The shrugging seculars
Gen Z is the most secular generation, but they wear it lightly. Is that shrugging attitude about to change?
When I wrote the first edition of Atheism For Dummies 12 years ago, the religiously unaffiliated were surging both in numbers and influence. About one in five Americans identified as nonreligious. For younger Millennials, then about 18 to 29, the number was closer to one in three. Relatedly, the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) hit a peak of 413 campus groups. Churches were hemorrhaging members and attendees. And the unaffiliated constituted the largest "belief bloc" supporting Barack Obama's re-election in 2012.
This year, as I begin work on the second edition of the book, the Millennial crest has the overall proportion of the US nonreligious pushing 30 percent. Church membership and attendance continue to plummet. The unaffiliated further cemented their political presence, constituting the largest belief bloc in support of Joe Biden's election in 2020 and Kamala Harris's run in 2024. A Congressional Freethought Caucus, unthinkable 25 years ago, was established in 2018 and now has 22 members. The most recent estimates I've seen for Generation Z have religious disaffiliation in the mid-40s, while Gen Alpha—too young both for surveys and developed religious opinions—are likely to reflect and exceed the secular profile of their Millennial parents.
But here's a stumper: The Secular Student Alliance has dropped from 413 to 237 campus groups. If the number of secular students is rapidly increasing, why would a group supporting secular students have such a massive decline?
I think the entire answer is in that question.
"Pretty much the default"
I have three kids, a younger Millennial and two Zs, all in their 20s. Despite being raised with a parenting style around religious questions that can only be described as fanatically open, all three seem to be secular in outlook.
An explicit secularism was most important to my youngest for a while. In fact, she formed and led her high school's Secular Student Alliance chapter. When she started it, I advised her to think immediately about leadership succession. Despite doing that, the chapter ceased to exist shortly after she went to college. I think it did so for predictable reasons that also explain the general nationwide drop: For young people in most places in the US today, being nonreligious is no longer isolating, no longer unusual. No longer a big deal. "Pretty much the default," says my daughter.
We don't live in Manhattan, by the way—we're in Atlanta. The year before I published Atheism For Dummies, my son mentioned that he and his group of eight friends had stumbled into the topic of family religion, something they'd never discussed before. In this sample of nine high school juniors in an Atlanta suburb in 2012, he said that all but one were completely nonreligious. "And," he added, "all of them but me have religious parents."
When secular students felt isolated and on the margins, there was real value in helping individuals find each other and connect on the basis of their mutual alienation from the mainstream. Now, as the ongoing disaffiliation from churches continues at an estimated 1.3 million Americans per year, fewer secular students encounter a religious cultural default that makes them feel the urgent need to huddle with others of their kind. You don't need a club when you're the default.
Many increasingly find that they don't even need a label. They simply never think about religion, or irreligion.
I heard similar stories from parents around the country as I traveled around speaking about nonreligious parenting a few years back. And what little helpful research we have indicates that this goes beyond the anecdotal: Younger generations of Americans increasingly "don't know and don't care" about religion or gods, about religious identity or nonreligious identity.
It's not a new position. Canadian sociologist Stuart Johnson coined the outstanding word apatheist in 1972 to capture the concept. But like agnostics, an apatheist isn't generally in a 50-50 straddle between religion and irreligion. Even though the question of God's existence and all that goes with it has fallen away for them, they tend to live their lives secularly, which suggests another phrase: the shrugging seculars.
Many atheist parents are driven mad by this attitude in their secular kids. I’ve had this basic conversation dozens of times. A parent says, “Oh our daughter’s nonreligious all right, but she just isn’t that, you know…committed to it. She could take it or leave it. I think she just hasn’t seen religion for what it is yet. She says she’s 'agnostic,' or even ‘spiritual but not religious,’” and the parent will roll her eyes.
That’s followed by an uneasy laugh because of course of course we want them to find their own way of course of course—“And hey, at least she’s not some crazed evangelical!”
The shrug that comes with success
What's happening is similar to the generational shift in civil rights, feminism, and other movements as they pass the torch they’ve labored to keep alight to their children – only to get that galling shrug in return.
African Americans who spent generations fighting for civil rights often hear their kids say, “Why is everything about race with you?” Young women whose mothers and grandmothers fought for women's rights often take those rights for granted, rolling their eyes and asking, “Why is everything about gender with you?” It’s a good sign that they can even ask that. Those struggles are far from over, but that question represents progress.
And it can be exasperating when our secular kids look at us, with our atheist memes and groups and rallies and say, “Why are you so obsessed with religion? Can’t you just BE an atheist?” It’s a good sign, a normalizing sign.
For the most part, the religion of their immediate peers tends to be less aggressive, less divisive, and less dogmatic, and more progressive and co-existent than the religion we struggled with growing up.
When relaxed, shrugging secularism meets relaxed, shrugging religion, they tend to set their belief differences aside and work on issues that matter to both of them.
I think the question now is whether the ground has shifted enough in recent years to change that. As aggressive Christian nationalism asserts itself not only in society but in government, will the nonreligious begin to see secular identity as a tangible thing of value to them, something worth defending and in need of it?
