The Rise and Fall of the NONES: Thru Evangelization

While Islam and Christianity provide fixed frameworks for human nature and the afterlife, "nones"—the religiously unaffiliated—lack a single creed. Their beliefs are highly diverse, often blending secular reasoning with individual spiritual ideas

"Nones" typically categorize their worldview in the following ways:
1. Human Nature & Purpose
Unlike the concept of being born a "slave to Allah" or a "child of God," nones generally view human nature through a secular or humanistic lens:

Subjective Meaning: 

Most believe there is no inherent, preordained purpose for human life. Instead, individuals must construct their own meaning through relationships, helping others, and personal growth.

Innate Autonomy: 

Rather than seeing themselves as belonging to a deity, they often emphasize personal autonomy and the use of reason over revelation to determine morality.

Moral Alignment: 

Many believe that being a "good, upright person" is more important than adhering to a specific creed or belonging to a religious group.

The Afterlife & Eternity
While religions offer a definitive "numbers game" or "face of God," nones hold a spectrum of views on what happens after death:

 
Secular Materialism: A significant portion (especially atheists) believes that death is the end of consciousness, with the brain's death marking the finality of the self.

Rising Spirituality: 

Despite being unaffiliated, belief in an afterlife is actually increasing among nones, rising to roughly 60% in some regions.

Fluid Conceptions: Many reject traditional "Heaven and Hell" but believe in:

Continuing On: An aspect of being survives, but not necessarily as a conscious individual.

Energy Transformation: Life continues as a form of energy or part of the "whole" universe.

 Individualized Heaven: Some still hold a version of heaven where "good people" are rewarded, regardless of their specific faith or lack thereof.

 
Spiritual but Not Religious (SBNR)
Many nones maintain spiritual beliefs without institutional ties:

 Spiritual Realm: Sizable numbers believe in a spiritual dimension beyond the natural world, even if they cannot see it.

Ancestral Spirits: In some cultures, nones maintain a belief that spirits of ancestors can still influence or help the living.



Without a shared scripture, "nones" rely on diverse philosophical frameworks that prioritize human reason and lived experience over divine command.
Common Moral Frameworks for "Nones"
• Secular Humanism: This is the most structured alternative, emphasizing that humans must take responsibility for themselves because no transcendent power will intervene. It relies on reason, empathy, and scientific inquiry to discover "objective standards" like the Golden Rule.
• Consequentialism & Utilitarianism: Many nones determine right and wrong by looking at the results of an action. The goal is often the "greatest happiness principle"—maximizing well-being and minimizing harm for the most people possible.
• Existentialism: This framework argues that life has no inherent meaning and that individuals are "condemned to be free". Instead of following a path set by a deity, nones must create their own purpose and take radical responsibility for their choices.
• Virtue Ethics: Rooted in Aristotelian thought, this focuses on character development. Instead of following a list of rules (like the Ten Commandments), individuals strive to become "superior persons" by cultivating virtues like courage, honesty, and compassion.
• Social Contract Theory: Morality is viewed as a practical agreement between people to live together in a functional society. Rules are followed not because they are "holy," but because they provide mutual benefit and social stability.

Key Differences in Moral Logic

Feature	Traditional Religious View	"Nones" / Secular View
Source	Divine Revelation / Scripture	Human Reason / Logic / Science
Foundation	Concept of Sin (offending God)	Concept of Harm (hurting others)
Flexibility	Fixed/Absolute	Adaptable to societal progress
Incentive	Eternal reward or punishment	Personal satisfaction or social cohesion

While 83% of nones say they can be perfectly moral without God, their specific "rules" are often a hybrid of these philosophies, tailored to their own intuition.

Challenging the ONES (excerpts from Bishop Barron on Evangelization)

For every one person joining the Catholic Church today, six are leaving; Catholics thirty and younger, now fully fifty percent, one-half, of them identify as having no religion.

As Bishop Barron would say:  we do have a fight on our hands when we evangelize in our culture today, but the great saints of our Church have always loved a good fight, and we should too. We are  facing three great challenges; I think we have three opportunities:

Three Great Challenges

Scientism aka naturalism.

 The reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge.

The human heart, as Augustine taught us long ago, is ordered to God. Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And therefore, when wIe close ourselves in, to what Charles Taylor calls ‘the buffered self’, that means a self that is isolated from all reference to the transcendent, we do damage to the human heart, we do damage. The culprit is this naturalism or materialism, scientism, that would close down the aspiration of the human spirit.

As Bishop Barron says: "One of the signs, by the way, these are young people picking up from the Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, the new atheists – you talk about religion and they say oh come on, it’s just a bunch of old nonsense, it’s just a projection of our desires, it’s bronze age mythology…this is a result of a scientism...here is the first problem with scientism. It is, strictly speaking, self-refuting. Scientism is not discoverable through the scientific method.  No, in fact, scientism is a philosophical perspective and so, it’s self-refuting."

One of the central arguments of Joseph Ratzinger’s great work Introduction to Christianity is that the universal intelligibility of nature, the fact that everything in nature, in every nook and cranny from the highest to the lowest, is marked by intelligibility. That’s the very ground for all the sciences. Every scientist goes out to meet a world that he or she is confident will be intelligible.

Where’s that come from? Why should the world be, in every detail, intelligible? Unless, Ratzinger argues, it’s grounded in a creative intelligence. Scientism, naturalism, materialism is the first great obstacle we face because to evangelize is to speak of God. It’s to speak of God. It is to break through the buffered self and to allow the human heart to fulfill its aspirations.

The culture of ‘m’eh’. 

Now where’s this come from? It’s rampant today, especially among the young. If there really is no objective truth, if there really is no objective value, yeah your truth, my truth, that’s good for you and it’s not good for me and I’ll tolerate you as long as you tolerate me. What that produces is the culture of m’eh. Or as the kids say, whatever. Whatever. You see, the whatever culture comes from the loss of a sense of the objectively good and the objectively true. Eh, your truth my truth, your good my good enervates first the person, and then the wider society. I’ll give you an image from John Henry Newman I have always loved. Newman says what gives a river its verve and its energy is precisely the firmness of its banks. Think of the firm banks, and then the river rushes in between those banks. It’s moving with energy; it’s going somewhere. Knock down the banks in the name of freedom. Let the river be. Let it be what it wants to be. What’s going to happen? That river is going to open up into this big, lazy lake. Placid, I suppose, but with no energy, no purpose. So I would say, our society today is a bitlike that big, lazy lake. All of us floating individually on our own little air mattresses tolerating each other – I won’t get in your way if you don’t get in my way – but floating on the great, lazy lake without energy, without purpose. Evangelization, the declaration of the good news of Jesus, is meant precisely to send us on mission. It is indeed the declaration of a tremendous, objective good, an objective truth, which is meant to give us energy and verve. Think of a line that Dante loved to quote. Mary, once she received the message of the angel, went in haste. She went in haste to the hill country to visit her cousin. See, once you’ve been grasped by the power of God, once you’ve been addressed by a truly objective truth and good, then you know where to go and you do it with energy. One of the obstacles we face is this m’eh, whatever culture. No, no. We speak for objective truth and objective goodness. 

The culture of self-invention. 

The roots of this go back to the nineteenth century. The most important philosopher of the nineteenth century, more important than Marx in terms of influence, is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche who said, remember, we are beyond good and evil, those are all just constructs, and what remains is the will to power. The will to power of the individual. That’s what remains. The twentieth century version of Nietzsche is Jean Paul Sartre, the founder of existentialism. So called, because Sartre says, existence precedes essence. It’s a fancy philosophical way of saying my freedom comes first, and then I determine essence, who I am, the meaning of my life. But see, it’s all done on the basis of my freedom. See what was at a high philosophical level in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, what was bandied about in the cafes of Paris in the 1950s, has now become, common knowledge among most high school and twenty-year old’s in America today. My freedom determines the meaning of my life. Now you see it all over the place, the culture of self-invention. My sexuality, my gender, the purpose of my life: it’s all up to me. In philosophy, it's voluntarism. The triumph of the will over the intellect

Nietzsche and Sartre, got it in high philosophical form, but now you’ve got it in almost every kid in America. The triumph of will over intellect. The world is what I want it to be. I determine the meaning of my life.

Voluntarism is the great obstacle, Ratzinger thought, to cultural progress today.  Why? Because to evangelize is to say your life is not about you. Your life is not up to you. In fact, the ecstatic expression of Paul, ‘It’s no longer I who live, it’s Christ who lives in me.’ When you’ve been seized by the power of Jesus Christ, your little ego-drama becomes pretty unimportant. What I want to do, what I want to accomplish, the person I think I am, who cares finally? ‘It’s no longer I who live, it’s Christ who lives in me.’ To evangelize, therefore, is to stand athwart to this culture of self-invention. It’s the Theodrama that matters, not the ego-drama. The great biblical truth is ‘the truth shall set you free’. John Paul exploited that all the time, to show the correlation between intellect and will, between freedom and truth. It’s not my little will that invents the truth. No, it’s the truth that sets me authentically free. 

Opportunities 

Forget Dumbdown Religion

When we don’t express Christianity and Catholicism in a smart way, people fall away. It happened to a lot of us you now grew up and faced the trials of life and this superficial, unintelligent Catholicism was not enough to sustain people.  Everyone from Jacques Maritain to Thomas Murton and  Thomas Aquinas, our great figures embrace the intelligence of Catholicism

Young people think the speech about God is a lot of nonsense. They don’t understand what we mean when we use the word God.
We all should have a good grasp of one of the great arguments for God’s existence: The contingency argument.  We’re surrounded by contingent things. That just means things that don’t explain themselves. Things that don’t contain within themselves the reason for their own existence. I’m a contingent thing because I had parents, I eat and drink, and I’m currently breathing air. That means my existence is dependent on all types of external factors. Everything in this room where I am is contingent. It doesn’t explain itself but was brought into being by external factors.  All the sciences assume this, which is why they look for causes. Now, those things that brought my existence into being – are they selfexplanatory? No, all those things are themselves, contingent. Back and back we go. We can’t proceed infinitely along these lines, because then we haven’t explained anything. All we have done is infinitely postponed the explanation. We must come finally to some great reality whose very nature is to be. And who in turn gives rise, moment to moment, to the whole of the finite world. When Moses asked God his name, that magnificent, mysterious answer came back, ‘I am who I am.’ Thomas Aquinas read that as ‘I am the one in whom essence and existence coincide. My very nature is to be.’ That’s what we mean when we use the word God. That reality which under girds and gives rise to and explains the whole realm of the contingent world. That proof does not give rise to a vague deism. So many of the young people, if they talk about God, talk about God in that way. Oh this distant being up there, out there somewhere or way back in time. The real God  is the God that sustains the whole universe, moment to moment.

Thomas speaks of creatio continua – continual creation. That’s the God that the great Catholic tradition talks about. We should recover this richly intellectual sense and convey it to our young people. The true. The true. No to dumbed down Catholicism. Yes, to an embrace of our great intellectual tradition

Be Radically Good

The most powerful force for evangelization in the first decades and centuries of the Church’s life was precisely the goodness of the Christian people. That wonderful remark reported by Tertullian: how these Christians love one another. That’s what galvanized the world. That’s what grabbed the attention of the pagan society. In the time when unwanted children were simply exposed on the mountain side. At a time when the sick and the poor were simply left by the roadside. Christians cared, not only for their own, but they cared indiscriminately for anyone who was in need. It was the goodness, it was the radicality of the Christian life that got the attention of the world.




Fast forward a few more centuries. The monastic movement begins with someone like Anthony in the desert and his followers endeavoring to live the Christian life in its radicality: poverty, simplicity, utter trust in God’s providence. Anthony gives rise to the monastic movement, which influences eventually Benedict, whose movement re-evangelizes and re-civilizes Europe after the fall of Rome. Fast forward several more centuries. At a time of deep corruption, especially among the clergy, Francis and Dominic emerge, again, with a back-to-basics evangelicalism: simplicity of life, poverty, trust in God’s providence. And those mendicant movements grabbed the attention of Europe and eventually the wider world. Fast forward to the Reformation and the great Jesuit movement emerging. Same inspiration. Look at Ignatius on radical detachment, surrender to God’s purposes and providence. And the Jesuits too, re-evangelize Europe, and they evangelize most of the world. Fast forward to the period after the French revolution. The rise of these great religious orders to address the problem of a rising secularism. Twentieth century figures like Charles de Foucauld and the greatest evangelist of the twentieth century. John Paul was the second greatest. The greatest evangelist of the twentieth century: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who by the shear intensity of her living the Christian life, evangelized. The good: living the Christian life in its radical form still has a powerful evangelical impact. And here, Pope Francis comes readily to mind. What has grabbed the attention of the world but precisely these displays of love and compassion,inclusion, simplicity of life, trust in God’s providence – Pope Francis has put on international display the radicality of the Christian life and that has evangelized

A bump on the road

We’ve all been living through a very painful time in the Catholic Church the last twenty-five or thirty years. The worst period clearly in the history of the American Church.

What should we all do?– we need to recover what all these great figures found: the splendidly radical form of the Christian life. When it’s lived publicly, it evangelizes.

The late Cardinal George of Chicago would talk often about this period of the Church’s life: the scandals, the difficulties. And he would say, “Where are the orders? Where are the orders? Where are the movements? I’m looking for the signs of life.”

And what he meant was it’s precisely at these times of crisis that the great orders and movements emerged. And so he said, “Where are they? I’m looking for them.” I’m looking for them too. I think we’ve all got that responsibility now to do something radical for the sake of evangelization

Behold the Beatiful

When appeals to the true are often met with resistance, even more appeals to do good,  the hackles tend to go up.

Just show people the beauty of Catholicism. Now Pope Francis speaks in Evangelii Gaudium about the via pulchritudinis – the way of beauty.

Show them Chartres Cathedral, show them the Sainte-Chapelle, show them the Sistine Chapel, show them Mother Theresa’s sisters at work. Show the beauty of Catholicism and that has an evangelical power. Think of the great playwright Paul Claudel, who is converted to the Faith looking up at the rose window at Notre Dame Cathedral.
The beautiful is a means of evangelization. The great Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, distinguished between what he called the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable. The merely subjectively satisfying, is something that I like if it appeals to me. So if you were to ask me so what’s your favorite food, I would probably if I’m really honest and not trying to seem sophisticated would probably say pizza. Maybe a deep-dish Chicago pizza is my favorite food. Well yeah, I find that subjectively satisfying, but it would never occur to me in a million years to become an evangelist for pizza. Right? It’s my thing, it’s a matter of my taste. The objectively valuable is not like that. The objectively valuable is something that is so intrinsically good and intrinsically beautiful that it seizes us, it stops us in our tracks. You know that beautiful phrase ‘aesthetic arrest’: when you’re stopped in your tracks. And then it rearranges our subjectivity. It doesn’t fit into our subjectivity, it rearranges it and then sends us on mission. Think for example,  if you were taken into the Sistine Chapel and someone shows you the ceiling and you were to say ‘yeah, yeah I just don’t care for it.’ You’re treating something objectively valuable as though it’s merely a matter of objective satisfaction. Or someone plays you the fourth movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, with the Ode to Joy, and you say ‘Eh, that doesn’t appeal to me’.  It doesn’t appeal to you? It’s not supposed to appeal to you, it’s meant to change you. It’s meant to seize you. It’s meant to rearrange you from the inside out. That’s what the objectively valuable does. Another example, some years ago there was a survey in Rolling Stone magazine and it asked a number of rock stars themselves, ‘What’s the first song that rocked your world?’  And I love how that was phrased because they didn’t say ‘What was the first song that you liked – the first song that you found catchy?’ That’s the subjectively satisfying. What’s the first song that rocked your world? And I could answer mine was Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which I heard for the first time when I was about seventeen. I didn’t just like it, it’s a song that made me different, that reached down inside of me and rearranged me in a way. The beautiful, by which I mean the objectively valuable, sends us on mission.


Not just something you find superficially appealing, but something that has really reached into your very soul automatically sends you on mission to announce it to everybody else.


Have you noticed, in the New Testament, there’s a grab-you-by-the-shoulders quality about the New Testament?

That’s to say, it’s written by people who don’t just don’t want to share nice spiritual truths with the world, and we have a thousand-people sharing nice spiritual truths. No, no, these are people that have been seized by something so powerful and so overwhelming that they want to grab the whole world by the shoulders and tell them about it. Not because they are being imperialistic. Not because they are trying to impose their views on others. No, no. It’s that same way that you become an evangelist of the truly beautiful. There’s nothing more beautiful than they dying and rising of Jesus Christ. And we today need to be filled with the same shake-you-by-the-shoulders enthusiasm that the first evangelists had. And see, the dying and rising of Jesus is precisely what is communicated in the beauty of the great Catholic aesthetic and artistic tradition. That’s what animates Dante’s The Divine Comedy; that’s what’s animating Notre Dame Cathedral. What’s animating the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the beauty of Christ risen from the dead.


And you see, it’s with that same shake-you-by-theshoulders enthusiasm that we’re meant to go forth today. Yes, in a difficult time. Yeah, we face obstacles.  But the saints always loved a good fight and we should love a good fight too because we go forth with this great truth of Jesus Christ. We go forth with this great goodness embodied in Jesus Christ. We go forth with what is most splendidly beautiful. And with those strategies, we can do this great work of evangelization today.