I think that belief will always be with us. Perhaps not as dogmatic and organized.
The study is about the decline of
religion, not of belief (though it seems to also touch on changes in beliefs).
The Wikipedia article on
religiosity starts out:
quote:
Religiosity is difficult to define, but different scholars have seen this concept as broadly about religious orientations and involvement. It includes experiential, ritualistic, ideological, intellectual, consequential, creedal, communal, doctrinal, moral, and cultural dimensions. Sociologists of religion have observed that the people's beliefs, sense of belonging, and behavior often are not congruent with an individual's actual religious beliefs since there is much diversity in how one can be religious or not. Multiple problems exist in measuring religiosity. For instance, variables such as church attendance produce different results when different methods are used such as traditional surveys vs time use surveys.
"Religion" carries with it the organizing and codifying of beliefs into social structures. Dogma is inherent in most religion where doctrine has been established and you need to conform to that doctrine (and dogma) in order to belong to that religion.
While individuals in a religion may hold beliefs that differ from the standard doctrine, peer and social pressure often drives those individuals to hide those beliefs -- eg, a New Yorker cartoon at a conservative mainstream church social where a man is admitting to a couple others, "Actually, my beliefs are the same as the Unitarians'. I'm just not as brave as they are." Finding others of like mind within such a church would be akin to gays' need to develop "gay-dar" to be able to sense to whom they can start to open up. The same thing applies in the workplace where arguments over politics and/or religion would be disruptive and could quite rightfully lead to you losing your job. Orange County used to be the ugly red spot in the blue state of California (that was fixed in the 2018 elections) with far too many Republicans and fundamentalist/conservative Christian megachurches. My friend, who is liberal and generally repulsed by religion, observed that it seemed that every guy she met was either a Republican or a fundamentalist, so she was so happy to meet me (I am far from either). She had a good friend at work who was also liberal, but for the first week or so after they first met they were both doing a cautious dance around each other trying to figure out where the other stood and whether it was safe to speak freely -- they sorely needed some form of political "gay-dar".
The fundamental purposes of religion and churches have very little to do with actual beliefs. A church is a community which offers members much more than worshipping with God. Rather, it provides social and economic support as well as helping to unite the community (truthfully when one church dominates, hopefully when multiple churches are present unless there's a much stronger over-arcing secular social order in place).
Evolutionarily speaking, our "wetware" (how our brains and minds and social behavior are wired) evolved within tribal groups normally consisting of 30 to 60 individuals. As a result, we tend to form social networks and social bonds with about 30 to 60 individuals, beyond which we get lost in the crowd like in
The Lonely Guy (really great early Steve Martin movie). Even megachurches with thousands of members know this, so they get new members involved in much smaller groups or "cells" which more closely match their "wetware's" social capacity. For example, Rick Warren's Saddleback Church has at least tens of thousands of members (Wikipedia under-reports with weekly attendance which is 22,000). In Lindy class I was recruited to try to balance the singles' ministry dance classes (usually 100 women to 50 men, so the women tended to lose interest) and being early in my separation and divorce it provided a social outlet (I had already been an atheist for four decades at that point). At the time, the Singles Ministry numbered 15,000, but they were further divided and segregated by age into even smaller groups, each with their own separate social activities.
You may not disagree with what I am saying here.
I'm not seeing any speculation about the causes of the trends being reported. We see the phenomenal growth of the "Nones" (as in "None of the Above" being their choice of religious options), which includes the hemorrhaging of about 80% of the youth raised on Christian Fundamentalism (many different names, all boiling down to the same basic theology) all running away from their particular religious upbringings as fast as they can. A visit to the testimonial sections of ex-Christian sites and fora (eg,
https://www.ex-christian.net/...imonies-of-former-christians) will recount their horror stories. One particularly chilling one on a blog, not a forum, was from a man whose parents firmly believed in the Rapture, so he grew up in constant fear that every time his parents went out they would never return. As an adult, he suffers from substance abuse and inability to socialize which he also sees in others raised as he had been. For others, seeing that they never received the "Fruits of the Spirit", most especially as teenagers, caused them to live in constant fear that they were not saved. Those kinds of life experiences lead to so many of them seeking escape from the Living Hell which has become Christianity.
On a much more benign level, what else has happened? People are finding non-religious communities to become a part of. Especially through social media, people are able to find other people of like mind, unlike feeling all alone in a church community.
Are you familiar with Dan Barker, co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, AKA "America's Leading Atheist"? In the mid-1980's, I heard his speech at Atheists United in Los Angeles (at the time, they had a 15-minute weekly radio program on KPFK -- compare that to countless hours of religious programming constantly on the airwaves over multiple channels). That was shortly after he had de-converted. I do not doubt that he has published many accounts of his deconversion; my own sources are that Atheists United presentation and the first few chapters of his book,
Godless. He had been raised a fundamentalist (his mother used to sing in tongues while doing her housework) and God Personally called him to the ministry when he was 11 years old. He studied and became a minister, plus his father was a former swing musician who gave all that up for Jesus, so he used his musical training growing up to create a musical ministry (he still receives royalties for the Christian music he had created). As a travelling minister, he encountered many churches in which the stark and sharp black-and-white line between right and wrong was always there, but it also followed different tracks -- that "sharp" line between right and wrong kept shifting and blurring. Not only did he keep thinking about that (a sign of intelligence), but he also read a lot and he discussed what he was reading and thinking with others. It got to a point where his religious leaders forced him out (and forced his wife to leave him ... according to his AU presentation, though he is much gentler with her in the book).
The point is that he was a new atheist in Southern California in the early 1980's. As far as he knew, there was nobody else like him in the entire state, let alone in the entire country. He was completely isolated and completely on his own going through deconversion from fundamentalist Christianity, which can be a very painful experience, with absolutely no support. His mother (the one who sang in tongues) talked with him, he asked her a few direct questions, and she ended up also deconverting as a result. The same with his father, in whose case it allowed him to return to the swing music that he really loved. But the first time he ever met anyone who thought how he did was on a TV show interview which included Annie Laurie Gaylor from Michigan, who had co-founded the
Freedom From Religion Foundation less than a decade before and whom he later married.
The point is that he had to travel more than half-way across the country to find anybody who thought as he did. At that point of his Atheists United presentation, he cried out, "Where were you guys when I needed you?" There they were, right next door to him, and he had no way to be aware of their existence.
Well, now the Internet and social media has changed all that. Now you can readily connect with any special interest group in your area or even outside your area.
I see that as factors in the exodus from organized religion (which largely is what the study was tracking) and from the dogma of those organized religions. The Nones are not necessarily more atheistic, but rather they are wanting to follow their own individual paths.
So then Nones still belief in something, but outside of the dogmatic and organized. That can and often does include entirely different ways of thinking of "God".
One of my personal chuckles about creationist and ID arguments is that they work so hard to try to get you to a point of accepting that some kind of supernatural explanation might be plausible, and then they suddenly jump to their extremely specific bible-literalist theology as the only explanation. Sheer idiocy!
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I have a favor to ask you and anyone else on this forum. I gave you a URL to the Amazon page for Dan Barker's book. Did that also place you into my account? -- (does it say "Hello, David" over "Accounts & Lists"?)
Obviously, that will have a huge impact on how I share Amazon links in the future.
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