Why Does It Matter? 393In short, not only are the polls skewed by the way questions are written, but the trends
are positive. YECs are nowhere near as numerous as Gallup suggested, their numbers are
declining rapidly, and the YECs are older and dying off. In every other developed nation
in the world—Canada, northern Europe, Japan, Australia, and others—creationism has no
influence on public policy. This is striking contrast to the United States, where (despite the
fact that YECs are a small minority according to these polls), creationists form the majority
of the House and Senate science committees and are the majority of GOP presidential candi-
dates in the past three elections.
The other encouraging sign is the change in the religious composition of the U.S. popu-
lation. The United States is the last major developed nation in the world that has such a
high degree of religiosity. If you travel in Canada, northern Europe, or the United Kingdom,
you’ll find that nearly everyone there is secular now, and that religion has just about van-
ished from the cultural landscape. Spectacular churches and cathedrals all over Scandinavia,
Germany, the United Kingdom, and much of northern Europe have lost their flocks, and are
now being repurposed as public meeting places or bars and restaurants or just sit empty and
serve as tourist attractions—but no one worships there any more.
According to a 2013 Pew poll in the United States, the “religiously unaffiliated” are
now about 20–30 percent of the general population, outnumbering nearly every other group
(Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, and most Protestant denominations) by a
big margin (each of the rest of these groups is 2 percent or less of the population). Only the
Catholics and the Southern Baptists are still more numerous, and both of these are losing
ground. And of those who said that they had “nothing in particular” in the way of a religious
affiliation, 88 percent also said they were “not looking.” Thus, the decline in religiosity across
the board in the United States is not some sort of hippy-dippy movement to “New Age”
religions from the old stale Protestant churches—but a movement away from any form of
organized religion, especially fundamentalism.
Even more striking is how this breaks down demographically. The most remarkable
of the trends is how much it is stratified by age. Young people are becoming increasingly
secular and nonreligious, so much so that the youngest cohort (the “young millennials,”
born 1990–1994) are 34 percent nonreligious! About 30 percent of the “older millennials”
(born 1980–1989) are also nonreligious, while the “Gen Xers” (born 1965–1980) report
21 percent “unaffiliated,” so the percentage declines only very slightly as the cohorts age. All
of these people together contribute to the overall 20–30 percent of “unaffiliated” in the poll
and will increase through time. Clearly, organized religion is fading rapidly in this country,
driven by a combination of young people who see no need of it and the dying off of the older
generations that were raised in a strongly religious society. As sociologists like Phil Zucker-
man have shown, such trends have already happened in most of the western industrialized
nations (especially those in Scandinavia), as the benefits of a modern secular society and
modern medicine and science become more central to their lives.
We can all speculate about why younger generations are alienated from organized reli-
gion, and certainly there are many reasons. But knowing the current political trends in this
country, we might suggest that one factor of great importance is how “organized religion”
in this country is largely dominated by the shrill and intolerant evangelicals and their hate-
filled message against science, gays, women, and minorities. With the incredibly rapid shift
in this country toward majority acceptance of gays (who are overwhelmingly supported by
young people, among whom homophobia and religious intolerance is rare), it might seem