SIO127: Rise of the Nones! with Kristi Winters

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:39 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 127. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and today I am very pleased to bring you an interview with Dr. Kristi Winters about a topic that I know will be near and dear to our hearts, which is the rise of the Nones. N-O-N-E-S. Kristi has been studying the data on this, and there's some questions that she's here to explore and answer, and one of them I have, which is, you often hear the group the Nones being one of the largest rising groups there is, but does that mean atheism is on the rise? Well, I don't know, not necessarily. So we're going to explore those issues and more in this conversation about the rise of Nones in America. Here you go.

0:01:32 Thomas: Hey, Kristi, welcome back to the show!

0:01:34 Kristi: It's so great to be back, and I'm really happy to be here. So, thanks for inviting me.

0:01:38 Thomas: Oh, I'm very happy to have you, and I'm really interested to hear what you're working on. You've been doing some work exploring the rise of religious Nones, is that right?

0:01:47 Kristi: That's correct. So I pitched this idea to you because I find this work really fascinating, but I find a hard time finding other people who will listen to me talk about it, and yes,

0:01:58 Thomas: And it's so funny, because every time I say it, I am like, people are going to think I'm saying nuns. Like, N-U-N. There's no, I need to pronounce it like nuns or something. I need a better pronunciation.

0:02:08 Kristi: That's true, that problem with the term itself, because people, when you talk about religiousness and religiosity, and then you mention nuns, they're going to think of the women And the habits, not the word with the O in it. Yeah, u's Not O's

0:02:15 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. There's, it would be funny how, if there are people who think there's like a sharp rise in nuns, like there's just nuns everywhere.

0:02:25 Kristi: Nuns On the run Uh, there's Actually, like the phrase religiously unaffiliated, which you could shorten to the ruse, but I don't know that that's any better, to be honest.

0:02:28 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:02:39 Thomas: We'll figure it out. Somebody, anybody in marketing out there give us a, give us suggestions.

0:02:43 Kristi: Come Up Yeah. Otherwise we'll have a spike in the ruses and people are like, what? Australia.

0:02:44 Thomas: Yeah yeah. I've always been really interested in this because I I'm curious, a lot of atheists will credit this as, as, you know, atheism on the rise, and I'm never sure if that's exactly true. Like, sometimes I wonder if it's just Christians are getting a little more lazy or something like that, where they're just like, eh.

0:03:04 Kristi: I Have Mm-hmm, that was the attitude I kind of came to this question with as well, because as someone who went from Catholicism into Buddhism, into sort of agnosticism, and then into being quite a strong atheist, the idea of this was thrown around a lot, the rise of the Nones, or the religiously unaffiliated, you know, Seth Andrews, and other people would mention it, Bill Maher mentions it a lot.

I think people in leadership, because it is a big deal relative to how much religiosity there has traditionally been in the United States, and because I saw, you know, the Dawkins delusion out there and people talking about this, and you saw the doubling of atheists from like three to six percent and things, I kind of had the idea that the religiously unaffiliated were quite unreligious or unspiritual, and when I started to dig into the Data and put it all together, I was pretty stunned to find that atheists are still very much a minority, even Within the religious, religiously unaffiliated, and so I wanted, yeah, to to talk about This, because it is so complicated, and yeah, this will be a great chance to do it.

0:03:58 Thomas: Yeah. You, are you, excellent. Yeah, sorry, I was just going to ask where you were focused if you were looking in, you know, in Europe and America. Are you focused on any geographical area in particular?

0:04:19 Kristi: Laser-focused on the United States. As an American, So I come at it in two ways. One is I'm an American atheist, and also I'm a social scientist. Now, I'm going to put my hands up and say that I'm dabbling outside my field insofar as I don't do the sociology of religion, but I do do social science, and the data interests me, and what's particularly interesting to me as an American and an atheist are looking at these trends, because I have an investment in policy outcomes in my home country. It's still very important to me that we have a good sort of, you know, good set of public policies, and those come from the kinds of people we put in office, and that is reflected by who gets to vote and what they're voting for. And with, we saw in the last election, a big push to get people who are secular and atheist to vote. And this idea of being the second largest religious, non-religious group now in the United States.

0:04:21 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:05:09 Kristi: But this focus on this rising non-affiliated group of religious people is definitely a uniquely American phenomenon. And not only am I studying it in this way, but I'm part of it. So that kind of is an interesting way to practice is social science. On the one side, there's the activist side of me, and then there's the curious social scientist who wants to understand the phenomenon from a scientific perspective.

0:05:33 Thomas: That's interesting. So Nones being on the rise is, you found it's strictly an American thing?

0:05:39 Kristi: Americans are really weird when it comes to how religious they are. And this goes back to, I would say, you know, coming from the tradition of political science, it comes from, one, the fact that that we kept Christian battles out of our government from the founding of our nation. And this was hugely important into, I think, in the way that religion developed. But also with the continued expansion of the country, people were moving away from government, and so they had these social networks, usually built around churches and faith, that sustained them over time. And government caught up later as people moved westward. So the church has always played a very unique role in American history in being that sort of center of community, but also not being tainted by political power.

0:06:24 Kristi: If you think about the UK, which has higher levels of sort of secularism and non-religious associations, obviously you've had people, Protestants and Catholics, fighting there. In the city where I live now, Cologne, there was a time when the people of Cologne were very upset with, I think if you're in a cathedral, you're an archbishop, and they made their own money here. So it was a pretty important spot. But the people of Kelowna really fed up with the Catholic leader who was leading the city. And they literally drove him out of the city, he had to go to Dusseldorf, up the river to get away from the crowds of people who were so angry with him. And in the French Revolution, the religious class was also very much targeted for destruction and critique, to say the least, by the revolutionaries.

0:07:10 Kristi: So because of the fights between Catholics and Protestants fighting over and then using state power to implement religious beliefs on their population, that had a sort of an alienating effect. And of course, too, in Eastern Europe, you had Soviet influence and a much lower level of religiosity in communist states. So for a lot of reasons, Europe is far less religious than their American peers.

0:07:36 Thomas: Okay, so therefore, when we're talking about non-affiliated, that number's not on the rise because of the history involved, whereas in the U.S. it is on the rise, you're saying, because we were so religiously affiliated that now people are changing their status. Is that what it is?

0:07:56 Kristi: We're kind of starting to catch up to our European peers in that way. We've got a long ways to go, but even on the number of Americans that believe creationism is how the universe came into being compared to Europeans is just like really Skewed. So we have

0:08:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Well then Let me, let me just quickly clarify the question then, so is the, when you said it was unique to the United States, is it the rise of Nones, or is it the percentage of not, like, which, which aspect of it is unique? Maybe that's where I was confused.

0:08:22 Kristi: Ah Well Yeah, we were so religious to begin with and we stayed very religious, basically, like there was a low level of people who were willing to say that they were atheists and unaffiliated. But after the 90s, and especially after the 2000s, the rate really went up, and it went up because there was a lot of room because of such high religiosity. So Europe couldn't kind of sustain the sort of spike, you know, trend line, because they just don't have as many religious people, so because Americans were religious for so long, we're seeing now a cultural shift, and we're starting to see this rise of of people who don't identify with a particular faith, and that's what, what I mean when I say the words religiously affiliated. They identify as Hindu or Christian or Jewish or whatever else.

0:08:51 Thomas: Right.

0:09:09 Thomas: Okay, well, interesting. Well, uh, I, I know you probably wanted to tell us a bit about this project and and the origins and and what you're doing, so why don't you go ahead and give us the overview here.

0:09:19 Kristi: I really do. I'm such a social science nerd. When I'm not doing things, you know, like at work, I still question and want to know more about the social world in my spare time. And because I went through the process of deconversion and became one of these religiously unaffiliated. I looked for information on there. And in the sociology of religion and in political science and religion and politics as well, you tend to focus on the positive side of the spectrum. So you look at the people who hold religious identifications. And especially in the United States, there weren't really enough Nones to study. They were pretty small numbers. And so they were just sort of discounted or controlled for in studies rather than being an object of of inquiry itself.

0:10:07 Kristi: And so I didn't find a lot of information on deconverting from religion. So I did a little, like, case study into that on my own, and wish I had more time to do that research, because I did find some interesting patterns on common themes that people experience when they leave religion and go into atheism in particular.

But the other part of that, too, is a political scientist and also as a political activist, I'm interested in the things that drive people's decisions, and his huge influence on people's political attitudes is their religious beliefs or lack thereof. And so it's a natural progression to kind of look at religion or the lack of religion as a way to understand or maybe predict how people will view an issue or which party they will vote for. So this interest, to another political scientist, Stephen Cattell, who is in charge of or was in charge of the Religion and Politics Specialist Group.

And I interviewed him on my YouTube channel and we've kept in touch. And he's recently, he invited me to present something on a panel he was hosting on religion and politics at a conference that's coming up in March. And so I proposed this idea, which I was already working on for something else that he's invited me for. And he said, yeah, why don't you go ahead and do it? And then since I was putting it together, and I was kind of interested in getting the information to more than 15 people in a room at a conference.

0:10:51 Thomas: Interesting.

0:11:36 Kristi: This is when I got in contact and said, you know, Thomas, yeah.

0:11:37 Thomas: You get into about 20 people on a podcast. No, I'm just kidding.

0:11:42 Kristi: But it just seemed like since we talked about talking about things other than MythCon when we were last on a podcast together, I was like, this is something positive and interesting that would suit your show. So I got engaged with you.

0:11:55 Thomas: Yeah, I am really glad to have you. It is going to be really interesting to think about. So, I guess yeah, let us dig into it. What are the things you are finding? Let us see what the data says.

0:12:05 Kristi: Right. Well, as I said, Americans are quite different from their European counterparts when it comes to their religiosity. And if you can imagine a chart on the left side of the chart, there's from less religious to more religious, and then from less money to more money. The curve goes downwards as the more money you get, the less religious you get. Except for the United States, which is an outlier, which just sort of sticks out like a sore thumb.

0:12:33 Thomas: Oh, right. You are talking GDP like on a country by country basis.

0:12:33 Kristi: Right. And so we know that people have known for a while that there's this association of sort of industrialization and modernization with secularization, except for America. And that difference does play into our politics. Uniquely among their European peers, Christians in the United States are way more likely to think of themselves as a Christian first, and then as as American second.

0:12:38 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:13:02 Kristi: So I'm looking at some Pew data here.

0:13:03 Thomas: Hey, Hey, that's Mike Pence. Christian first. I think he's a conservative next. He's not even an American. We better check his status, actually. Because he might get deported by Trump soon. Because I think He's a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third.

0:13:06 Kristi: Yeah, yeah. On the list. Yes. Yes. Yeah. American doesn't even make the list for Mike Pence. There are so many other identities that are more important to him. Really smart.

0:13:23 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. So I'm seeing in in the data you've, you've sent me here that, uh, so when you're looking at Christians in America, it's 46 percent of American Christians see themselves as Christian first and American second, and this is 36% saw themselves the opposite, Americans first, Christians second. And when you compare it to Germany, only 23% of German Christians thought of themselves as Christians first, Germans second. Interesting. And then Spain, it's 22%. Remarkably similar numbers, British Christians, 21%. So 23, 22, 21. But then France, yeah, France. France is always an outlier. 8% of French Christians consider themselves Christian first and French second. So that's, wow, stark contrast there.

0:14:14 Kristi: Yeah, really different. And if you think about two, another big difference is the people who agree that religion plays a very important role in their lives when you compare America with some of those other countries. Whereas, you know, like 50% of Americans agree that religiousness is very important, whereas only 21% of Germans, 17% in the UK, and I think it's 13% in France, would say the same thing. So you just see not only how their identity, how American Christian identity is quite different, but even the role that religion plays in people's everyday lives, not just their identity. That's really a big difference.

0:14:26 Thomas: Oh, I'd be curious if they've updated that one. I wouldn't even be surprised if it was more. Because like 50 is, it seems, and this isn't just Christians. This is just any religion, right? Or, right, right.

0:15:04 Kristi: Well, this is Americans reporting that their religion was very important in their lives, yes. Yes.

0:15:08 Thomas: Right. Yeah. I'm actually surprised it's only 50. That's kind of surprising to me. Oh,

0:15:09 Kristi: But Yeah, Well, of course important or something like, uh, somewhat important or very important. It might be something right. There are more positive.

0:15:16 Thomas: Okay, yeah, yeah, Yeah, there you go, there's probably, probably all Told it's like it's okay, I see.

0:15:20 Kristi: Yeah, And in terms of agreeing that belief in God is necessary to be moral, Americans agree at 53 with that statement, whereas in Germany it's 35, 25%, 20% in the UK, and 15% in France.

0:15:28 Thomas: Isn't That's shocking that a majority of people in this country believe that I can't be moral, like I literally cannot be moral, that's according to more than half of the people, I'm that kind of sucks.

0:15:52 Kristi: And part of it, too, is I'm sure people just haven't ever encountered an atheist, and so it hasn't occurred to them you could be moral without cause, I would imagine. But that's still a pretty shocking statement in the 21st century. And this data is from 2011, but that's not that long ago. We're not looking at 1997 data or or something on that.

0:15:55 Thomas: Yeah, right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's really interesting. I bet you, a short sidebar as a sociologist, it's going to be fascinating to look at any data post 2016, you know, because of just how fundamental of a split there was. Because like when you look at the evangelicals, you know, I'm sure you've seen how that's completely skewed their data once Trump was the candidate. You know, it went from like, we need a strong moral leader to, okay, we don't really need a moral leader per se. You know? We don't Really need. They just fundamentally just switched on a dime. So I'm very curious in the future. We'll do a podcast 10 years from now. Now, it's going to be funny when we're both talking about how much the data looks skewed for however many years it does.

0:16:54 Kristi: Yes. The thing to be watching, I would say, is the cohort effect on millennials and how they compare with other generations, because that will really tell you the extent to which these cultural impacts are seeping into their moral frameworks over time.

0:17:05 Thomas: Hmm.

0:17:14 Thomas: Interesting. Good point. Yeah.

0:17:16 Kristi: Yeah. So leading on to that, you know, talking about millennials and this role of religion and politics, and again, you're bringing it in because I'm a political scientist, is when we then think about, like I said, if really, if you think of yourself as a Christian first, that's going to frame how you vote and it's, you, I don't know if you saw the focus group with the women who were saying that, um, even if Donald Trump did have an affair with that porn star star after his wife had just given birth, God put him in the White House, and this is part of God's plan. Well,

0:17:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's so frustrating is like, yeah, okay, you're Christian first, so therefore you would vote for whoever's the most Christian of a candidate, right? Well, no, just whoever the right says is the most Christian. It doesn't actually matter, like, their actions or their life or anything like that. That's what was so frustrating. But anyway, I'll stop complaining about 2016. No, I probably won't I probably won't. Oh,

0:18:09 Kristi: I'll just throw another thing related to, um, to Roy Moore was the pastor who said, you know, God used sinners like David to accomplish his plan, so you're just what

0:18:19 Thomas: That's right, so that's your get out of jail free card, I guess. That's your once God used sinners, then you can support anybody as long as, as long, long as the, the kind of right-wing Christian, uh, there decides they're the, the candidate that God wants you're right

0:18:22 Kristi: Yeah that's that's the decision, yeah, whatever happened, that he, he's forgiven now, he's sorry, all This impact in politics, obviously, we saw the Moral Majority in the 1980s. And we're starting to see, as we said, this trend of people who are religiously unaffiliated coming forward. And one of the things that you can say about them is they're definitely more politically left or liberal than religious people. They kind of had to be. There were very few places to go. But generally, when we're going to be looking at the types of people who are identifying as religiously unaffiliated, they're going to be more politically liberal. They're going to be more likely to be Democrats, but there's not a whole lot of difference there. But in terms of their social attitudes, there are some pretty big differences. Now in terms of American secularization, for a long time into the 60s, 70s, and 80s, you're bumping around percentages of secularization that are pretty low, like single digits.

0:19:37 Kristi: And as you get into the 90s and then into the 2000s, there's a real big increase. So by 2014, and this is according to Pew, those who answered the question as nones when they were asked about their religious affiliation had grown to 56 million Americans. And at that point, they made up the second largest group of respondents behind evangelicals. And yeah, so that's pretty big.

0:20:05 Kristi: This is why it's kind of an interesting phenomenon. And in that same 2014 period, 23% of Americans identified themselves as nothing in particular, agnostics, or atheists. And that gives really good, you know, that's like the good news side of things.

0:20:05 Thomas: Yeah yeah so wait is that I'm sorry, was that a different category than none? Was nothing in, or, that is the None, or sorry, maybe I don't understand. Okay.

0:20:27 Kristi: Right. So I think that of that number, the 23%, that's, I mean, it lumps in then nothing in particular agnostics and atheists in that category. But the second largest non-religious religious group is a big shift in American politics. And we're going to see too that the trend is that younger people are far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than older people. So in terms of looking forward, this group is looking like it's going to increase. Trees. The thing that surprised me and maybe depressed me as an atheist is that when you start to unpack these numbers a little bit, people who are religiously unaffiliated are, to quote the article, overwhelmingly not self-identified atheists or

0:20:41 Thomas: Gotcha yeah

0:21:17 Kristi: Agnostics. In the Pew data that I am looking at right now, of the people who are religiously unaffiliated, 14% said they identified as atheists, 13% as agnostics, 16% still identified as a religious person, just not any particular religion, and 58% self-identified as a secular person.

0:21:38 Thomas: That, that's interesting because a secular person in theory should apply no matter what, like if you're right or what, how, I wonder how people are defining that. Like if you could be Christian, but also be in favor of secularism, or am I wrong? Am I thinking in terms of government?

0:21:54 Kristi: Well, maybe that is part of the, I think of myself as a Christian first and an American second, and these people might be saying, you know, I might be secular, even if I I have some religious or spiritual views, I see myself as a secular person.

0:21:58 Thomas: Hmm. Right. But they still answered, that'S interesting, but they still entered the question. The first question, this is of the people who said, unaffiliated, right? But at any rate, I think this bears out what my guess was at the beginning, that this could be a lot of, I said lazy Christians, but it also could just be a lot of religious people who were just like, I don't really like religious leadership in this country. Like, I Don't like, you know, the people who are calling themselves leaders, so I'm still religious, but not, I'm not going to call myself it or something, right.

0:22:14 Kristi: Yep, correct.

0:22:38 Kristi: Right, because if you, there's some, you segued into that perfectly, the Pew 2017 data. If you ask people to self-report their identity, if they say I'm religiously unaffiliated, 35% identified as Protestant, 14% as Catholic, and 11% from sort of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism, and 37% in the Pew data identified as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. So yeah, a lot of the religiously unaffiliated still, you know, they still do Christmas with their families. They still go to maybe church on Easter before they have the meal with their families.

0:22:38 Thomas: Right? Yeah. Yeah. I imagine, and I don't know if you have this data, but I imagine if you ask them certain questions about religion or about their beliefs, they're not going to tell you, "Oh, I don't believe any of that garbage." You know, they'll probably, I imagine they would still answer with some sort of metaphysical, you know, spiritual answers. But is that something that you have, or no? Right

0:23:32 Kristi: The data actually indicates that people, it's, so here's a case where the society maybe isn't changing as fast as we thought it was. It's the people in the society that are changing. So if you look at the habits of people who say that they're religiously unidentified, they tend to not go to church, and they tend not have high belief in God and the role of religion. But previously, they would still say, oh, I'm a Catholic. I'm a lapsed Catholic, perhaps.

0:24:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:01 Kristi: And what seems to be happening is the behaviors of people who say they're religiously unaffiliated are pretty much the same as the people who said they were Catholic in the past, but just really not very high religious in their practices and their beliefs. Now they're more likely to say, I'm religiously unaffiliated. So what are we really capturing here? Is it really this big rise of the Nones, or did post-God delusion, did it become more socially acceptable to just say, yeah, I don't really have, I am a spiritual but not not religious person.

0:24:31 Thomas: Yeah, or or alternatively, or or kind of going hand in hand with that, I wonder if the just the the the display of the Christian right in, you know, 2000, 2008, during the Bush administration, if that also could have just turned people off from from association, like, like not wanting to say like, "Ah, no, I'm not, I're not that." Could be part of that, maybe.

0:24:54 Kristi: One of the things that really surprised me, but not much when I thought about it, is that when you look at who are the religiously unaffiliated, and there are data on LGBT respondents, and half of LGBT respondents are religiously unaffiliated. It's like one of the largest groups of religiously unaffiliated if you kind of look at demographics. And it's because they've been driven from the religions that they might have been raised in. But yeah, Yeah, I mean, that's a, when you look at the kinds of people who are going to be religiously unaffiliated, if you're LGBT on the line, the chances are pretty good that you're probably not an active member of a religion. And if you are, it's probably a pretty liberal one. But yeah, so there is a link there between we are looking at the numbers, whether or not, like I said, it is really the categories that are changing are just people are willing to call themselves something else now.

0:25:13 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:25:49 Thomas: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, it makes sense that people who would feel alienated would be willing to say, okay, no I'm, not that,

0:25:56 Kristi: Very much so, yes. When you're sort of driven from your church, you don't necessarily lose your faith or the things that you care about or believe in. You just might not be accepted where you were before. So that's one of the things, you know, I think sociologists will be looking at and paying attention to to see, you now, how many more religiously unaffiliated people are willing to sort of come out as it were. And there are places in the states too where it's more acceptable. There's a lot more people in the Northeast than in the South. So there are some geographic roles that this plays in American life and in American politics too.

0:26:32 Thomas: That so interesting. I was going to ask you this early on, but then I decided I'd wait to see if it came up because my, just my, again, Again, my uneducated but slightly educated hypotheses that I come up with, I was going to imagine that being a None would be something that would be more common in California, for example, because I've noticed in the past few years that I've started going to atheist conferences and stuff that, and this is very obvious, but it's, again, the bias that I kind of the blind spot that I have living in California, even though I'm still surprised at how religious it is, the energy for atheism is so much higher in the South. And with good reason, like that's where people are, you know, being ostracized or they're seeing what the power of religion is, where they are.

0:27:25 Thomas: So I was going to ask you if that were true, if there's more more people who say I'm an atheist in the South because they're sort of driven to make that choice more so than in liberal states, maybe like, like in my state of California, where people honestly just don't really care that much. They're like, "Ah, religion. Yeah. Everybody has their religion." Because we're not in California, we're not here seeing like bathroom bills happening around us and like all this horrible Christian bullshit, you know? So that was going to be something I was going ask if it were true. What do you, what do you think of my little amateur hypothesis there? Yeah.

0:28:02 Kristi: Oh, I definitely think that you could do, well, one, you've got a sort of a mixture of like geography and individual psychology. So you need to separate Those out. But it is definitely the case that Western states and in the Northeast it's much, there's more reporting of being religiously unaffiliated or being an atheist, and that people who are a minority, and when you start to identify as an atheist in the South, yeah, you become sort of, you know, consciousness-raising experiences, and therefore your identity is far more pronounced. Like, Europeans don't get why Americans wear their atheism on their sleeves, because Yeah, just that they don't have to, because that kind of bathroom bills and stuff doesn't really come up in their, in their politics.

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I think I've, I've mentioned it, but if I found it so, uh, just educational and interesting when, uh, Lydia and I took our Europe trip, of, gosh, I don't even know, a couple years ago now I guess, when I, I did some meetups, so I decided to meet up with some listeners, uh, and in, in France. Like, you know, I'm just not aware of these things because it's not where I live and I'm not that worldly, I suppose. But in France, there's just no such thing as like an atheist group. They just do not exist. I literally talked to everyone I met there. I met, you Know, six, seven, eight people. They're probably still listening. Hi, everybody, who

0:30:44 Thomas: I met There. They all were there from somewhere else. So they were like living in France but they were from somewhere Else. And I was talking to one listener who was like, yeah, I looked for an atheist group when I first got here, and people were just like, what are you talking about? Nobody bothers, you know? It's so funny that it's so different there.

0:31:02 Kristi: And France is one of the most sort of, you know, secular states, yeah, in Europe. That's where they, I think there's some legislation, well, they've, they've gone after the burka, haven't they, um, the bikini burka, right? Yeah.

0:31:06 Thomas: Yeah, it's sort of like, I mean, maybe this increasingly won't be a good example, but it's like, we don't have round earth clubs or something like that. Maybe we'll, we'll need to assume, but but like there's no, everybody is just like, "Yeah, that's, that's what it is." What are you talking about? Hmm.

0:31:22 Kristi: Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And there's this weird mix, too, of, you know, Americans having a really deep sense of the separation of church and state. And you've got groups like the ACLU and Freedom From Religion Foundation and others who keep that commitment and keep those sort of court battles going. And again, that's just not really something you get quite as often anywhere else in Europe. And so, yeah, when you're in that state and it's happening in your community or someplace that, that, you know, that touches you more deeply, and you're going to be more agitated by it than living in California, where you never have to deal with that kind of stuff. So you get more radicalization where you get more conflict.

0:32:08 Thomas: Well, thanks for indulging my amateur hypothesis, feel

0:32:10 Kristi: You were totally right on the geography impact.

0:32:14 Thomas: Yeah, it also could, it sounds like it would be polluted a little bit by the fact that, uh, there's more left-leaning Nones anyway, so like you'd be, you'd have to maybe get into more detailed data to separate out the, the question of like, is it just, you know, liberal states have more Nones because they lean left, or because of what all the nonsense I'm spewing? Sure.

0:32:35 Kristi: Yeah, so getting into who are the Nones a little bit, if you don't mind, we'll jump into that. Slides with us. So starting with ethnicity, there was actually an increase in reporting non-religious affiliation across every single ethnic group measured in the US, but they kind of boil it down to whites, blacks, and Hispanics. So there was like an eight-point increase from 2012 to 2017 for whites. It's a seven-point decrease for blacks. And for Hispanics, it went from 16% to 23%. So we're just seeing a general trend of people who are willing to say, I'm spiritual but not religious in terms of ethnicity. We also see it, men and women, in terms of gender in the aggregate. There are increases from 2012 to 2015, and even there's a steeper incline for Dems and people who lean Dem.

0:33:24 Kristi: But even among Republicans, from 2012, where it was 15% who said that they were spiritual but not religious, it went up to 23% in 2017. So this is a pretty broad-reaching trend. It's not specific to a demographic, but in terms of age, you do get a cohort effect where older people, even if they report low levels of religious activity, they'll still identify with a religion. But younger people who engage in a similar amount of religious activity will say that they're religiously unaffiliated. So all of the headwinds really are just sort of, actually that would be tailwinds, wouldn't it, to the back of the religiously unaffiliated in terms of identification across ethnicities, across genders, and across even party affiliation.

0:33:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:08 Thomas: Yeah, so people are just, their behaviors aren't that different, it's just answering the question a little differently based on their behaviors. Okay.

0:34:18 Kristi: It might be correct. So part of it might be people, who would, people who used would normally identify with a religion in the past, will now just say they're unaffiliated. But, but, you're definitely seeing a big cohort effect for millennials, where early on in their lives, they're identifying as religiously unaffiliated. And so that, you know, some people might change, but obviously, that's a thing that is pretty, it takes a lot to shift in people's lives. So I think that we're moving in that way.

0:34:30 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:43 Thomas: And then the numbers look really big yeah Yeah, yeah, the effect looks really large from the data I'm seeing.

0:34:50 Kristi: Agree. And when you're talking about six point difference, you now, in a country of over 300 million people, that ends up being quite a lot of people. In terms of gender, though, No. One thing that I don't think you'll find surprising is that self-identified atheists and agnostics are more likely to be men, but people who say they're spiritual but not religious are more unlikely to be women.

0:35:06 Thomas: Interesting. What are, what is your opinion based on this data of the question, are there a similar amount of men and women who are atheists but answer that question differently for some reason? So like, is, again, is the gender discrepancy made up for, like the lack of female atheists is kind of compensated for by women who say they're unaffiliated, or are the numbers not quite the same there?

0:35:35 Kristi: It seems that women are more likely to say that they're special, but they're not religious. And when it comes to women who do identify as atheists, I don't have the data here, but I remember looking into it and I found it really interesting. Women who identify as atheist, if you ask them about how strong an atheist they they are or what their kind of beliefs are. They're as atheist as men who say that they're atheist. But there are fewer women who identify that way. But then you get sort of the reverse where if a guy is religiously unaffiliated, he's more likely to say he's atheist.

But a woman is more likely to say, I'm spiritual but not religious. And one could think of that as the fact that women tend to have higher rates of religiosity than men do. Women just, like in a lot of of countries, and I think every country, if you look at who is more likely to say I'm a religious person, women are more likely to say that they are, like, practicing religion than men are. So there's already in the data that kind of preset for women to be more spiritual and more religious than men, and we're seeing it reflected here and in this data, too.

0:35:56 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:36:39 Thomas: Interesting. Okay. But some amount of it, I guess what I was interested in is like, I don't know that we know this specifically, but there There might be some amount of it that's, okay, women just have a higher propensity for religion, but also there could be some amout of it that is the same possible behavior or set of beliefs, but they answer that question differently. Like, women might be more likely to say, eh, unaffiliated, rather than, say, atheist.

0:37:06 Kristi: Right. Definitely.

0:37:07 Thomas: Or, I mean, you could phrase it the other way. Men are more apt to say yes, I'm an atheist. That could be also. There's so many different ways to slice or to look at these questions. It's kind of, I guess that's, that's why, uh, that'S why you have a job.

0:37:08 Kristi: Yeah.

0:37:23 Kristi: Yeah. Yes. And that's it. The thing with probability is it goes equally in either direction. So the fact that they, you know, sort of, now the gender gap, you could kind of, in voting, you can say women are more likely to vote for a candidate than men are to vote for that candidate, so you can frame it in the bigness here. But because with spiritual, not religious, or atheist, or not, the other side of the coin is always going to be the other answer. It is how you frame it.

There's a lot, I think, in the linguistics, especially, I Think, in atheist community that tends to look down on women because they do have higher rates of religious belief, and that's somehow a weakness of women, or because women are more emotional, they're more susceptible to religion or something like that. And it is framed almost as an essentialist flaw in women from the perspective of some atheist men. And what I don't think is taken into account is that socialization forces on women in religion teach them to be submissive and to, you know, be subservient and to find their religiosity very important to their identity. And so women coming out of religion have different psychological things to deal with because of the way that they were raised as women within that faith.

0:37:29 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

0:38:39 Kristi: Then, yes, I mentioned it before, but just to say it again that when you survey LGBT Americans, 46% say that they're religiously unaffiliated. And if you compare that with all Americans, only 24% of all Americans say that they're religiously unaffiliated. So it's almost, it was like almost double the chance of being religiously unaffiliated if you know someone is LGBT.

0:39:06 Thomas: Mean, that, that seems rational.

0:39:09 Kristi: And the cohort effect applies here, too, because looking at this Pew data, not only, but 25% of LGBT seniors said that they were religiously unaffiliated, but 56% of LGBTQ adults aged 18 to 29 said they're religiously unaffiliated. So that millennial effect is not sort of, you know, it's across, it looks like, these spectrums, not sortof, you know, chunked up. Well,

0:39:33 Thomas: So you're saying like that millennial effect kind of trumps this other effect. Like it's, it's almost more powerful of an effect than being LGBT in terms of being religiously unaffiliated.

0:39:47 Kristi: I'm saying that in terms of the population, the millennial effect will have a wider sweep because it's across all identities. But within the LGBT community, it's especially high, like ridiculously high compared to if you just took a sample of the rest of America. So if that's just a population.

0:40:01 Thomas: Okay. Right. But I still found it. Didn't you just say that only 25% of older LGBT people were, it seemed like there was a similar. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, yeah, I just find that interesting. It's like, even, even being LGBT, and facing the barriers you would face there didn't turn as many people off as it does for millennials. I just, it's, that's really really fascinating.

0:40:15 Kristi: Yep. Yeah, yeah. That was it. 25% of seniors said they're religiously unaffiliated.

0:40:32 Kristi: I think that comes down to childhood socialization. I think this is why millennials identifying as religiously unidentified is so important for the future. Because it's, you know, when you're raised in that sort of environment and your family was all that way and gay rights and the gay movement hit when you were in your 30s and 40s, as an adult, you'd sort of, you know, your life had kind of been set in certain ways already. Ready.

0:40:56 Kristi: So I think that the code effect might, that might be something that would go into it. But in terms of politics, this isn't going going to be, I think, too surprising if you've ever listened to, well, atheists who don't exist on YouTube, but atheists in terms of the, if you look at people who are atheists, I've got some data and this changes a little bit, but in this particular sample, again, being Pew data from 2012, 69% of atheists identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party. 56% of them called themselves politically liberal. They overwhelmingly favor legal abortion and marriage equality. And even 52% of people who say that they are neither spiritual nor religious are supportive of the Democratic Party.

0:40:34 Thomas: Right, yeah. Yeah,

0:41:45 Kristi: Ahead, So 52% percent of neither spiritual or religious are supportive of the democratic party. And that's 2017 Pew data.

0:41:45 Thomas: You Say 52 Well, That's not a very big is it that's Kind of that's

0:41:57 Kristi: Well, then you have to like chop up all the rest of the people into Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Buddhists, you know. So when you look at the Democratic Party's base, actually the people who are, and again, spiritual but not religious counts as religiously unaffiliated. So that is still, yeah.

0:41:58 Thomas: Right, Right, I Just mean I I would Have expected them to be a little more liberal I suppose.

0:42:19 Kristi: Oh, well, I guess I'm coming from America where, you Know, 46% of American Christians see themselves as Christian first and American second. 52% is a majority. That's good with me.

0:42:34 Thomas: Well, Maybe I'm misunderstanding, so 52 of unaffiliated right are are Democrats. So 48 48%.

0:42:39 Kristi: Yeah, sorry. Sorry. I should actually, I'm dealing, throwing,

0:42:42 Thomas: Yeah. So that leaves 48% other. I don't, I imagine they're not all right wing, but I just would have thought the balance might be skewed a little more like 60-40 or, you know, maybe I, I guess I was wrong.

0:42:42 Kristi: Yeah, throwing well, there might be Green Party supporters in there. There might be libertarians in there too. I don't know. Yeah, I guess I would have to look more deeply into those numbers. So and maybe actually, actually, if you were polling in 2012, what you would find is if you looked at which religious category had the highest support for same-sex marriage before marriage equality became the law of the land, it was those people who said no religious identity. They had the higher support for marriage equality.

0:42:58 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:43:23 Kristi: So that push was very much linked to people who are more secular, at least not religiously caught up, people who aren't practicing a particular religious faith. And another interesting thing to note from this data, again, Pew data. Pew is awesome. They have that religion and public life group, and they put out awesome data. So I strongly recommend people go into the Pew website and look at these things, because that's where a lot of this stuff comes from. But there is a a widening gap in the Democratic and Republican parties in terms of how their members identify.

So in 2006, Republicans, about 4% of them said they were religiously unaffiliated. In 2016, 10 years later, that had grown to 11%. In 2006, for the Democrats, 9%, still single digits for for the Democrats in 2006, said they were unaffiliated, but by 2016, that had grown to 26%. So as a proportion of the base, you can see that religiously unaffliated, they're actually now like the largest group, but 26% is a plurality. The next largest group on here that I'm seeing is 17%, which is black Protestants. But overall, that will have an impact on the kinds of values and policies that you'll see Democrats supporting going forward.

0:43:24 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah.

0:44:49 Thomas: Fascinating. Yeah. Again, I wish that, that 52 were higher from earlier, but that's just me. I worry How much, how many, how many atheists and unaffiliated are caught in the culture wars?

0:44:56 Kristi: Fair enough. And I don't know what percent of that are people who said that they don't have a particular political affiliation. So yeah,

0:45:08 Thomas: Yeah, that's got to be, well, okay, that I again, once again, comes down to the linguistics. I mean, if you're fed up with everything, maybe you would answer you don't have an affiliation. But it's, it's hard in this day and age to imagine not really having an opinion on the current leaders of the country. I'm undecided, that would be a, I don't know who those people are.

0:45:28 Kristi: Fair enough. But interesting for me, I think, because I'm now approaching, well, I'm well into middle age and looking not too near for my golden years. But I can see now that there's a new generation coming up and that things are going going to be progressing beyond me. And what I found exciting coming out of this data as a Democrat and as someone who's progressive is that there's very much a changing face of the Democratic Party. So again, using Pew data, a decade ago, 50% of all Democrats identified as white and Christian. And white Christians are now a minority in the Democratic party. So 40% here identify as religiously unaffiliated and 29% identified as white Christians. So that's, like I said, the Democratic Party itself is very different from the Republican Party in many ways, but also in terms of its religious identities.

0:46:25 Thomas: That's exciting. And tying that into recent news, of course, seeing how all the kids, uh, have taken a real leadership role in speaking about the gun control and in the wake of the shooting, that's been, that's been exciting. I think a lot of people have noticed, like, oh, there's a, there's a new cohort around that's going to be taking up a position of leadership very soon.

0:46:45 Kristi: Yes. I'm personally of the opinion that, well, one, it's the shooting at the high school and the students taking up these voices. It's not so, so much like a breaking point to me or a tipping point as it is like a cacophony that's just reached a crescendo that is starting to shake the world. And those students are standing on the backs of Black Lives Matter activism and mothers against gun violence and people like the Congresswoman Giffords and the work that she's done. So I think there is, uh, you know, they have a whole group of people, groundswell behind them, and they've been watching as well for the last year, people going into the streets and standing up and saying, we're not going to take it anymore.

And I think that the resistance itself and seeing the activism and how you can stand up to your politicians and demand something different, those kids, their voices now, they have people who are willing to lift them up and they have a whole sort of social media and political structure to build, build on that. And I think that kind of momentum now, and all of these voices are making real change, if not in Congress,

0:47:10 Thomas: Yeah. Mm hmm.

0:47:58 Kristi: Then at least in cosmetic ways in corporate America, which seems to be the new place where social policy is made.

0:48:04 Thomas: And I, right. Right. And I do think that it will, I think the excitement will bleed through 2018 elections. I do have, of course, a branch off topic, but I think people have pointed out and I think it is kind of sad that a lot of Black Lives Matter activists should have gotten this kind of reception, you know, but it's almost as though I think I think race does play a big factor It was a group of kids who, yes, they're awesome kids and they're well-spoken and they are precocious and what they're doing is great and everything, but it was almost a group that was so normalized in our country that it was unassailable. There wasn't an easy, oh, Black Lives Matter terrorists and that kind of racist smearing. It wasn't easy to smear them because demographically and what they're going for, there wasn't a lot of racial tension in it. It was a very wide ranging set of goals that wasn't so easy. Even though, by the way, the right still tried to dismiss them in disgusting ways and claim they were actors and everything.

0:48:25 Kristi: Yes. Yes,

0:49:14 Thomas: But I think it just didn't take because there's so broad appeal to them. And I think It's sad that in our society, the same broad appeal wasn't able to be realized for Black Lives Matter activists in the wake of some of these high profile shootings.

0:49:15 Kristi: Agreed.

0:49:34 Kristi: I think there are a lot of people who have, very sadly, they have places on that stage and stories to tell. And the kids that that are taking the lead now, their voices are being heard. But I think we always have to keep the long list in mind, and not just of school shootings, but of unarmed people who are executed by the police wrongly as well, as part of the gun problem. I know that it's quite convenient for Trump to try to parse this up into school shootings and treat this like it's a school shootings issue and a school safety issue. But it's not a shooting issue. It's a guns issue. It's an issue of culture.

0:50:09 Thomas: Yeah, Absolutely. Well, in drawing it to a close here, is there anything that we need to make sure you got to in your data that I didn't allow you to with all my butting in and giving you Weird hypotheses?

0:50:23 Kristi: No. Watching things in society churn. When you watch them with the eye of a sociologist or someone who has a care or familiarity with the social sciences, and you can step back a little bit, this is a very very interesting, to use that term in sort of all of its connotations, time to be alive in America and to watch this change as we really come into the body of the 21st century. We've kind of done the first part of the 21st century, now we're looking to, you know, 2020 and what is life going to be like. And by looking at these attitudes, looking at millennials, what they think, you can start to see the contours of what the political discussions are going to be going forward. And that, to me, is what's exciting about analyzing data we get now the fun of maybe making some predictions going forward.

0:50:29 Thomas: Yeah. Oh,

0:51:17 Kristi: So I think we've covered more than enough to overwhelm anybody who tries to listen. And I want to thank you for the opportunity to geek out on your show.

0:51:27 Thomas: No problem. Thank you. And, you know, I do want to ask actually just to reiterate, in the wake of all these numbers and kind of put a bottom line on on it, it does sound like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like atheism isn't necessarily on the rise in the way that a generous interpretation of this data might make you think. What is the actual rise in actual out-and-out atheists that you see in this data? Is it very significant?

0:51:56 Kristi: Most recently, it was 6%. So no, I mean, it doubled. It went from like 3% within five or seven years or 10 years ago up to 6%. But when we talk about the religious Nones or religiously unaffiliated, don't equate it with atheists. That's a mistake. And that was the real takeaway from this research because that was the perception I have. Oh, look at all these agnostics and atheists, I just thought, oh, you know, agnostics, those would be the other people in the group. It's really not, it's the spiritual, um, but not religious, and they are the religious Nones, and they're the added people with the attitudes that are going to have way more impact because of their numbers than however many loud atheists there are. Oh,

0:52:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. And I suppose it's a battle to, in some ways, I mean, there's a lot going on here, but one thing going on is it might be a battle to court these religiously unaffiliated, because if religious institutions adapt and maybe change and do outreach, maybe they will claim some of them back. And I think it'll be up to atheism as a group, as a movement, to make itself palatable and make itself presentable and fight for some of these hearts and minds. What do you think?

0:53:13 Kristi: Wow, way to segue into the problems of the Me Too movement in the atheist community? Because you're right. The People, the market, if you want to look at who are the people most likely to say, I'm spiritual but not religious, that could be moved over to atheism, they're women.

0:53:18 Thomas: Yeah. New podcast.

0:53:32 Thomas: There you go. Okay.

0:53:33 Kristi: We saw the data.

0:53:34 Thomas: Well, with that in mind, maybe topic for a future show, huh? Right.

0:53:40 Kristi: That would be a very interesting topic for a future show, how to market atheism to women to kind of direct, attract people from the spiritual but but not religious, all the way into open atheism. Yeah, what kind of community would you need to have?

0:53:51 Thomas: Right. To be fair, I think plenty of women have already answered that question, which is like, stop sexually harassing us and start believing us when we say we've been sexually harassed. That's one easy, quick answer.

0:54:03 Kristi: Really easy way to make a big improvement is take a leadership role on sexual assault and harassment accusations that are credibly leveled against members of the community.

0:54:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:13 Thomas: Yeah, that should be the basics. That should be step one. Honestly, that shouldn't be a battle we're even having. But we are.

0:54:14 Kristi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're a humanist, that shouldn't be a discussion to debate, you know.

0:54:24 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, man. Well, so much to talk about in the future. Thanks again, Kristi, for coming on. It's been a pleasure and I learned a lot and yeah, thank you. Oh,

0:54:36 Kristi: Tired. It was really great to talk to you again.

0:54:38 Thomas: Point people to where they should go to find more about you, your YouTube channel, all that stuff.

0:54:43 Kristi: Right. I'm a feminist on YouTube. So what you don't want to do is just put in Kristi Winters and click on the first video You see. What you'll have to do is put in Kristi Winters channel and you can go there and see the various things that I've put up on my channel. I haven't posted it yet, but I did have a conversation with several friends who are polyamorous, and that was a fascinating conversation. I learned so much. So if you want to go check that out, please go to my channel, and then you can go check out the people who actually had the conversation, because I was the one non-poly person there to ask really obvious questions. So, all

0:54:49 Thomas: Yeah.

0:55:18 Thomas: That's interesting, it'll be a chance to learn more about that, but thank you again, have a great evening, and we'll be in touch again soon, I'm sure.

0:55:26 Kristi: Right, thanks again, Thomas.

0:55:52 Thomas: Very interesting stuff. Thanks again to Kristi for coming on the show. Always a pleasure to talk to her. And I love her enthusiasm and energy for sociology and the kinds of research she does. Very interesting. All right, well, that's my show for today. Make sure to check out Philosophers in Space if you haven't already. It really is just getting more and more fun and it makes philosophy fun and accessible. I really think that it has the potential to be a major show because it's just, it's so fun and we're getting so much positive feedback from it. And And it's a place where we don't have to go talk about Trump or the culture wars or anything. It's just good old appreciation of sci-fi and philosophy. So check that out if you haven't already. But But thank you for listening, and I will see you on Thursday.