Data suggests there is hope for religion in the United States. According to polling from Cooperative Election Study, the share of “nones,” or those who claim no religious affiliation, is plateauing.

Ryan Burge, who writes the religious data Substack ‘Graphs About Religion,’ said, “the rise of the nones is essentially over for now.” For the last several years, the percentage of those who claim no religion, are atheist, or agnostic has hovered between 34% and 36%. That’s a major slowdown from the rapid increase in “nones” between 2008 and 2014, when the “nones” increased from 21% to 30%.

The Silver Lining of COVID

New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat thinks the plateauing of the “nones” represents the completion of a trend. “Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to start coming back up,” Douthat told Drew. The Times columnist believes COVID acted as an accelerant to the trend of religious decline that, had the pandemic not happened, would have continued until 2032.

Who are the Nones?

The “nones” are not a monolithic group, but a discreet group Americans with varying views of organized religion. Pew reports that 43% of “nones” have a “negative view of religion.” However, most “nones” believe in God, “or another higher power,” and about 50% of them say spirituality is important to them.

To those ‘spiritual, but not religious’ Americans, Douthat makes the case for organized religion. “There’s a lot potentially to be gained through connecting to a larger tradition of people who have thought about these issues, debated these issues before, who have developed a set of spiritual practices,” he told Drew Mariani.

And as a Catholic, Douthat says, “it’s incredibly useful for me that I belong to a Church that tells me I need to go to mass every Sunday.”

Faith and Reason 

To those who remain on the sidelines of faith in general, Douthat makes a scientific reason-based argument for belief.

“Scientific progress of the last 100-150 years” has not had a damming effect on religious claims about the universe, Douthat told Drew Mariani. Instead, these scientific discoveries have confirmed the “basic religious ideas about the mathematical beauty and comprehensibility of the world.”

Moreover, Douthat believes science shows the universe is “fine-tuned” for human life. And to the skeptics that think the universe is a 1 in 100 possibility, Douthat said that number is more like a 1 in 100 billion possibility.