The growing denomination "None"

Heartening news from Frank Rich's op-ed piece ("The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off") in yesterday's New York Times¹:

The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.
    This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”
    The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice — as exemplified by the New Deal and those movements that challenged it from both the left and the right. It’s too early in our crisis and too early in the new administration to know whether this decade will so closely replicate the 1930s, but so far Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America with the possible exception of his sometime ally, the Rev. Rick Warren.

I'm of course cavalier in calling the decline in church affiliation "heartening." But my regular readers will know why I say this. For example, just this morning on NPR, I was listening to a commentary about the need for Christians and Muslims to cooperate to further human rights. True enough that cooperation would be nice, but the commentary might more usefully have included some information about how both religions stand in the way of various human rights. Christians in the way of rights for gays, for example. Muslims in the way of rights for women. And on and on.
    As Sam Harris rightly recommended in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, progress demands that religion not be given a free pass when it comes to criticism.
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1. It has come to my attention that columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. has also written about these findings, in his syndicated article, "Wake-Up Call for Organized Religion," in the Miami (FL) Herald, March 14, 2009.
       Pitts allows that "God and religion are not synonymous." I agree; god doesn't exist, religion does.