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Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America's Nones
To the dismay of religious leaders, study after study has shown a steady decline in affiliation and identification with traditional religions in America. By 2014, more than twenty percent of adults identified as unaffiliated--up more than seven percent just since 2007. Even more startling, more than thirty percent of those under the age of thirty now identify as "Nones"--answering "none" when queried about their religious affiliation. Is America losing its religion? Or, as more and more Americans choose different spiritual paths, are they changing what it means to be religious in the United States today?
In Choosing Our Religion, Elizabeth Drescher explores the diverse, complex spiritual lives of Nones across generations and across categories of self-identification as "Spiritual-But-Not-Religious," "Atheist," "Agnostic," "Humanist," "just Spiritual," and more. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews conducted across the United States, Drescher opens a window into the lives of a broad cross-section of Nones, diverse with respect to age, gender, race, sexual orientation, and prior religious background. She allows Nones to speak eloquently for themselves, illuminating the processes by which they became None, the sources of information and inspiration that enrich their spiritual lives, the practices they find spiritually meaningful, how prayer functions in spiritual lives not centered on doctrinal belief, how morals and values are shaped outside of institutional religions, and how Nones approach the spiritual development of their own children.
These compelling stories are deeply revealing about how religion is changing in America--both for Nones and for the religiously affiliated family, friends, and neighbors with whom their lives remain intertwined.
In Choosing Our Religion, Elizabeth Drescher explores the diverse, complex spiritual lives of Nones across generations and across categories of self-identification as "Spiritual-But-Not-Religious," "Atheist," "Agnostic," "Humanist," "just Spiritual," and more. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews conducted across the United States, Drescher opens a window into the lives of a broad cross-section of Nones, diverse with respect to age, gender, race, sexual orientation, and prior religious background. She allows Nones to speak eloquently for themselves, illuminating the processes by which they became None, the sources of information and inspiration that enrich their spiritual lives, the practices they find spiritually meaningful, how prayer functions in spiritual lives not centered on doctrinal belief, how morals and values are shaped outside of institutional religions, and how Nones approach the spiritual development of their own children.
These compelling stories are deeply revealing about how religion is changing in America--both for Nones and for the religiously affiliated family, friends, and neighbors with whom their lives remain intertwined.
342 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2016
28 people are currently reading
492 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 24, 2016
My next stop on the tour of religious viewpoints was supposed to be atheism, but I just couldn't get into the book I'd chosen.
So, instead, I grabbed this one about the ever-growing category of "nones" - those who claim no religious affiliation when filling out surveys. This doesn't mean that they're atheists (despite what some pundits say). A few are. But "none" could mean anything from being a mainstream religion but not wanting the institutional baggage that comes with a label, to a multi-cultural grab bag of beliefs, to New Age practices, to agnosticism and atheism.
Drescher tries to point out trends she sees among the various viewpoints the people she's interviewed have on various topics but since she's working with trying to describe an incredibly diverse group of people, it's a little like herding cats at times - especially as people use religious terminology like "prayer" or "spiritual" to describe activities that other people would think of as completely secular.
One thing that struck me is how many people she's interviewed incorporate bits of Christian practices into their daily lives, even though they don't identify with Christianity as a religious institution, or, in some cases, being atheists. "Culturally Christian" isn't a label that's often used, but as the "nones" become more prevalent, I wonder if it'll be something that will become more useful for people to describe their identities.
Thank you, Netgalley and Oxford University Press for the free review copy.
So, instead, I grabbed this one about the ever-growing category of "nones" - those who claim no religious affiliation when filling out surveys. This doesn't mean that they're atheists (despite what some pundits say). A few are. But "none" could mean anything from being a mainstream religion but not wanting the institutional baggage that comes with a label, to a multi-cultural grab bag of beliefs, to New Age practices, to agnosticism and atheism.
Drescher tries to point out trends she sees among the various viewpoints the people she's interviewed have on various topics but since she's working with trying to describe an incredibly diverse group of people, it's a little like herding cats at times - especially as people use religious terminology like "prayer" or "spiritual" to describe activities that other people would think of as completely secular.
One thing that struck me is how many people she's interviewed incorporate bits of Christian practices into their daily lives, even though they don't identify with Christianity as a religious institution, or, in some cases, being atheists. "Culturally Christian" isn't a label that's often used, but as the "nones" become more prevalent, I wonder if it'll be something that will become more useful for people to describe their identities.
Thank you, Netgalley and Oxford University Press for the free review copy.
March 12, 2016
This book, like a lot of books on religion, caught my eye. It is an in-depth look at people that do not identify themselves as one religion or another—those that choose the answer “none” on a survey question asking about religion. I related to this book more than any other book I have read in a long time. I loved it. I found it interesting and inspiring. It covers all aspects of a person’s life that religion would be a part of and asks nones what they think about them and whether they live their life any differently. I enjoyed the chapters about morals and ethics and raising children. I loved George from Kansas City.
While I enjoyed it as a regular nonfiction book, it would make a great textbook for a college religion course or for a research source. It contains many examples of people from every religion and different backgrounds that classify themselves as a none. There are so many good quotes!
I was given an ARC from Netgalley.com.
While I enjoyed it as a regular nonfiction book, it would make a great textbook for a college religion course or for a research source. It contains many examples of people from every religion and different backgrounds that classify themselves as a none. There are so many good quotes!
I was given an ARC from Netgalley.com.
April 21, 2016
An interesting apologetic for "Nones," or those who identify as not belonging to any formal religious tradition or institution. Nones have cropped up in Pew surveys and elsewhere as one of the fastest growing constituencies in the United States religious landscape. Drescher reached out to agnostics, atheists, spiritual-but-not-religious folks and others, interviewing them, discovering that there is more spirituality present among Nones, and a variety of moral and ethical systems at work, than traditional religiously affiliated people and researchers have granted so far. Granted, the book focuses largely on white, middle class America, but so little has been done on Nones that the book provides a place for further studies to begin, build on, or challenge.
Overall I was pretty engaged by this book. The chapter on prayer was especially interesting. Plenty more remains to be done with regard to Nones, a category largely invented by recent religion researchers.
Overall I was pretty engaged by this book. The chapter on prayer was especially interesting. Plenty more remains to be done with regard to Nones, a category largely invented by recent religion researchers.
March 24, 2016
Being an inquisitive soul in the religious and spiritual domain, this book sparked my attention. I'm a Religious Studies teacher and my experience with students (and the general population) is that more and more people are seeing themselves as "spiritual but not religious" or a none. This book was an easy read, using familiar language and real life examples. I will utilize this knowledge and highlight chapters in my teaching and general life. I would recommend it as a must for all other inquisitive souls.
nonfiction-and-references
February 19, 2016This book gives me a perspective on how other people take religion or the absence of its practice on their lives.
July 16, 2016
Game-changing. Beautifully written and tremendously insightful. Drescher truly listened to Nones with kindness, open-mindedness, and respect. Highly recommended.
July 6, 2019
"Nones are the overachievers of the US religious landscape," writes Dr. Elizabeth Drescher in her helpful guide to the spiritual life of the rapidly increasing numbers of people selecting "None" when surveyed on religious affiliation. She does a brilliant job of presenting not a homogenous group, but a diverse set of individuals grouped solely by a desire to not connecting themselves to a set religion.
Her work overturns assumptions in naming that "while individuals under the age of 30 are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated, older Nones make up the bulk of the unaffiliated population because there are simply more of them." There is some commonality across the stories of how people came to drop out of organized religion including the many bored with Mainline denominations, angry at their conservation Christian upbringing, or wounded by the Catholic Church (often specifically citing clergy). But then she notes all that these generalizations miss. For example, part of the move away from churches and synagogues follows Moral Therapeutic Deism becoming the dominant view of US teenagers and that worldview can accommodate the divine, but doesn't need an institutional church.
She noted the presence of both spiritual teachers and practices for many Nones who find their teachers in the bookstore with the writings of Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and even Anne Lamott and Richard Rohr for those drawn in a more Christian direction. She describes spiritual practices that are primarily relational and embedded in experiences often with the four Fs of family, friends, fido, and food. But I am telling about the book as if it is primarily propositional, when it is mainly narrative in allowing Nones to speak for themselves with lengthy quotations from her interviews so those with no religious affiliation tell their stories in their own voices.
Drescher's work is a helpful in that she debunks stereotypes and complicates the narrative. Largely she finds the current rise in persons who do not want to identify with any religion partly the result of the freedom to do so in our more mobile and diverse society and also a "resettling back into older patterns of religious affiliation that were in place for generations before the affiliational blip of the 1950s."
This book does not intend to guide religious leaders in reaching those who have left their brand of religion. Instead, the purpose here is to share that those who check off None on a survey are no more or less moral or spiritual or good than those who do whether they believe in a supernatural being or not and in no way adhere "to the stereotype of Nones as spiritually shallow, immature, or self-referential."
Her work overturns assumptions in naming that "while individuals under the age of 30 are more likely to be religiously unaffiliated, older Nones make up the bulk of the unaffiliated population because there are simply more of them." There is some commonality across the stories of how people came to drop out of organized religion including the many bored with Mainline denominations, angry at their conservation Christian upbringing, or wounded by the Catholic Church (often specifically citing clergy). But then she notes all that these generalizations miss. For example, part of the move away from churches and synagogues follows Moral Therapeutic Deism becoming the dominant view of US teenagers and that worldview can accommodate the divine, but doesn't need an institutional church.
She noted the presence of both spiritual teachers and practices for many Nones who find their teachers in the bookstore with the writings of Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and even Anne Lamott and Richard Rohr for those drawn in a more Christian direction. She describes spiritual practices that are primarily relational and embedded in experiences often with the four Fs of family, friends, fido, and food. But I am telling about the book as if it is primarily propositional, when it is mainly narrative in allowing Nones to speak for themselves with lengthy quotations from her interviews so those with no religious affiliation tell their stories in their own voices.
Drescher's work is a helpful in that she debunks stereotypes and complicates the narrative. Largely she finds the current rise in persons who do not want to identify with any religion partly the result of the freedom to do so in our more mobile and diverse society and also a "resettling back into older patterns of religious affiliation that were in place for generations before the affiliational blip of the 1950s."
This book does not intend to guide religious leaders in reaching those who have left their brand of religion. Instead, the purpose here is to share that those who check off None on a survey are no more or less moral or spiritual or good than those who do whether they believe in a supernatural being or not and in no way adhere "to the stereotype of Nones as spiritually shallow, immature, or self-referential."
Want to read
May 8, 2023Maxwell Institute podcast #47, 6/7/16
April 26, 2016
I received a complementary copy of this book for review purposes. The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.
Look at the book cover. When asked “what is your religion?”, and none of the choices presented seem to fit your own spiritual journey, are you tempted to check “none of the above?” If so then Elizabeth Drescher’s new book “Choosing Our Religion” may be for you.
Drescher describes those uncomfortable with identifying with any organized religion as “Nones”. The author spent two years interviewing Nones across the U.S. “This is not a book about Nones, but a book of Nones and their stories,” she writes in the book’s introduction.
And they are interesting stories, indeed. Such as this from a church going parent, “I’ve hidden my whole life as an unbeliever,” Jack wrote, “no one but my wife knew. Not our family or friends, not our children. That was the promise I made to her when we married. It didn’t seem such a big thing at the time. But it ate at me over the years.” And this from a woman who regularly attends church but doesn’t buy into the doctrine, “I’ve done it for almost twenty years – since I was in college, which means that I’ve been around church for long enough to know that most of it is a lot of crap. I don’t believe very much of it. But I like to sing, and I couldn’t do that if I told everyone I’m probably a None. A Lutheran None. So I keep quiet. I get to sing with people I really like every week, and I don’t have to deal with the rest of it.”
Choosing Our Religion is full of stories like this. I found these first hand accounts compelling – about a segment of society that is often misunderstood. A segment that Drescher thinks is frequently given harsh labels, like “individualistic”, “Narcissistic”, “uncommitted”, “unbelieving”, “consumerist”, “superficial”. “(they are considered) otherwise less serious and meaningful than those of people who anchor their spiritual identity to formal membership in institutional religions organizations,” the author feels.
I also got a sense from the book of how large a segment “the Nones”represent. “If the unaffiliated gathered into a formal religious organization, it would be larger than any Protestant denomination and all Mainline Protestant denominations combined,” Drescher writes.
A minor criticism of Choosing Our Religion: there are so many stories of Nones in the book, with a few quotes from each, that we really don’t get to know any of the subjects in depth. Perhaps fewer but longer stories would have made the book even better. Still I think Choosing Our Religion is a good read for those who don’t seem to fit into the religion of their family and friends. In reading of the challenges and successes of other Nones, maybe you’ll realize that your own spiritual practice isn’t so strange after all.
Look at the book cover. When asked “what is your religion?”, and none of the choices presented seem to fit your own spiritual journey, are you tempted to check “none of the above?” If so then Elizabeth Drescher’s new book “Choosing Our Religion” may be for you.
Drescher describes those uncomfortable with identifying with any organized religion as “Nones”. The author spent two years interviewing Nones across the U.S. “This is not a book about Nones, but a book of Nones and their stories,” she writes in the book’s introduction.
And they are interesting stories, indeed. Such as this from a church going parent, “I’ve hidden my whole life as an unbeliever,” Jack wrote, “no one but my wife knew. Not our family or friends, not our children. That was the promise I made to her when we married. It didn’t seem such a big thing at the time. But it ate at me over the years.” And this from a woman who regularly attends church but doesn’t buy into the doctrine, “I’ve done it for almost twenty years – since I was in college, which means that I’ve been around church for long enough to know that most of it is a lot of crap. I don’t believe very much of it. But I like to sing, and I couldn’t do that if I told everyone I’m probably a None. A Lutheran None. So I keep quiet. I get to sing with people I really like every week, and I don’t have to deal with the rest of it.”
Choosing Our Religion is full of stories like this. I found these first hand accounts compelling – about a segment of society that is often misunderstood. A segment that Drescher thinks is frequently given harsh labels, like “individualistic”, “Narcissistic”, “uncommitted”, “unbelieving”, “consumerist”, “superficial”. “(they are considered) otherwise less serious and meaningful than those of people who anchor their spiritual identity to formal membership in institutional religions organizations,” the author feels.
I also got a sense from the book of how large a segment “the Nones”represent. “If the unaffiliated gathered into a formal religious organization, it would be larger than any Protestant denomination and all Mainline Protestant denominations combined,” Drescher writes.
A minor criticism of Choosing Our Religion: there are so many stories of Nones in the book, with a few quotes from each, that we really don’t get to know any of the subjects in depth. Perhaps fewer but longer stories would have made the book even better. Still I think Choosing Our Religion is a good read for those who don’t seem to fit into the religion of their family and friends. In reading of the challenges and successes of other Nones, maybe you’ll realize that your own spiritual practice isn’t so strange after all.
September 13, 2016
Choosing Our Religion by Elizabeth Drescher might better be titled Not Choosing a Religion since it is about Nones, those who answer none when queried about religious affiliation.
The key to this wonderful book is that the Nones are finally allowed to speak for themselves. We (I am a None) don't form any kind of a group beyond our answer to that one question. We range from atheists to spiritual but not religious and even Christian without an affiliation. So there is no simple answer or reason that speaks to or for all of us. Drescher captures this beautifully in both her discussions of the recent trends as well as the interviewees she quotes.
There is still quite a bit of framing of non-religious value systems in religious terms but much of that is done by some of the Nones themselves. Even when leaving the institutions behind many find it difficult (or conversely, many find it easier) to retain terms and simply change what they are. Prayer is a good example, since many Nones do indeed pray while some call things prayer that aren't.
I would recommend this to just about anyone. Those who are affiliated will gain a better understanding of Nones. Nones will realize they are not alone. Those who believe that morals are only top down can see that Nones are as moral and ethical as anyone else. Most importantly, this shows that this is not something that needs fixing.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
The key to this wonderful book is that the Nones are finally allowed to speak for themselves. We (I am a None) don't form any kind of a group beyond our answer to that one question. We range from atheists to spiritual but not religious and even Christian without an affiliation. So there is no simple answer or reason that speaks to or for all of us. Drescher captures this beautifully in both her discussions of the recent trends as well as the interviewees she quotes.
There is still quite a bit of framing of non-religious value systems in religious terms but much of that is done by some of the Nones themselves. Even when leaving the institutions behind many find it difficult (or conversely, many find it easier) to retain terms and simply change what they are. Prayer is a good example, since many Nones do indeed pray while some call things prayer that aren't.
I would recommend this to just about anyone. Those who are affiliated will gain a better understanding of Nones. Nones will realize they are not alone. Those who believe that morals are only top down can see that Nones are as moral and ethical as anyone else. Most importantly, this shows that this is not something that needs fixing.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
December 2, 2021
As someone who doesn’t subscribe to any particular organized religion, I appreciated the way the author moved beyond assumptions of religious “nones” and actually engaged in conversations with them. Relaying these stories in the “nones” own voices shows the breadth and depth that simple categorizing belies. This proved an interesting book, and shows a more nuanced understanding of those who self-identify as “none”, from how they handle the big, difficult questions in life to morals and ethics to raising children. An excellent read for anyone interested in exploring the topic from a fairly unbiased point of view (the author doesn’t cast nones in a negative light, nor do they treat them as a problem to be solved).
July 9, 2016
Looking closer into the faith perspective of twenty-first century westerners, this book is helpful, opening up more dialogue than coming to conclusions. What it all means is still, and hopefully always be, an open question.
Want to read
June 23, 2016I won this book via Goodreads First Reads Giveaway. I received a hardcover copy.
April 7, 2016
Digital ARC kindly provided by Oxford University Press through Netgalley.com
abandoned
August 11, 2017Too dry and academic for me to finish. A few interesting insights. Best parts of the book are the interview excerpts.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews