Book Interview: Stephen Bullivant looks at how America lost its religion

People gather for the Reason Rally on the National Mall March 24, 2012 in Washington, DC..

• Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America
• Stephen Bullivant
• Oxford University Press, €23.15

When asked to state their religion, roughly one in four American adults — about 59m people — say ‘none’. 

In the space of just over a quarter of a century, the proportion of US adults with no religious affiliation has more or less quadrupled. And 44% of American 18-19 year-olds now identify as having no religion.

Key to understanding this ‘Rise of the Nones’ is what theologian and sociologist Professor Stephen Bullivant calls ‘nonverts’. 

What are nonverts? Well, instead of leaving one religion for another, as converts do, they leave a religion, usually the one they were raised in, for having none: nonverts.

According to Professor Bullivant’s new book, the “mass nonversion” of millions upon millions of Americans who were raised religious is fundamentally and decisively changing the face of their society. 

We are witnessing the making of ex-Christian America; and, with it, the unmaking of a paradigm that had seemed set in stone.

“Within the sociology of religion, for a very long time, there was this classic contrast between ‘Christian America’ and ‘Godless Europe’,” Stephen told me when we sat down to chew over the nonvert question recently.

“In Europe, religious practice, religious belief, and religious affiliation have declined over the past fifty, sixty, seventy years. It’s the same in Canada, the same in Australia. There is a modern, western, democratic country path — except that the most modern, the most western country seemed to be quite a considerable exception.”

However, America is an exception no more, it seems. “It was always going to be of interest, if and when, having never seemed to secularise in any kind of serious way before, America suddenly seemed to start to do it.”

Stephen Bullivant is a theologian and a sociologist. He grew up in Preston, England, where, religiously speaking, he was raised as ‘a nothing’ and became a “quite obnoxious” secondary school atheist. 

He lives near Oxford which is where he studied and converted to Catholicism. Nowadays, he’s a professor at St Mary’s University in London and that is where I meet him.

Stephen Bullivant author of Nonverts, Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion Director, Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society St Mary's University, Twickenham, UK

Bullivant is still only in his late 30s, but he has amassed a very impressive publishing record, which includes co-editing the  Oxford Handbook of Atheism and the Cambridge History of Atheism, and writing Mass Exodus, a recent landmark study of Catholic disaffiliation in Britain and America. 

He is also an avid student and lover of Americana, everything from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, from rodeos to Mork and Mindy, from bluegrass to bourbon. (‘James Beam’ is thanked in the Acknowledgments section of Nonverts for being an “unfailing source of comfort and resilience”.)

He is eminently qualified then for the task of scrutinising the American religious scene and its burgeoning atheism, and for spotting the known unknowns.

“We don’t know how all this plays out. It’s not finished, the process. There’s a sense in which we’re in this strange transitional moment, this kind of watershed moment, where, because it’s been so fast, there’s this kind of cultural whiplash. A lot of the febrile moral debates, the church-state issues, anything around abortion, anything around gay marriage, because it’s all tied up with religion, mean it’s quite an excitable moment in American cultural life. Everyone’s got a dog in the fight. It’s personal for so many people.”

These people weave in and out of Bullivant’s book, speaking in their own voices, telling the story of their own idiosyncratic journey to no religion. 

Nonverts opens with Stephen visiting a gun range in southern Louisiana. Pretty soon we are in the company of John, a libertarian happy to converse about everything from the ideas of Epicurus to the sex lives of octopuses; and then Judy, a polyamorous, mohawked, BDSM enthusiast and (along with the Adele and Benedict Cumberbatch) a minister in the Universal Life Church (which doesn’t have a god). Both are nonverts. 

John grew up in a nominal but very low-commitment Christian household. Judy’s mother is a pious Catholic in a traditionalist mould and, as a teenager, Judy herself once spoke to a mother superior about joining the convent.

Bullivant can write in a free-wheeling style that helps the reader to feel we are on a classic American road trip with him. 

In Florida, we’re introduced to an ex-evangelical woman called Kate, a former employee of a scandal-hit megachurch and an alcoholic who compares going without church to going without drink, which she has managed to do for six years. When it comes to having religion, Bullivant observes, she’s 15 years sober. 

Meanwhile, in an upscale, west coast private members’ club, we meet Luisa, a third-generation Mexican American who, on the one hand, sends regular donations to support the retired Irish nuns who taught her — “If it wasn’t for them, everything would have just fallen apart” — and, on the other hand, bangs the table when telling Bullivant that she “never — ever — ever” felt anything special when receiving communion.

Alongside the human stories sit bigger theories about how shifts in thought and feeling on this scale are shaped by history. Stephen expounds on one of them for me. 

Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, by Stephen Bullivant

“The Cold War, kind of kept the possibility of thinking of yourself as having no religion artificially low. It didn’t play out like that in Europe. We were up to our necks in the Cold War, but it wasn’t framed in these religious terms. But the millennial generation were brought up either completely or mostly once the Cold War has ended, when the public enemy number one is not people with no religion, it’s people with too much religion! And then in the early 2000s, once you start getting headlines that say ‘nones on the rise’, then people start thinking ‘Ooh, that’s what I am!’.”

The entanglements of politics and religion in America have been endlessly discussed and debated. But now we need to reckon with the encounter between politics and no religion: “It’s certainly true that ‘nones’ tend to skew more liberal. That’s kind of the stereotype, right? But there are still five million Republican-identifying nones. There is a significant voting bloc here. As nones become a bigger and bigger segment of American society, we’re already seeing moves. Obama’s first inauguration speech made headlines in certain quarters for being the first to have a little shout-out to all faiths and none. It was the first time the ‘and none’ was included.”

Could Ireland end up under Stephen Bullivant’s sociological microscope in the future? As it happens, Stephen was part of the CSO subgroup which examined changes to the religion question in the 2021 census.

“I do have an interest in Irish religion. Partly, I’m interested in Ireland itself, but to be interested in Catholicism anywhere, you have to be interested in Ireland. If you’re interested in American Catholicism, English Catholicism, Australian Catholicism, African… It’s the greater hibernosphere! And the turning off of the taps of vocations in Ireland then rolls out elsewhere. You have to look to the Philippines or Nigeria or wherever. I’ve never really focused on Ireland because I think it’s too big and important a topic just to dabble in without really fully immersing oneself in the work.”

I hope it happens someday. A Bullivant road trip across Ireland would be mighty.