“So there is a story about why there is this rise of the nones,' says British sociologist Stephen Bullivant. 'But to me, the more interesting story is why it didn’t happen earlier.”
If even the LDS Church is starting to bleed members, “that shows what a big issue this is for everyone else.”
And it is sudden, he notes. “This kind of religious change in a society doesn’t normally happen in the space of 20 or 30 years,” he told Religion News Service in a Zoom interview. “It’s been within the space of one or perhaps two generations that we’ve seen a sudden surge.” “So there is a story about why there is this rise of the nones. But to me, the more interesting story is why it didn’t happen earlier.” Why did this change start not in the 1960s, when American culture was in a state of upheaval, but in the ‘90s?a backlash against the GOP’s “Contract With America” and the rise of the religious right
“Then suddenly the Cold War ends, and you have people able to acknowledge being nonreligious. In fact, by the timerise up in the mid-2000s, it’s no longer people with no religion who are the existential threat, but people with too much religion, especially extremist religion. The New Atheism is really interesting in how it positions itself as patriotic.”
The internet chips away at that enclave. “This was important for many of the Mormons I interviewed, who were encountering new things about Mormon history online. But even more than this, they’re starting to hang out with non-Mormons and ex-Mormons, people who are very much in your boat, and that becomes this other world you can inhabit.”
“In order to come to this guest dinner with loads of wine on a Sunday evening,” he said, “you had to have gone to the Mass beforehand.”
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