NOVEMBER 6, 2014 | A key question emerging from much post-election commentary is why the religiously unaffiliated — the so-called “Nones” — didn’t flex their liberal political muscle, as was anticipated by demographic analysts such as Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). In an article in The Atlantic last month, Jones suggested that growing populations of Nones in traditional red states such as Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina promised “the beginnings of a major shift away from a robust white evangelical presence and influence in the country.” Nones, Jones prophesied, might “exert enough force to make themselves felt” against GOP candidates.

Uh, well, maybe not so much.

But why is that? If a mass of well-educated, reasonable affluent, latte swilling, tech-savvy hipsters from coast to coast had it in their power to flip the liberal switch on Tuesday, why didn’t they? What stood in the way of Nones and the polls?

Over at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner makes the obvious point that those wondering why so few Nones came out to vote on Tuesday seem to have missed: white, conservative Evangelicals are “winning the turnout game.” They’ve worked particularly hard this election season at get-out-the-vote initiatives, certainly. And, “rise of the Nones” be damned, there are still just plain more affiliated voters than unaffiliated ones. So, Evangelicals had more impact on voting on Tuesday both because math and because effort. But both of these are factors in the critical, underlying difference between religiously affiliated and the religiously unaffiliated that many commentators seem to miss: affiliation itself as an organizational, communications, and mobilizing structure.

If a mass of well-educated, reasonable affluent, latte swilling, tech-savvy hipsters from coast to coast had it in their power to flip the liberal switch on Tuesday, why didn’t they?

Why Aren’t the Nones on the Electoral Bus?

In perhaps the starkest terms for those concerned both about the viability of institutional religion in America and changing patterns of religiously-motivated political action, the numbers tell us that if the unaffiliated gathered into a formal religious organization, it would be larger than any Protestant denomination and all Mainline Protestant denominations combined. That’s a huge deal, the potential of which was recognized when, in January 2013, an annual meeting of leaders of Humanist, Atheist, and other non-religious organizations convened “to chart a path forward and discuss the most important issues facing ‘nones’ today.” On the heals of the release of “Nones on the Rise” report showing growth in the population of the religiously unaffiliated, and the election of Barack Obama, in which many commentators saw the voting practices of Nones as critical, the group was concerned to “consolidate [the] cultural presence” of Nones to “gain broader social acceptance” and amplify wider cultural and political influence.

Organizing Nones is kind of a class cat-herding problem.

Alas, however, there is no Church of the Risen None, no Affiliation for the Religiously Unaffiliated, which makes “consolidating the cultural presence” of Nones as somewhat more complex proposition than doing so for members of formal religious organizations. What’s more, the majority of Nones — some 70% — retain a belief in God or other supernatural beings or forces, many retaining elements of institutional practice as significant parts of their own spiritual lives. Atheist and Humanist organizations don’t necessarily represent their spiritual or political interests. Likewise, many also move in and out of theistic and extra-theistic modes of spiritual practice at different times in their lives. Some are wholly indifferent to spirituality and religion in general, including the anti-religious religious posturing of some Atheists and Humanists. Organizing Nones is kind of a class cat-herding problem.

Figuring out what sort of tent to gather a demographic cohort characterized most by their desire not to be glommed into a demographic cohort is a quite a conundrum for political organizers and religious leaders alike. At the end of the day, Nones as a cultural, political, or religious category comparable to institutional religious groups simply don’t exist.

A Demographic Distinction with a Meaningful Difference

Technically speaking, that is, Nones are members only of a demographic category made up of people who share similar characteristics but “who do not necessarily interact or identify with one another.” “None,” the authors of the Pew “Nones on the Rise” report note, quoting sociologist Glenn Vernon, is a terminology that “provides a negative definition, specifying what a phenomenon is not, rather than what it is.”

Embracing the very noneness of Nones is a critical practice for those attempting to understand the unaffiliated and an important starting point for understanding how American religion and spirituality themselves are changing.

Nones, then, are not part of a group proper, which would require that they meet at least periodically with one or more Nones expressly on the basis of their shared “noneness” and that together they would act on assumptions about belief and behavior on the basis of that common identity. Thus, in what may seem like so much wonky semantic quibbling, there is here a distinction with a meaningful difference. That is, the population of Nones in the U.S. can be categorized according to gender, race, ethnicity, age, educational level, geographic location, and other personal characteristics. But they do not form a cohesive ideological or social group as do Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, or Protestants, despite the fact that these, too, can be categorized in terms of the same characteristics as are Nones.

The religiously affiliated, however, do of course, by definition, join religious groups, and membership in these in itself functions as a demographic characteristic. The affiliated are male and female, young and old, gay and straight, black and white. And they are also Buddhist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Hindu, Jewish, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and so on. However much academic researchers and mainstream writers may like to funnel them into group-like classifications, the unaffiliated resist such psuedo-affiliated classifications as a matter not only of demographic correctness — what they have in common is that they do not share a set of beliefs with others in groups of which they are members — but also as a matter of spiritual identity and practice.

Embracing the very noneness of Nones is a critical practice for those attempting to understand the unaffiliated and an important starting point for understanding how American religion and spirituality themselves are changing. In this light, the challenge of the new politics of religion in an America that grows increasingly religiously unaffiliated is not how to organize Nones, but what to do with the fact that they are not an inherently organizable and mobilizable mass analogous to the religiously affiliated.

Elizabeth Drescher, PhD is the co-editor of The Narthex and the author Tweet If You ❤ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation (Morehouse, 2011) and, with Keith Anderson, of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible. Her forthcoming book is Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of American Nones (Oxford). Her articles on the changing contours of American Christianity have appeared in Salon, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News, and Religion Dispatches. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Cover photo: C-Monster, “NYC Vote,” 2009. CC 2.0 license. Saturated from original.