NONESTERS

"Nonesters are people who check the 'none' box for religion. They're not athiests or agnostics, necessarily… And there're a lot of them, the fastest growing segment if you believe the demographers. Most think of themselves as spiritual, but they feel like they don't fit into their parents, or anyone else's religion."  - Ellen Shea, p.149

Ellen calls them "nonesters," those who on purpose follow no formal religion. Of course, there've been spiritual nonesters since the dawn of mankind, declining their elders' beliefs as they fashion their own, but Ellen refers to her generation, the millennials, born between 1980 and 1996, also known as Generation Y or the Net Generation. Estimates of how many of her fellows reject their parents' churches, synagogues, and mosques vary, but the drift is clearly away from their inherited institutions. Reliable surveys consistently show a growing fraction of millennials to be nonesters, about one-third, more than double compared to their childhood days, and fast increasing compared to prior surveys.  

Many of us are nonesters about something, usually religion and politics. Perhaps an innate tendency in our species, part of an evolutionary mechanism for the cleaving of clans, it's an age-old phenomenon. Of course, we're also usually for or against something, and there's the rub: in the boiling human caldron, nonesters are bound to collide with forsters and againsters in unpredictable and unintended ways...

Which "none" boxes do you check?