David E. Campbell, Geoffrey C. Layman, and John C. Green. Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics

Extract

In 1968, the sociologist Glenn Vernon implored his colleagues in the social sciences to not turn a blind eye to those without a religious affiliation. He referred to this group of nones as the “neglected category.” But, for decades, very few scholars of American religion took him seriously. That’s likely because there were not that many religiously unaffiliated people in the United States. In the 1970s, just 1 in 20 Americans were willing to tell a pollster that they were not attached to any religious tradition. Two decades later, that had risen to just 7 percent of the country.

However, from 1990 onward, the nones have seen a meteoric rise and likely make up at least 30 percent of the population today. While a number of social scientists began studying the nones over the last 20 years, scholarship in this area has reached a new level of activity in the last 2 years with a number of book-length treatments of the religiously unaffiliated. Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics by David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and John Green stands as the most authoritative scholarly work on the political implications of the nones in contemporary America. It is a tour de force in terms of both theoretical contribution as well as quantitative data that should serve as the starting point for scholars of social science who are interested in the religiously unaffiliated.