Christel Manning

“The Nones: America’s Fastest Growing Religion”

Americans, especially young people, are leaving organized religion in record numbers. There are now more “Nones” than Catholics in the US population, and more than a third of millennials say they have no religion. This talk will explore why and where they are turning instead. We will examine what Nones believe, what are they passing on to their children, and what all this means for the future of religion in America.

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Christel Manning, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University, has spent the last decade studying people who leave religion. Her book, Losing our Religion, was rated one of the top ten religion titles of 2015 and received the 2016 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is co-editor of Organized Secularism in the United States (2018), a collection of essays about the atheist/free-thinkers movement, and a contributor to New Dimensions in Spirituality, Religion, and Aging (2018). Manning’s current research, supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, examines how non-religious individuals find meaning as they approach the end of life. She lives with her husband and daughter in New Haven, CT.