How Do Organized Nones Differ From All Nones?
Freethought Hall in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, which serves as the national offices of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (Photo Courtesy FFRF)
(ANALYSIS) In May of last year, Tom Edsall — a columnist at The New York Times — asked me a question that I had never thought about before: “Given the rise of the nones, why aren’t Democrats winning most elections?”
I mean — it’s a really obvious query, and I am kind of ashamed of the fact that it hadn’t crossed my mind at least once before that moment. The nones were 5% of the United States in 1972. They are about 30% of the population today. They are overwhelmingly voting for Kamala Harris in 2024. They are a very reliable voting bloc for the Democrats. Yet, Trump might very well win the 2024 election.
I go through several different reasons why this is the case in a previous post, but there’s one possible explanation that was looming in my head that I just couldn’t answer very well with the data that I had at the time.
The nones just aren’t a coherent “thing” like Catholics or evangelicals. They are united by what they are not. They don’t have regular worship services. I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t a dominant worldview among the nonreligious. They are a herd of cats, to put it bluntly. And that weakens their political power.
But now, because of a collaboration among the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Paul Djupe and myself, we can have an unprecedented view into the differences in organized nones versus nones in general. Here’s what we did.
We conducted a survey of nonreligious Americans using the Qualtrics platform — it was about 2,400 of them in all. The only thing that unified them was that they identified as atheist or agnostic or claimed no religion in particular.
We also conducted a survey of members from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The response rate was incredible — we collected over 11,400 responses.
We asked a bunch of the same questions in both surveys, which means we can now understand how organized nones look compared to those who were nonreligious but not part of any formal organization like FFRF.
Let’s get to it.
Both samples were asked a series of questions about the household that they grew up in. It’s pretty apparent that people who are currently nonreligious are more likely to have a nonreligious father than a nonreligious mother.
But here’s what really jumps out to me: The FFRF members are much more likely to have grown up with a religious mother or a religious father compared to the random sample of nones that we collected.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.