About the Project
This site is part of the Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America Project, which is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, led by Ryan Burge and Tony Jones, and housed at Eastern Illinois University. The project's aim and goal is to better understand non-religious Americans, and to make resources available to anyone interested in the Nones, including scholars, journalists, clergy, elected officials, and even the Nones themselves.
Why Does this work matter now?
Every week, it seems, there's a new headline: "The Nones are coming back to church!" "The Nones are growing by leaps and bounds!" "Millennials are leaving religion!" "GenZers are coming back to faith!" As enticing and clickbaity as those headlines may be, they're usually based on a small survey, or a small segment of a larger project. Here at The Nones Project, we're investigating the results of the largest ever survey of Nones, and we're digging deeper into the research, going beyond the headlines. The rise of the Nones have reshaped not just the religious landscape in the United States, but also politics, social mores, and family life. Stay tuned to this site and we reveal what we've learned about the Nones: who they are and what they believe, as well as a trove of demographic data.
RESEARCH METHODS
In the Spring of 2024, we commissioned a survey through Qualtrics that polled 12,014 non-religious Americans and 3,282 individuals who identified with a religious tradition. We asked them a wide range of questions about their views of spirituality and religion and how often they engaged in spiritual or religious practices. Using a machine learning technique called k-means clustering, we focused on a handful of variables that were the most crucial in providing clear distinctions between the nones. The end result were four clear categories of non-religion: Nones in Name Only, Spiritual But Not Religious, the Dones, and Zealous Atheists. We believe that these categories are both academically defensible but also conceptually accessible to the general public.
MeET THE RESEARCH TEAM
Ryan Burge
Ryan knows firsthand what the decline of religion looks like as he has pastored a number of declining churches across southern Illinois over the past two decades. In fact, the last two churches where he was the lead pastor no longer exist. The closure of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois happened in the Summer of 2024 and was covered by the Associated Press and Religion News Service. Thus, studying the decline of religion from a statistical standpoint dovetails with his own personal experience. Trying to understand the rise of the nones and the implications that this shift will have on the future of the American church and the larger culture has been the goal of his academic work over the last decade.
Tony Jones
Tony Jones has been elbow-deep in the church world for decades, most notably in the leadership of the Emerging Church Movement, which attempted to reshape and even revolutionize the Protestant church in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to catalyze a change in organized religion that would take account of the millions of Americans who were growing disillusioned with the politics and theology of both the liberal and conservative wings of the church -- meanwhile centrist churches virtually disappeared. Now, Jones has turned his attention to the 100 million Americans who have checked out of religion altogether, and he's particularly interested in how those non-religious Americans continue to make meaning in their lives, and even to seek transcendence.
See the Advisory Board shaping this project.