2 very different stories are being told about people stepping away from faith

Within one month’s time this fall, two different analyses of American religious disaffiliation have been published — the first, a book-length treatment from secular humanist sociologists, Ryan Cragun and Jesse M. Smith, on “the causes and consequences of secularization,” and the second, an extensive Wheatley report on “leaving, staying, and returning to faith” by Latter-day Saint scholars, Stephen Cranney, Justin Dyer, Sam Hardy, Paul Lambert and Loren Marks.
Despite exploring essentially the same phenomenon, the conclusions of these analyses couldn’t be more different. While one downplays family influences on religious exiting, the other highlights them as consequential. While one paints an appealing picture of life after faith drawing on interviews with people estranged from their former religion, the second emphasizes the range of data illustrating the longer-term consequences of faith dissolution.
The first report portrays religion as destined to eventually become a thing of the past and something that usually makes people happier to leave behind. The second report paints a completely different picture, rebutting those same points.
In a day when many Americans seem to have embraced a funhouse-mirror view of religion, full of seriously misleading perceptions, it seems helpful to at least map out some of the competing interpretations about faith in circulation. Below, I summarize three issues on which the Wheatley report diverges significantly from a more secular view on faith disaffiliation:
It’s common to hear online comments like “I left that religion and I’m never going back.” Much the same message is being broadcast by some about a terminal decline in religion as a whole — “modern society is leaving this behind and it’s not going back to it.”
“The decline of religion is a perennial theme in public discourse,” the Wheatley report notes. Although “predictions of the death of religion are centuries old, the data reveals that the world as a whole is actually becoming more religious.” (The authors go on to explain that highly religious people continue to have more children, while the birthrate in secular areas keeps declining).
Although the United States has slightly less people affiliating with faith (7 in 10), compared with the rest of the world (8 in 10, or 84%), the Wheatley authors don’t sugarcoat the challenges, acknowledging “clear indicators that people in the United States and elsewhere are abandoning religion” (the number of ‘nones’ unaffiliated with any religion has grown from 5% three decades ago to about 30% today).
“Some evidence suggests that secularization has already begun to level off,” the report adds — prompting lead author Stephen Cranney to say that this “has kind of been predicted theoretically, but now we’re starting to see it empirically a little bit.”
“Now, will it stay plateaued?” That’s still uncertain, he says. What does seem clear, Justin Dyer adds, is these shifting faith attitudes are “not a one way street where there’s just more and more people becoming more secular. There’s more going on, I think, than people are typically considering.”
“The main message for me,” Paul Lambert tells Deseret News about the report and Wheatley’s work as a whole, is that “religion matters for human flourishing. And that’s the misconception I’m hoping we challenge.” He flags “simple narratives out there that ‘religion is obsolete, or it’s not relevant anymore, or it’s becoming irrelevant, or at best, it’s an interesting social factor.’”
“I just don’t think that’s true. The data doesn’t suggest that at either a global level or at a national level,” emphasizes Lambert, Wheatley’s Religion Initiative Director. “Religion matters, and we can’t deny its impact.”
The intersection of religion and politics was center stage in the nation’s recent election, with political hostilities sometimes intruding into faith communities, like every other group. Yet a groundbreaking More in Common study recently pushed back on the common presumption that politics is what motivates people of faith the most, which has come to be a common perspective among secular critics of religion.
This extensive national survey found that political expression was among the least common reasons for religious engagement, with only 6% of Americans saying they turn to their faith community to express their political views and fewer than 9% saying they turn to their faith “to advance social or political causes.” Instead, other reasons such as looking for guidance in life (37%), finding comfort during difficult times (46%), and deepening their relationship with God (54%) motivate believers more.
Authors of the Wheatley report reach the same conclusion after surveying the broader literature — writing that “people’s religious backgrounds, beliefs, and identities shape their political leanings.” Lambert elaborates to push back on the idea that disaffiliation patterns are simply “a social trend or a liberal trend or a conservative trend.” Instead, he argues that “religion existed long before our current ways of seeing the world, and it’ll be around long after these ways of seeing the world are gone.”
“Religion transcends all of those ideological frameworks,” Lambert says. “Religion isn’t defined by our political ideologies or our political lenses. There’s something deeper going on.”
Promotional efforts for the aforementioned secular analysis included an infographic purporting to answer “how does religion impact society?” In multiple colorful blocks, the authors assert things such as “for most people who leave their religion, abandoning religion is NOT A CRISIS and does not generally disrupt their health, charitable giving, or volunteering.” Also, that “the fears among some that massive religious exit will result in a decline in family values or less civic engagement are UNFOUNDED” (caps for emphasis are their own).
“Nonreligious people don’t have a ‘religion-shaped hole’ in their lives,” columnist Jana Riess wrote in her summary of the book — highlighting the authors’ critique of the idea that nonreligious people are somehow “missing the presence of God or religion in their lives” and quoting their summary of interviewees who insist, “Not only is it not bad to be without religion, but I haven’t lost anything.”
Wheatley authors are sympathetic about unique challenges faced by believers today, but they are plainspoken regarding clear trends in decades of data. “We recognize that each individual’s experience is unique,” Lambert says. “But if you want to increase the odds that your own life is going to have purpose and meaning, the data suggests that being actively engaged in religion will increase the odds.”
If something is generally beneficial, then walking away from it will be generally harmful, the Wheatley authors explain. “Due to religion’s positive effects on both individuals and societies,” their report summarizes, “the growing trend of religious disaffiliation carries significant negative implications for individual health and well-being, familial relationships, community cohesion, and demographic stability.”
“We want to be sensitive about each person’s individual experience,” Lambert reiterates. “But if we look at aggregate data, it’s clear that religion has a powerful role in enabling human flourishing — both increasing the things that will bring purpose and meaning and increasing the odds that you’re going to be protected from risky behaviors or mental health challenges.”
That kind of probability statement is “much less exciting” than more dramatic, black and white statements about religion out there, Lambert concedes. “It’s much less neon lights, but that’s what we’re trying to say. We’re not trying to say that those that leave religion are all nut cases, and those that are in religion are all flourishing at level 11. It’s just more complicated.”
But the overall pattern is still hard to deny. “The bulk of the social science research,” Sam Hardy summarizes, “seems to suggest pretty repeatedly and reliably that for most people, most of the time, religion has positive outcomes for individual well being — lower risk behaviors, higher pro social behaviors, psychological well being, better relationship quality.”
“So, because of that,” Hardy continues, with more people leaving religion, “we should expect possibly some negative outcomes for them.” While some data shows that nonreligious teens are sometimes comparable to religious youth, he explains that when differences arise, the nonreligious youth are typically worse off.
When comparing religious vs. nonreligious people, Cranney adds that premarital sexual relations, drinking, drugs, things like that — the risky behaviors — those actually are higher for less religious people.” He says, “the non religious people do, I guess, party harder — however you want to frame that — they do engage in more risky behavior. So there is some truth to that.”
The Wheatley report concludes by advancing a “complex picture that neither depicts religion as a relic of a bygone age nor downplays the significant headwinds faced by religion in the twenty-first century.” What seems clear, the authors say, is that “society will continue to be shaped by religion, religion in turn will be influenced by society, and faith will continue to be a powerful force in the world far into the future.”