Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. โAnd it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,โ he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
โMost religions are there to control people and get money from them,โ said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. โI canโt buy into that,โ he said.

As Dulak rejects being part of a religious flock, he has plenty of company. He is a โnoneโ โ no, not that kind of nun. The kind that checks โnoneโ when pollsters ask โWhatโs your religion?โ
The decades-long rise of the nones โ a diverse, hard-to-summarize group โ is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America's religious landscape as we know it.
In U.S. religion today, โthe most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious,โ said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of โThe Nones,โ a book on the phenomenon.
The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.
So who are they?
Theyโre the atheists, the agnostics, the โnothing in particular.โ Many are โspiritual but not religious,โ and some are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.
While the nonesโ diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:

They. Really. Donโt. Like. Organized. Religion.
Nor its leaders. Nor its politics and social stances. Thatโs according to a large majority of nones in the AP-NORC survey.
But theyโre not just a statistic. They're real people with unique relationships to belief and nonbelief, and the meaning of life.
Theyโre secular homeschoolers in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Pittsburghers working to overcome addiction. Theyโre a mandolin maker in a small Missouri town, a former evangelical disillusioned with that particular strain of American Christianity. Theyโre college students who found their childhood churches unpersuasive or unwelcoming.

Church โwas not very good for me,โ said Emma Komoroski, a University of Missouri freshman who left her childhood Catholicism in her mid-teens. โIโm a lesbian. So that was kind of like, oh, I didnโt really fit, and people donโt like me.โ
The nones also are people like Alric Jones, who cited bad experiences with organized religion ranging from the intolerant churches of his hometown to the ministry that kept soliciting money from his devout late wife โ even after Jones lost his job and income after an injury.
โThey should have come to us and said, โIs there something we can do to help you?โโ said Jones, 71, of central Michigan. โThey kept sending us letters saying, โWhy arenโt you sending us money?โโ
Although he doesnโt believe in organized religion, he believes in God and basic ethical precepts. โPeople should be treated equally as long as they treat other people equally. Thatโs my spirituality if you want to call it that.โ

These days, if a visiting relative wants to attend church, heโll go along, โbut Iโm not prone to listening to anybody telling me this is the way it should be,โ Jones said.
About 1 in 6 U.S. adults, including Jones and Dulak, is a โnothing in particular.โ There are as many of them as atheists and agnostics combined (7% each).
โAll the media attention is on atheists and agnostics, when most nones are not atheist or agnostic,โ Burge said.
Many embrace a range of spiritual beliefs โ from God, prayer and heaven to karma, reincarnation, astrology or energy in crystals.

โThey are definitely not as turned off to religion as atheists and agnostics are,โ Burge said. โThey practice their own type of spirituality, many of them.โ
Dulak still draws inspiration from nature.
โIt just feels so good to be next to something so timeless,โ he said, sitting in his yard in the Missouri River town he now calls home.
He finds similar fulfillment in his two-story workshop, where he makes the latest of thousands of mandolins he has created over the decades, enabling people to โshare the joy of music.โ

โIt feels spiritually good,โ Dulak said. โItโs not a religion.โ
Burge said the nones are rising as the Christian population declines, particularly the โmainlineโ or moderate to liberal Protestants.
โThis is not just some academic exercise for me,โ said Burge, who pastors a dwindling American Baptist church in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. Itโs โwhat Iโve seen every single Sunday of my life the last 16 years.โ
The statistics show the nones are well-represented in every age group, but especially among young adults. About four in 10 of those under 30 are nones โ nearly as many as say they're Christians.

The trend was evident in interviews on the University of Missouri campus. Several students said they didnโt identify with a religion.
Mia Vogel said she likes โthe foundations of a lot of religions โ just love everybody, accept everybody.โ But she considers herself more spiritual.
โIโm pretty into astrology. Iโve got my crystals charging up in my window right now,โ she said. โHonestly, Iโll bet half of it is a total placebo. But I just like the idea that things in life can be explained by greater forces.โ
One movement that exemplifies the โspiritual but not religiousโ ethos is the Twelve Step sobriety program, pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and adopted by other recovery groups. Participants turn to a โpower greater than ourselvesโ โ the God of each personโs own understanding โ but they donโt share any creed.

โIf you look at the religions, they have been wracked by scandals, it doesnโt matter the denomination,โ said the Rev. Jay Geisler, an Episcopal priest who is spiritual advisor at the Pittsburgh Recovery Center, an addiction treatment site.
In contrast, โthereโs actually a spiritual revival in the basement of many of the churches,โ where recovery groups often meet, he said.
For some, Geisler said, the God of their understanding is โGUS,โ for Guy UpStairs. Or โSAM,โ for Sure Ainโt Me.
โNobodyโs fighting in those rooms, theyโre not saying, โYouโre wrong about God,โโ Geisler said. The focus is on โhow your life is changed.โ

Participants echoed those thoughts recently at the center. In keeping with the Twelve Step tradition of anonymity, they shared their experiences on condition only their first names be used.
โI grew up Methodist, but I donโt follow any religion,โ said John, 32. โI donโt believe in a big, bearded dude in the sky.โ But after surviving overdoses, he knows that โsomething has been watching over me.โ
Some identified as Christian, but skip evangelizing in favor of supporting each othersโ individual paths.
โI donโt push my belief on anybody,โ said Linda, 57. โThe pain bonds us.โ

Those interviewed said their newfound community is essential to their recovery โ and the lack of community contributed to their initial fall into addiction.
Scholars worry that, as people pull away from congregations and other social groups, they are losing sources of communal support.
But nones said in interviews they were happy to leave religion behind, particularly in toxic situations, and find community elsewhere.
Jones agreed that church connections can have benefits โ but not for him.

โWhen you need references and you need other things, those people are there to support you,โ he said. โBut again, what are you willing to sacrifice of your own beliefs to develop that kind of relationship?โ
Marjorie Logman, 75, of Aurora, Illinois, now finds community among other residents in her multigenerational apartment complex. She doesnโt miss the evangelical circles she was long active in.
โThe farther away I get, the freer I feel,โ she said, criticizing churches for prioritizing money over caring for people. She recalled seeing church leaders tell people with depression their problem was sin or demonic possession โ piling guilt upon unaddressed mental illness.
When she was recovering from an injury at a nursing home in 2010, Logman said, her husband was home by himself in despair and died before she could return home. She said her pastor refused to visit him because he hadnโt been involved in church.

She now identifies as agnostic. โIโm not throwing in the towel on everything,โ she said. โI still believe in a higher consciousness.โ
Even far from urban centers, nones are finding community.
Adria Cays and Ashley Miller, who live in nearby towns in northwest Arkansas, helped found a group for parents homeschooling according to secular principles.
Even in a predominately Christian region of the Ozarks, they found โpeople like us who were approaching education and just raising their children from a more secular view,โ said Miller, 35.

The women's families regularly share hiking adventures on Instagram. While they donโt describe their explorations as spiritual, they aim to inspire wonder and purpose in their children.
โWe really want them to have a deep connection to nature,โ said Cays, 43.
Added Miller: โWe are part of something bigger, and that is the Earth. There is meaning just in being.โ
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AP journalists Linley Sanders, Emily Swanson and Jessie Wardarski contributed.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the APโs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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The poll of 1,680 adults was conducted May 11-15 using a sample drawn from NORCโs probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.