Rise of the 'Nones'

From the 2010s the religiously unaffiliated, the nones of the survey forms, become the fastest-growing category in the United States and much of the West, about a quarter to a third of adults in the Pew counts. Most are not organized atheists; the surveys find belief, practice, and belonging separating, which is the population the spiritual-but-not-religious label names.

Tagged: Secular and Non-Theistic Spiritual But Not Religious

The Event

Date

2010s-present (approximate)

Also called

The religiously unaffiliated

Era

Secular Modernity; Standard periodization of secular and non-religious history

Location

The United States and the West; today Worldwide

Traditions

Secular

Streams

Spiritual But Not Religious

How the Tradition Tells It

Unaffiliated is a survey category, not a creed: it holds atheists, agnostics, and the spiritual but not religious together, and the proportions differ by instrument and country.

Connections

History Event New Atheism 2004-2006 follows in part

Primary Sources

• The tradition's own record of the event.

Secondary Sources

• Gottlieb, Anthony. The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. New York: Liveright, 2016.
• Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.
• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Zuckerman, Phil, ed. Atheism and Secularity. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

Provenance: HIST-1326; confidence 0.85; accessed 2026-10-28.

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No image; the post explains why Art Entry AI-Generated Religious Art Image generators now produce Christs, Buddhas, and temple scenes on demand. The traditions are answering; some with welcome, some with prohibitions that reach the new medium directly. This page shows no generated image, because any single example would misrepresent the argument. Art Tradition Non-Theistic and Secular Art without transcendence: humanist meaning-making, museums as secular temples, and protest art. Artist Doris Salcedo The Colombian sculptor of political violence's traces; her Fragmentos floor in Bogotá is a counter-monument hammered from surrendered weapons by women victims of the conflict. Artist Käthe Kollwitz The German artist of grief: her Pietà, enlarged in Berlin's Neue Wache, is Germany's central memorial to the victims of war; a mother holding her dead son, made by a mother who lost hers. History Event Emerson's Divinity School Address 1838 History Event James's Varieties of Religious Experience 1902 History Event Theosophical Society founded 1875 World View Spiritual But Not Religious Spiritual But Not Religious is the self-description of those who keep the sacred and leave the institution: personal practice, borrowed wisdom, and experience over doctrine, without membership, creed, or clergy.