned with that particular strain of American Christianity. They’re secular homeschoolers in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Pittsburghers working to overcome addiction. They’re real people with unique relationships to belief and nonbelief, and the meaning of life. That’s according to a large majority of nones in the AP-NORC survey.īut they’re not just a statistic. While the nones’ diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common: They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity. They’re the atheists, the agnostics, the “nothing in particular.” Many are “spiritual but not religious,” and some are neither or both. Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. religion today, “the most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious,” said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of “The Nones,” a book on the phenomenon. They are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it. The decades-long rise of the nones - a diverse, hard-to-summarize group - is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. The kind that checks “none” when pollsters ask “What’s your religion?” He is a “none” - no, not that kind of nun. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.Īs Dulak rejects being part of a religious flock, he has plenty of company. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled. Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning.
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