I've had it with the "nones." Not those so designated but with the designation. For a while it seemed cute and even funny - "not nuns, nones!" - but in the present moment defining anyone purely negatively isn't fun or funny at all.
I've taught the Pew Research Center's "Modeling the Future of Religion in America" since it came out three years ago, noting its beholdenness to a narrow definition of religion as affiliation. It's Pew as much as anyone who has taught us about the "rise of the nones." Usually we critique its lumping together all "Christians" and, even more, its throwing all those who don't check an affiliation box on a survey into a monolithic sea of "nones." (Dumping everyone else into a residual category of "Other Religions" pisses students off, too - when it's included in the picture at all.) 
We notice how they offer graphs which let you tell the story either as one of the decline of Christianity or the rise of the unaffiliated, and note their prediction that, in three out of four hypothetical scenarios of religious "switching," Christians will cease to be a majority by 2070. 
These studies and the way they have been reported and interpreted feed the alarmist "America as a Christian nation" shibboleth. It all seems rather zero-sum but it was only this time through, with the DIY Religion class, that I noticed that they confirm this framing.
(This is on the third page of a website where most people read only the first.) It comes as a relief that rates of rise or fall are likely to slow, possibly resulting in a kind of "equilibrium rather than one group ascending completely and the other disappearing." A relief and a surprise, given that the framing has suggested an inescapable existential battle between the two sides. And who was thinking in terms of anyone's "ascending completely"? Who could even conceive that?
In the context of our class, we noticed how incongruous this polarized story seems against the backdrop of the religious pluralism which has long characterized the American landscape. "Christians" count as a unified block rather than a world of jostling competitors only when contrasted with something else, but the sources we've been reading have argued that the vitality of the American religious scene has long derived precisely from that jostling competition and the particular voluntarist way of experiencing religion forced by an ever expanding spiritual pluralism. (To be fair, the Pew model comes from this peculiar denominationalist culture: everyone is free to affiliate, it's only when people decline to affiliate that they get spooked.) Attentive as we have been to the variety and spiritual depth and adventurousness of those relegated "nones," we see glasses overflowing where they worry about a glass emptying.
This isn't to say that nones are just religious in their own way. Rejecting or repurposing organized traditions is important for many, and not all experience this as freedom rather than emptiness. For many, "religion" just is obsolete. But in the present moment, the Christians vs. nones framing seems not just misleading but pernicious. Not only is the ever churning mix of American spiritualities obscured, with a stalemate between two competing visions the only conceivable alternative to the eradication of one by the other. (One student astutely observed that this sounded a lot like the bankrupt American two-party political system in 2025.) But a contrast between religion and irreligion (to name it) isn't between two similar competitors, two different visions of the good or true or beautiful - or spiritual. It's between something and nothing. (And so, in the extreme, everything and nothing.)
"None" may just be a shorthand for "unaffiliated" in a conventional sense: just this year Pew finally tried to measure as agency, initiative and conviction what in the earlier studies appears only as absence. But "none" resonates with the most extreme rhetoric of the current administration, a Manichaeanism made explicit in that chilling speech of Stephen Miller's last week.
We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. [...] What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. ... To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.In his signature enactment of the hatred and nihilism he claims define those he demonizes, Miller spat out the word "nothing" over and over and over. I watched the video: you could feel the spite building from the repetition. This extreme dehumanizing of those who think differently is central to his thinking, as it is to the "or we won't have a country" rhetoric of his boss. Its hollowness bellows.
In hands like theirs, Pew's already prejudicial shorthand "nones" becomes poison. The unaffiliated are not free-thinkers, seekers, innovators, DIYers, but defined purely as negativity, emptiness, a chaos threatening to engulf and consume "the world that we inhabit." The setting in which Miller spoke, and things students in the class have mentioned seeing in their internet feeds, made me aware that the outrageous "are you something or nothing" challenge might be appealing to some young people lost in this age's uncertainty.
How do we teach them that plurality is not only possible but actual reality?
