Nonreligious Parents a ‘Niche’ Market? Not By My Count
When I started pitching “Relax, It’s Just God” two years ago, I was told, repeatedly, that it was too niche for major publishers. At the time, I assumed this was true. After all, we live in a religious country. If I wanted to appeal to the masses, there were certainly better ways to go.
But since then, I’ve come to strongly disagree with the contention that we of little faith are some hugely specialized market. And, today, I did some number-crunching. Now I’m no statistician, so feel free to check me on this.
I started with some basic Census information:
• 313 million people live in the United States and 83.7 million of them are adults between the ages of 25 and 44.
Then I broke some numbers out by age and gender:
• 21.1 million adults are in the 25-29 range — including 10.5 million women and 10.6 million men
• 62.6 million adults are in the 30-44 range — including 31.5 million women and 31.1 million men
Then I discovered that roughly 74 percent of women and 62 percent of men between the ages and 25 and 44 are parents. I calculated that into this:
• 7.8 million women between the ages of 25 and 29 are moms.
• 6.6 million men between the ages of 25 and 29 are dads.
• 23.3 million women between the ages of 30 to 44 are moms.
• 19.3 million men between the ages of 30 and 44 are dads.
Then I considered this:
• 32 percent of all adults between the ages of 25 and 29 consider themselves “nonreligious” — that is, they don’t subscribe to any particular faith.
• 21 percent of adults between the ages of 30 and 44 consider themselves nonreligious.
Now, if we can assume that parents and non-parents are equally likely to be religious as they are to be nonreligious, then we should be able to play these numbers against each other. And when we do, we find this:
• 13.3 million American parents between the ages of 25 and 44 are nonreligious.
That’s more than one in five parents. And it doesn’t even include parents younger than 25 and older than 44. [Nor, as one kind reader pointed out to me, does it include parents who consider themselves "religious" but are looking for advice on raising open-minded children who will not become slaves to any particular belief system.]
So my question is this: What’s so niche about that?
“if we can assume that parents and non-parents are equally likely to be religious as they are to be nonreligious”
That is an adorably optimistic assumption.
My husband and I were just discussing, as we drove along with the weekend traffic, how skewed a person’s perception of the numbers can become, when the religious evangelists proudly declare their faith on bumper stickers and billboards all around us, because evangelism is important to them, while we the nonreligious, or the faithless, or those who don’t believe in the direct marketing of their beliefs, do not have nearly the brand recognition of the NOTW crowd. We don’t realize that we are surrounded by people with other ideas about religion because such are not the kind of ideas that one expresses in four words to complete strangers tailgating them on the freeway. One could easily overlook all those other unmarked cars, which could be carrying people of any religious faith, or of no faith at all. Cars like ours.
Like many, I was initially horrified by the “Good News Club”. But after discovering how many religious parents are equally horrified when they discover just how narrow and brimestone GNC theology actually is, I relaxed.
I think your concept has potential appeal beyond the atheist/agnostic community. It is, after all, aimed at SECULAR parents. And I think a good many religious parents fit that description. There’s value in teaching your child broader concepts, and embracing the fact that your child should not be a clone of yourself.