The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers, and Those in Between by Kaya Oakes (review)

Today, the rise of the Nones – the religiously unaffiliated – constitutes, by voting with their feet, a growing challenge to the future of institutional religions. Yet author Kaya Oakes offers room for hope to those who bemoan the exodus from organized religion. While unaffiliated, Nones are hardly uniformly nonreligious: a 2015 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study indicates 61 percent of Nones – which include atheists and agnostics – report belief in God while 33 percent do not. Some Nones are seekers. In The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers, and Those in Between, Oakes goes to the margins of faith and even beyond religion “to the seekers, to see what we would find” (16).

With breadth and depth, Oakes frames and fleshes out the already multifaceted matrix of seekers within the one-third of the U.S. young adult population (those in their twenties, thirties, and forties) that self-identifies as religiously unaffiliated. Oakes’s engagement with her own “God bothered” generation churns up refreshing, fleshy portraits of those who live in the liminal spaces of faith and doubt, seeking spiritual truth, acceptance, and community. The interviews selected for inclusion in the monograph reflect highly religiously literate Nones who voice with valuable academic nuance the complex realities of their spiritual journeys. Catholic in its hopeful arc, The Nones are Alright ends with a snapshot of “guerrilla” seekers today who, despite their fraught relationship with institutional religion, continue to organize together outside official constructs to “talk, relentlessly, about doubt and faith and social structures, about the broken world and what we can do to repair it, about how we can be better, and what we can do to become good” (198).

The book is helpfully organized into eleven brief chapters with an introduction and afterword, each section evenhandedly telescoping between her interviewees’ narratives, Oakes’s own experiences, and a broad range of publications. Citing statistics, mystics, the Catechism, theology, and reportage, Oakes writes from her own home base as a liberal, justice-oriented Catholic who has known spiritual drifting firsthand, becoming a “boomerang” Catholic herself when she returned to be confirmed as an adult. Oakes draws on the experiences of Nones from religiously diverse backgrounds including atheists and multiple religious belongers. However, so many Catholics responded to her interview requests that the second half of the book culls from the lives of “God haunted” Catholic Nones, reverts, and those at the margins of the religion, addressing familiar Catholic tropes of hierarchical clericalism, lack of gender parity, callousness toward the queer community, and distant priests (94).

This is an excellent book that belongs in many libraries and that will inform conversations on the state of faith in the modern United States. The volume should be required reading for those in parish and young adult ministries and chaplaincy. High school and undergraduate instructors will find several of the short chapters if not the whole book especially germane to discussion and reflection. Still, I have to register my own qualm with the title and the impression it gives: are all Nones really alright? It seems they are inasmuch as they are seekers or even nonbelievers without misgivings working with religious institutions, but not all Nones are seekers or “God bothered.”

In fact, the same November 2015 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study mentioned above shows that the religiously unaffiliated are increasingly less religious and more secular, with a full third of Nones reporting no concern with religion at all; at that, seven-in-ten young Millennials (born 1980–1996) with no religious affiliation report that religion and God are not important to their lives. A similar percentage says they never pray and 42 percent saying they do not believe in God at all. While religious affiliation or belief do not exactly correlate with societal levels of religious literacy, sociologists of religion like R. Scott Appleby would express concern over what...