Having No Religion Means Different Things to Different People

Here at Mosaic, we’ve given much attention to what social scientists have called the “rise of the nones”—the increasing number of Americans who tell pollsters that they have no religion at all. (The equivalent category for experts on American Jewish demography is “Jews of no religion.”) Yet this is by no means a uniform group. The demographer Ryan Burge and his colleagues have come up with a fourfold classification of nones based on survey data. These include the well-document category of “spiritual but not religious,” and another group, the “dones,” who simply want nothing to do with religion whatsoever. Of the latter, Burge writes, “we feel confident in saying that there is no clearly articulated ‘God-shaped hole’ in the hearts of these folks.”