There is a great temptation to accept religious decline as inevitable. It does not help that much of the mainstream media seizes on any indication that faith is dying and amplifies it.
For example, in 2022, the Central Statistics Office issued a press release stating that “more than 3.5 million people, or 69% of the population, reported their religion was Roman Catholic. … The number of people who stated they had no religion increased to more than 736,000, or 14% of the population.”
Guess what the headlines were? Yes, of course, that 14% of the population now declare they have no religion.
Nearly 7 out of 10 people are still Catholic, but that just would not make headlines. However, it is also foolish to ignore decline, particularly hidden decline and the rise of Catholics in name only.
One of the consequences of a shrinking Church is that there is less money for research from within the Church. The Irish Catholic Bishops once sponsored major nationwide surveys of religious belief and later featured the work of researchers like Eoin O’Mahony.
Comparisons
It is tempting to treat research from the US as a proxy for what is happening in Ireland, but caution is necessary.
The culture is obviously strikingly different to Ireland, not least because of the dominance of Protestantism historically.
Some similarities are worth exploring. For example, the US was once one of the most religious countries in the developed world, with only countries like Indonesia (majority Muslim) and Israel (majority Jewish) having higher rates of belief. Even today, 7 out of 10 Americans profess to follow a religion.
Ryan P Burge is an American sociologist and political scientist who specialises in religion, religious affiliation, and politics in the US.
Along with Toby Jones, he recently conducted large-scale research on Americans who identify as ‘nones’, that is, having no formal affiliation with religion.
In their practices, they don’t look very different to religious Americans, but they choose not to be affiliated with any religion or denomination”
The research is fascinating. The non-religious are far from homogeneous and can be loosely divided into four categories. Toby Jones and Ryan P Burge have catchy acronyms for each grouping.
We are familiar with the concept of CINO – Catholic in name only. Now, meet the NiNos, Nones in Name Only. They reject religious labels but still show religious behaviours such as regular prayer or even attending religious services.
Roughly 20 million Americans fall into this category. In their practices, they don’t look very different to religious Americans, but they choose not to be affiliated with any religion or denomination. Why is that?
The second group are SBNRs, that is, spiritual but not religious. Again, in an unexpected twist, it turns out that this group, which comprises some 36 million people, are not doing very much that would identify them as spiritual. Toby Jones says that their self-dentification as SBNRs is mostly aspirational, or a stance towards life, rather than spending significant time building a spiritual life.
In Blaise Pascal’s posthumously published Pensées, he describes an abyss in the human heart which people vainly try to fill but cannot, because only God can fill it. This subsequently became known as the God-shaped hole.
For the third category of Nones, some 33 million Americans, that is simply not true. They are living lives of contentment without religion and their wellbeing scores are little different to religious people. They are not, as the title of Denis O’Driscoll’s beautiful poem puts it, Missing God. The researchers call these the Dones. Not doing religion and not missing it.
Atheists
The final category is the ZAs, the Zealous Atheists, a group that probably reached its zenith in the 1990s and early 2000s, with major cultural figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Zealous atheists are on a crusade to rescue people from the lies of religion. Today, even Richard Dawkins admits to a kind of cultural Christianity, so it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the smallest but most vociferous group, around 11% of all Nones.
They are also the most miserable, with the lowest levels of happiness and meaning”
In what the researchers admit is a counter-intuitive finding, the Zealous Atheists are less done with religion than the Dones. They are still engaged with religion, even in a negative way. They are also the most miserable, with the lowest levels of happiness and meaning.
Are these categories true of Ireland? I suspect that a lot of people who still identify as Catholic on a census are actually SBNRs, and that true atheists are a tiny number. The Dones, on the other hand, are growing. They have substituted family and friends for their ultimate concern and invest in those relationships instead.
If we truly want to arrest decline, the NiNos and SBNRs seem like the obvious place to start. Ask yourself: what have you done to reach out to a NiNo or an SBNR that you know? We cannot leave it to everybody else.
The decline in religiosity and reaching out to the ‘Nones’
There is a great temptation to accept religious decline as inevitable. It does not help that much of the mainstream media seizes on any indication that faith is dying and amplifies it.
For example, in 2022, the Central Statistics Office issued a press release stating that “more than 3.5 million people, or 69% of the population, reported their religion was Roman Catholic. … The number of people who stated they had no religion increased to more than 736,000, or 14% of the population.”
Guess what the headlines were? Yes, of course, that 14% of the population now declare they have no religion.
Nearly 7 out of 10 people are still Catholic, but that just would not make headlines. However, it is also foolish to ignore decline, particularly hidden decline and the rise of Catholics in name only.
One of the consequences of a shrinking Church is that there is less money for research from within the Church. The Irish Catholic Bishops once sponsored major nationwide surveys of religious belief and later featured the work of researchers like Eoin O’Mahony.
Comparisons
It is tempting to treat research from the US as a proxy for what is happening in Ireland, but caution is necessary.
The culture is obviously strikingly different to Ireland, not least because of the dominance of Protestantism historically.
Some similarities are worth exploring. For example, the US was once one of the most religious countries in the developed world, with only countries like Indonesia (majority Muslim) and Israel (majority Jewish) having higher rates of belief. Even today, 7 out of 10 Americans profess to follow a religion.
Ryan P Burge is an American sociologist and political scientist who specialises in religion, religious affiliation, and politics in the US.
Along with Toby Jones, he recently conducted large-scale research on Americans who identify as ‘nones’, that is, having no formal affiliation with religion.
The research is fascinating. The non-religious are far from homogeneous and can be loosely divided into four categories. Toby Jones and Ryan P Burge have catchy acronyms for each grouping.
We are familiar with the concept of CINO – Catholic in name only. Now, meet the NiNos, Nones in Name Only. They reject religious labels but still show religious behaviours such as regular prayer or even attending religious services.
Roughly 20 million Americans fall into this category. In their practices, they don’t look very different to religious Americans, but they choose not to be affiliated with any religion or denomination. Why is that?
The second group are SBNRs, that is, spiritual but not religious. Again, in an unexpected twist, it turns out that this group, which comprises some 36 million people, are not doing very much that would identify them as spiritual. Toby Jones says that their self-dentification as SBNRs is mostly aspirational, or a stance towards life, rather than spending significant time building a spiritual life.
In Blaise Pascal’s posthumously published Pensées, he describes an abyss in the human heart which people vainly try to fill but cannot, because only God can fill it. This subsequently became known as the God-shaped hole.
For the third category of Nones, some 33 million Americans, that is simply not true. They are living lives of contentment without religion and their wellbeing scores are little different to religious people. They are not, as the title of Denis O’Driscoll’s beautiful poem puts it, Missing God. The researchers call these the Dones. Not doing religion and not missing it.
Atheists
The final category is the ZAs, the Zealous Atheists, a group that probably reached its zenith in the 1990s and early 2000s, with major cultural figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Zealous atheists are on a crusade to rescue people from the lies of religion. Today, even Richard Dawkins admits to a kind of cultural Christianity, so it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the smallest but most vociferous group, around 11% of all Nones.
In what the researchers admit is a counter-intuitive finding, the Zealous Atheists are less done with religion than the Dones. They are still engaged with religion, even in a negative way. They are also the most miserable, with the lowest levels of happiness and meaning.
Are these categories true of Ireland? I suspect that a lot of people who still identify as Catholic on a census are actually SBNRs, and that true atheists are a tiny number. The Dones, on the other hand, are growing. They have substituted family and friends for their ultimate concern and invest in those relationships instead.
If we truly want to arrest decline, the NiNos and SBNRs seem like the obvious place to start. Ask yourself: what have you done to reach out to a NiNo or an SBNR that you know? We cannot leave it to everybody else.
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