The alienation of moderates and liberals from conservative Christian political positions is a key reason why the percentage of Americans who claim no religion doubled during the 1990s, two University of California, Berkeley, sociologists say. Michael Hout and Claude Fischer analyzed data from annual public opinion surveys on religion taken by numerous organizations to reach their conclusion, published as an article in the American Sociological Review.
The surveys showed that the proportion of Americans who said they have "no religious preference" rose from about 7 percent in 1990 to about 14 percent by the end of the decade -- a significant change after remaining stable for most of the previous two decades.
But the increase does not necessarily signal a decrease in faith, the researchers said. The majority of those who claim no religious affiliation continue to hold conventional religious beliefs. Most of the increase in people with no religious preference in the 1990s was composed of believers, not atheists or agnostics.
"One of the points we're trying to make is that most people who have no church still are likely to say things like 'God is real. Heaven and hell are real. Me and my kids will go there when we're dead,' " Hout said.
Though blacks and Latinos are more likely to claim a religious affiliation than the wider population, a comparable statistical doubling of people with no religious preference was noted among them. The only exception to the trend was people of Jewish ancestry.
The researchers' principal data came from analysis of the General Social Survey, taken since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center, a nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Chicago. That survey included the question: "What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion or no religion?"
Hout and Fischer also analyzed data from the National Election Study, affiliated with the University of Michigan, which conducts national surveys of the American electorate in presidential and mid-term election years.
Hout and Fischer said they considered three possible explanations for the growing numbers of self-styled believers with no formal religious affiliation: demographic changes, religious skepticism and the mixture of politics and religion, the latter of which played an increasingly influential role in American society during the 1990s.
Religiousness typically follows a family life cycle: People often leave organized religion when they leave the family they grew up in, then return about the time they begin a family of their own, Hout and Fischer wrote.
The extended schooling and delayed family formation of more recent years may have contributed to the growth of the "no preference" category. Also, recent generations are more likely to have been raised with no religion; people who became adults after 1973 expressed much less attachment to organized religion than those who reached adulthood before then, Hout said.
The two sociologists discount suggestions that new-age influences and America's secular culture weaken ties to organized religion. They note survey data indicating that piety persists even among people who claim no religion.
For example, 93 percent of the people avoiding organized religion continue to pray on occasion; and one-fifth of those pray daily. Also, the percentage of people with no religious preference who agreed with the statement that "God is concerned about people" actually rose from 22 percent to 32 percent.
It was against this background that the researchers decided that the rise in people with no formal religious affiliation was most strongly linked to the influence of religion in politics.
An institutionalized connection between religion and political party is relatively new to the United States, and one of two key political shifts in the past half century, Hout and Fischer say. A similar one, according to Indiana University sociologist Clem Brooks, occurred with the dramatic liberalizing of attitudes regarding civil rights of blacks, women and, more recently, gays and lesbians.
In the civil rights era, race became a determinant for political party: Liberals and moderates who supported an end to segregation tended to be Democrats, and conservatives less supportive of federal legislation found a home among Republicans, Brooks said. Race polarized politics, and feminism began to have the same effect in the 1980s, reflected in the political "gender gap."