Anya Batrakova  Journal Contributor

It has come to our attention that one in five Americans has no religious affiliation. A study that just came out conducted by the Pew Center and PBS says that 19.6 percent of the population is religiously unaffiliated. This includes atheists and agnostics, who comprise six percent of the population. Perhaps I view the country as more conservative than it actually is, but these percentages surprise me. The numbers are at their highest point ever in American history, and they are higher than I assumed. Maybe my fear of religious zealots taking over the country has skewered my idea of our nation’s general spiritualism.

Let me just say, I am one of ‘those people’ who proudly proclaims that I am spiritual and not religious. This probably gets a lot of mental eye-rolling. But I pray, believe in a higher power, and even if I didn’t, I follow my own moral and ethical codes. I formed a lot of my morals not just from my parents, who are for the most part religiously unaffiliated, but through what I myself deem spiritually fit.

Sometimes it’s intrinsic, and other times it’s through the trials and errors of daily living. Many people are just like this. So many of us have tried to find a religion that fits our ideals, but to no avail. Somehow, something within organized religion doesn’t click for them but they do believe there is something bigger than them. The reasons for this, the study claims, are usually that the unaffiliated view the religious organizations as “too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules, and too involved in politics.” Discouraged, many have given up on God altogether.

It is also not shocking to learn that 60 percent of voters who are religiously unaffiliated are Democrats. They support same-sex marriage and women’s abortion rights – something not typically embraced in religious institutions. I visited a church service recently as a portion of my research for a class, and they were talking a lot about how woman was made for man, and if you divorce you won’t get into heaven. It is easy to see how these ideas could make an American of today uncomfortable. Clearly, the Pew statistics show an appropriate progression into modern times. Not only are many people turned off from what they interpret to be hypocrisy, but many of our views have changed into something more free, liberal, and open-minded.

This does not mean we’re going to abandon all our values, or that our social and moral fiber is going to unravel and the country is going to go into complete anarchy. It means the complete opposite, even though religious leaders around the world are concerned about the Western World and are trying to do something about it.

When the Constitution was written, the Founding Fathers made sure to keep the Church out of it. To their surprise, people started getting more religious and spiritual, going to church and forming new religions. They upheld this society by living their own values. This is a good parallel to what is going on now. With less control over us or pressure to conform to a religious standard, we actually flourish.