The religiously-unaffiliated make up 22% of the population nationwide, but which cities have the most Nones?
The Public Religion Research Institute, using data from the American Values Atlas, has figured out the least religious cities in the country…
At first I got stoked Saint Louis was on the list… then I realized it was just at the average. To be honest though, I would have expected it to be lower on the rankings so I'll take being average.
American Values Atlas: http://ava.publicreligion.org/
PublicReligion.org: http://publicreligion.org/2015/03/how-religiously-unaffiliated-is-your-city/#.VRNnf-7F90p
Wow. I'm (pleasantly) surprised Boston is so high on the list!
Portland just became my fave city!!!
Seattle and Portland, two of the Whitest cities in America made the list.
What exactly does that say about tolerance and diversity?
+Sarah Waters Fitzgerald *cough*
Keep in mind that 'religously unaffiliated' represents the end-state of a long, complex, interlocking set of privileges. To blithely tick the 'unaffiliated' box on this survey, you pretty much need to be one of two things (or both): 1) a college-educated, internet-native hipster, or 2) a professional of above-average income who comes from one or more generations of college-educated professionals who didn't identify with a minority ethnicity. Which basically means they (and you) are white, and either of 'soft'-Christian (e.g., Episcopalian) or far-end-of-the-reform-scale Jewish/intellectual roots.
That explains Portland.
It also explains why someplace like NYC — obviously a world center of effective atheism (because deeply-felt religion typically withers where style, intellect, money and power aggregate) scores a very low 19%. Because the city is disproportionately populated by ethnic minorities and elites, who maintain the outward trappings of religion as a form of group identification and/or social theatre, as well as new immigrants, some of whom may actually be believers (but trust me: most of them believe in the Big Apple more).
+Angelique Smith I dunno, what are you implying it says about tolerance and diversity?
+John Jainschigg I'm not saying your wrong, but those are large sweeping statements so I'd ask you cite your source. I've known people on both ends of the religious spectrum on every end of the financial spectrum across diverse ethnic lines.
+John Jainschigg I think that's a bit of an oversimplification.
Okay you explain why New York scores in the same neighborhood as Southern bastions of Born-Again fervor. (This is actually a trick question — you'd expect the same framing as you get in NYC in Atlanta, and a very different framing in Cleveland or Dallas.)
+Paul Spoerry — it's not that sweeping. Just the skeleton of an analysis that seeks to explain a (to my mind, paradoxical and deeply non-representative) result by showing some of the varying ways an overly-simple question might be answered by people with strongly-divergent practical views. My source is 58 years of living in New York, all over the place, knowing thousands of people, speaking four languages, dabbling in politics on and off, connecting with religious and ideological subgroups all the time (my atheist kids now play volleyball in a Catholic Youth League where Irish and Italians are the minority and Muslims arguably the majority, for example), and generally keeping my ears open.
Well, I don't have a good explanation for that.
I'm just saying, I don't fit into the two options that you proposed and I am not from a Judeo-Christian background.
I'm a native Portlander and a Christian. So meh. 😉
You're part of the 58%! ^_^
I think those are your expectations. Like I said, I expected St. Louis to be much further down, but clearly just because I expected it doesn't mean that's the result.