Last Saturday, my friend Sarah Levin of Secular Strategies and I facilitated a training session at Netroots Nation 2023 in Chicago. The session's title was “Religiously Unaffiliated: Understanding and Engaging the Nones.” It was a good tag team. Though Sarah and I had not met in person in years, we’ve emailed and texted each other enough to know what we are up to.
We also did some media but haven’t gotten alerts that they are uploaded, will post links in the newsletter when they are. I did the “understanding” part based on the extant research, some original like the Secular Voices Survey, some from public datasets, primarily the Cooperative Election Study. Sarah did the “engaging” part discussing vocabulary and, well, engagement strategies. The two halves fed off each other as some of the research addressed issues like the media’s obsession with the spiritual but not religious as the overwhelming face of the nones. But in reality, most nones are indifferent to God or spirits; they don’t practice religion. This, in turn, affects how messaging may be perceived. When progressives use generic religious language, thinking they are casting a wide net, the nones do not feel included because they don’t care about religion. Thus, they’re likely to feel left behind, pun intended.
I will expand on some of my slides in the following weeks. Considering the amount of interest we got in the subject, it will be useful to have the slides expanded into full posts.