“I’d feel most comfortable assigning myself to the category of people who prefer not to be assigned to categories,” a fifty-something, Silicon Valley entrepreneur I’ll call Nathan* joked when I asked him how he’d describe his religious identification or affiliation. “But I suppose ‘none’ will do.”
You can call them “unaffiliated,” as in a recent Pew poll, or “nones,” or even just “not very religious.” A brand new poll by PRRI/Brookings divides this group further (and somewhat counterintuitively) into “unattached,” “atheists/agnostics,” and “seculars.”
Media excitement continues over the latest Pew poll showing continued growth in the religiously affiliated. But do such data really tell us what we need to know about the Four F’s of Contemporary American Spirituality: Family, Fido, Friends, and Food?