What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over so much of America?

The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. It is simply not the case that inrecent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existenceof God, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot. Sure, thismay be happening here and there, in this or that dorm room or on this or that Tumblr page. The best-sellers written by Richard Dawkins,Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harrisas well as the irreverent impiety and flagrant mockery of religion by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, House, South Park, and Family Guyhave had some impact on American culture. As we have seen, a steady, incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.

For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with therise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embracedthe conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party.Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to JamesDobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayerin schools, advocating abstinence only sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposinggun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, whichhas been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House.

What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists MichaelHout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of nones in America is largely attributableto a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partiallyrelated to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically foundthemselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weakattachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamountto saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.

A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation of, and reaction against, the CatholicChurchs pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators toremote parishes rather than having them arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash lawbreaking,and the aggressive slandering of accusersand all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victimshave been made known than one can imagine. After the extent of the crimesthe rapes and molestations as well as the cover-upsbecamewidely publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual sexual crimes themselvesmorally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was trulyshocking. The result has been clear: a lot of Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England.Between 2000 and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its members in Maine,and closed nearly seventy parishesa quarter of the total numberthroughout the Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39 percent in 2008. And according to an American Values survey from 2012, althoughnearly one-third of Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as sucha precipitous nationwide declineindeed.

Of course, the negative reaction against the religious right and the Catholic pedophile scandal both have to do explicitly with religion. Buta very important third possible factor that may also account for the recent rise of secularity has nothing to do with religion. It is something utterly sociological: the dramatic increase of women in the paid labor force. British historian Callum Brown was the first to recognize this interesting correlation: when more and more women work outside the home, their religious involvementas well as that of their families tends to diminish. Brown rightly argues that it has been women who have historically kept their children and husbands interested and involved in religion. Then, starting in the 1960s, when more and more British women starting earning an income through work outside thehome, their interest inor time and energy forreligious involvement waned. And as women grew less religious, their husbands and childrenfollowed suit. Weve seen a similar pattern in many other European nations,especially in Scandinavia: Denmark and Sweden have the lowest levels of church attendance in the world, and simultaneously,Danish and Swedish women have among the highest rates of outside-the-home employment of any women in the world. And the data shows asimilar trajectory here in America. Back in the 1960s, only 11 percent of American households relied on a mother as their biggest or sole source of income. Today, more than 40 percent of American families are in such a situation. Thus it may very well be that as a significantly higher percentage of American moms earn a living in the paid labor force, their enthusiasm for and engagement with religion is being sapped, and thats playing a role in the broader secularization of our country.

Additional Factors

In addition to the above factorsthe reaction against the overt mingling of religion and conservative/right-wing politics, the reactionagainst the Catholic priest pedophile scandal, and the increase of women in the paid labor forceI would add two more possibilities concerning what might also be at least partial contributors to the recent rise of irreligion in America: the greater acceptance of homosexuality in American culture and the ubiquity of the Internet.

Since the days of Stonewall and Harvey Milk, more and more Americans have come to accept homosexuality as a normal, legitimate formof love and pairing. For many, acceptance of homosexuals simply boils down to a matter of fairness, civil rights, and equality before the law. The overall stigmatization of homosexuality has weakened significantly in recent decades. We see that those Americans who continue tomalign homosexuality as sinful or immoral, and who continue to fight against gay rights, do so exclusively from a religious vantage point. And it is turning some people off religion. In my previous book, Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion, which was based on in-depth interviews with Americans who were once religious but are no longer, I found that many of those who have walked away from their religion in recent years have done so as a direct consequence of and reaction against their respective religious traditions continued condemnation and stigmatization of gays and lesbians. The fact that Americans today between the ages of eighteen and thirty are the generation most accepting of homosexuality in the nations history, and are simultaneously those least interested in being religiousand the fact that the states that have legalized gay marriage tend to be among the most secularmight be coincidental, but I highly doubt it.

Next, the Internet has had a secularizing effect on society in recent decades. This happens on various levels. First, religious people canlook up their own religion on the Web and suddenly, even unwittingly, be exposed to an array of critiques or blatant attacks on their tradition that they otherwise would never have come across. Debunking on the Internet abounds, and whether one is a Mormon, a Scientologist, a Catholic, a Jehovahs Witnesswhateverthe Web exposes the adherents of every and any religious tradition to skeptical views that canpotentially undermine personal certainty, rattling an otherwise insulated, confident conviction in ones religion.

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Were putting an end to religion: Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and the exploding new American secularism