And Then There Were Nones

Religion

Last year, I posted the results of the General Social Survey showing that, in 2012, 20% of American adults reported themselves as having “no religion,” and that these folks—referred to by demographers as the “nones”—are increasing by about .6% per year. This month, the Pew Research Group released the results of their 2014 Religious Landscape Study. This survey, undertaken every seven years, is based on the results of a quota sample of over 35,000 adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus .6%. Although Pew refers to their nones as “unaffiliated,” the results are strikingly consistent.

Pew reports that 22.8% of the population were nones in 2014, up 6.7% from 16.1% in 2007. Meanwhile, those calling themselves Christians declined from 78.4% to 70.6%. This amounts to an increase of 19 million nones, for a new total of 56 million. Among all religious groups, the nones are second in size only to evangelical Protestants. A followup question showed that, of this 22.8%, 3.1% said they were atheists, 4% claimed to be agnostic, and 15.8% believed “nothing in particular.” This leaves open the possibility that some of the nones engage in spiritual practices, pray, or believe in one or more gods. There was also a 6% increase in those saying that religion is “not too” or “not at all important” in their lives.

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The Pew researchers offer two explanations for this shift.

  • Generational replacement. The most dramatic increases in the percentage of nones occurred among younger adults. However, they increased across all generations, even rising by 2% among people over 70.
  • Switching religions. Among those who report switching their religious affiliation, the nones showed the largest gains of any group. Eighteen percent of Americans who were raised in a religious faith now claim to be unaffiliated.

Another perspective on this trend comes from the 2015 State of Atheism in America, a study by the Barna Group. It combines the results of four surveys of 23,000 adults conducted in 2011 through 2014. The Barna Group calls their nones the “unchurched,” meaning that they say they haven’t attended church in the last six months. This results in a larger group, about 36% of the total. They find that 25% of the unchurched are either atheists or agnostics, a group they call “skeptics.” I find this a more interesting group than folks who believe “nothing in particular,” since they would seem to have given some thought to religion.

The Barna Group identifies five demographic shifts among their skeptics when they are compared to the same group in a 1993 survey they conducted.

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  1. They are younger. In fact, 34% of them are between 18 and 30.
  2. They are more educated. Half of them are college graduates. Only 32% of Americans over 25 have graduated from college.
  3. A higher percentage are women. Male skepticism increased too, but not as much as among women.
  4. They are more racially diverse. This is due largely to an increase in skepticism among Hispanics and especially Asians.
  5. They are more regionally dispersed. The Northeast and West continue to have higher percentages of skeptics, but the differences are not as great as in the past.

The last three trends suggest a mainstreaming of skepticism. Rather than being a distinctive subgroup, atheists and agnostics are becoming more broadly representative of the population. One major exception, however, is the continuing underrepresentation of African-Americans.

The Barna Group’s stated goal is to reconnect with skeptics and bring them back under the influence of superstition, so they asked skeptics what they thought of Christian churches. They note four common responses, although they don’t report the percentages who gave each one.

  1. The church is group of people who share a physical space but are not otherwise connected to one another in meaningful ways.
  2. The church adds little of value to their community.
  3. The church stands for the wrong political policies: war, sexual and physical violence, prevention of gay marriage and reproductive freedom, etc.
  4. Church leaders are not trustworthy.

The third response supports the backlash hypothesis—that young people are leaving the Christian religion because they disagree with its conservative politics.

What can we conclude from all of this? Due to the positive association of religiosity with age, the percentage of nones is likely to continue to increase. This is good news for liberals. In an earlier post, I presented evidence suggesting that the most important causes of religiosity are poverty and lack of education. Barring an increase in the financial desperation of the middle class or a weakening of our system of public education—both very real possibilities—the future of organized religion does not seem very bright.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 1

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 2

The God Squad, Part 1: Religion as Selfish Individualism

Advance Planning

Films, Social psychology,

Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority are among the most famous social psychology investigations yet conducted. They suggest that ordinary people are willing to harm others (to the point of killing them) on the orders of an authority figure who provides only minimal justification for doing so. What makes them so surprising is that they show that behavior we ordinarily attribute to strong personal convictions is largely under situational control–a basic argument of almost all social psychology.

A familiar pose: Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram
A familiar pose: Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram

Experimenter, a new film about the life and work of Stanley Milgram directed by Michael Almereyda, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It has received good notices. Film critic Amy Taubin chose it as the festival’s best film. In the March-April Film Comment, she says:

Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects. . . . Almereyda’s screenplay and direction—this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film—and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder’s performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams’ entire life.

Experimenter is scheduled for general release on October 16. Here is the trailer.

A good source of information about Milgram’s life and work is Tom Blass’s book, The Man Who Shocked the World.

The only other film I know of that directly portrays social psychological research is the 2001 German film Das Experiment, a fictionalized version of Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, a study closely related to Milgram’s work. The film deviates considerably from real events, portraying the lead experimenter as unconcerned about the suffering of the participants and eventually morphing into a thriller about whether the subjects can escape from the laboratory. Zimbardo was not amused. Nevertheless, it’s worth checking out if you can find it.

This post was revised on August 24, 2015.

You may also be interested in reading:

Social Psychology on Film, Take 2

The Dirty Dozen* of 2014

Films

The reason for the asterisk is the same as my reason for delaying this year’s list of best films. I can’t remember a year in which I’ve missed as many critically-acclaimed movies, through a combination of inattentiveness earlier in the year and bad weather during the end-of-year rush. Included among the unseen are American Sniper; Mr. Turner; Only Lovers Left Alive; Selma; Still Alice; The Theory of Everything; Two Days, One Night; and Under the Skin. I’m probably not going to see any of these films for a while, so I’ll go with what I have. On the plus side, thanks to Pittsburgh’s film festivals, I’ve managed to include some obscure but excellent films.

  • The Babadook (Australia). A literate haunted house movie and commentary on family dynamics. It’s good to have a horror film back in the dirty dozen.
  • Boyhood. You have to admire the risks director Richard Linklater took in shooting a film over 12 years. The consensus choice of film critics, it probably fell short during award season because of its lack of emotional highs and lows.
  • Citizenfour. There’s very little technique in this documentary. Laura Poitras simply pointed the camera at Edward Snowden and let Glenn Greenwald interview him. But this is an essential film about the willingness of an individual to stand up against illegal state action.
  • Confession of Murder (Korea). After the statute of limitations expires, a man confesses to murder and becomes an instant celebrity. The detective who conducted the original investigation searches for the truth. Koreans have made some great cop flicks.
  • The Dark Valley (Austria). Although it’s set in the snowy mountains of Austria in winter, the film has the plot structure and presentation of a revenge-themed spaghetti Western. Very entertaining genre film.
  • Human Capital (Italy). On the surface, a mystery involving a hit-and-run accident. The facts are filled in as the same events are told from the perspectives of three different characters. The subtext is social inequality in Italy; specifically, the question of how much a human life is worth.
  • Ida (Poland). As beautifully shot in black and white as any film I’ve seen lately, it has an intriguing premise: In 1962, a young orphan raised in a convent is about to take her vows when she discovers that she’s Jewish. But the ending, while probably realistic, was a major disappointment.
  • The Imitation Game (UK). My choice for best film of the year. The central irony is that Alan Turing, who saved the collective British derriere during WWII, was hounded to his death for being gay. Another great performance by Benedict Cumberbatch.

  • A Most Wanted Man. This film of a John Le Carre spy novel involving the hunt for a terrorist went almost unnoticed despite the excellent acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a German secret agent.
  • Nightcrawler. Not only does this action movie satirize the sleazy ethics of TV news, the main character (well-played by Jake Gyllenhaal) has internalized the ridiculous self-help messages taught by motivational speakers to naive business students.
  • Stranger by the Lake (France). In this thriller, a man thinks he may have witnessed a murder at a gay swimming place, but he lets his libido overrule his judgment and winds up in real danger. The film is sexually explicit.
  • Unforgiven (Japan). An extremely faithful remake of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film, but the main characters are all samurai. The lead actor is exactly who you’d want in the Eastwood role–Ken Watanabe.

Here are two flawed honorable mentions.

  • Snowpiercer (Korea) has a terrific premise: Runaway global warming, followed by a failed attempt at geoengineering, leaves the survivors stranded on a moving train (“Snowpiercer”) in a below-freezing world. Living arrangements on the train replicate the extreme inequality that preceded the Apocalypse, and the film is about the on-train revolution that follows. Unfortunately, some plot points make little sense, and the film lapses into mindless violence.
  • Whiplash is a well-made, well-acted film with a great soundtrack, but is based on the flawed premise that the way to teach a young man to be a skilled jazz musician is to humiliate him, arousing both anger and fear. Reviews I’ve read suggest that many otherwise bright people accept this premise, which is not empirically supported.

My take on Birdman is that I agree that Alejandro Inarritu’s camera work is outstanding, but I had a hard time identifying with the self-indulgent pseudo-problems of actors under stress. This is one of the world’s most overpaid and underworked professions, so spare me, please.

My best actor is Benedict Cumberbatch for the second year in a row (last year, for The Fifth Estate). Best actress goes to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the beleaguered upper-class wife in Human Capital.

TV Networks on Torture: “Just Do It!”

Media,

After the December 9 release of the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, widely known as the torture report, it became the #1 story on the weekly television news programs. Since journalists seldom express opinions on such matters as whether “rectal hydration” constitutes torture or whether politicians who approved such methods should be prosecuted, the best measure of the corporate media’s position on these issues is to examine the guests who are invited onto their programs to express their views.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) surveyed the guests on nine TV news programs during the week of December 7 through 14: ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union and Situation Room, Fox’s Fox News Sunday and Special Report, MSNBC’s Hardball, NBC’s Meet the Press, and PBS’s News Hour.

Of the 104 guests on these programs, 53 of them indicated whether they supported or opposed the “enhanced interrogation techniques” described in the report. Thirty-five of them (66%) supported the CIA’s actions, while the remaining 18 (34%) were opposed. While some progressive critics worried that the networks would give equal time to torturers, they probably didn’t anticipate that the “liberal” media would present more advocates of torture than opponents by a two-to-one margin. (Of course, most of those who supported the CIA’s actions usually also claimed that they did not constitute “torture.”)

Sixty-five of the 104 guests were journalists, most of whom remained neutral. The second largest group was 35 current and former government officials. Nine CIA officers were among them, seven of whom defended their agency’s practices. Of those who were political partisans, 19 were Republicans and 7 were Democrats. Four of the Democrats spoke against torture while the others had no opinion. Sixteen of the Republicans favored the CIA’s actions and three opposed them. For more details on what was actually said, see this report.)

Of course, the most prominent Republican guest was former VP Dick Cheney, who said the report was “full of crap.” As Glenn Greenwald noted, Dick Cheney should be in prison rather than having his ass kissed by the Sabbath gasbags (my language, not his). So far, the only person to be jailed over the CIA torture program is John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who helped to expose it.

While the perpetrators of torture had many opportunities to defend themselves, torture victims were seldom heard from. Their only voice was indirect. Two lawyers representing torture victims, Joseph Margulies and Meg Satterthwaite, were invited to participate in the discussions.

Given this kind of media coverage, it’s not surprising that in a Pew Research Center survey of 1001 Americans conducted December 11-14, 51% said the “CIA’s interrogation methods” were justified, 29% said they were not justified, and 20% had no opinion. Were they effective in preventing terrorist attacks? The Senate Report concluded they were not, but 56% of respondents thought they were effective, 21% said they were not, and 16% didn’t know. The public was almost evenly divided on whether the Senate Report should have been made public. Forty-three percent thought releasing the report was the wrong decision, 42% thought it was the right decision, and 15% had no opinion.

It seems that a lot of Americans are O. K. with torture. They just don’t want to know about it.