2026-02-16
Ryan T. Cragun, Alexandra Rodriguez, Jesse Smith, David Speed
Using the 2023 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine whether there are significant differences in the tendency to donate (and/or) make contributions towards religious and secular charitable organizations based on religious affiliation. The secular charities of focus include organizations related to poverty, health, international peace, education, youth, cultural, environment, and other. We focus on two nonreligious groups – atheists/agnostics and nones – in comparison to other commonly recognized religious groups in the United States. Both groups of nonreligious individuals, net of controls, are significantly less likely to give their money to religious charitable causes. However, both groups are not meaningfully more or less likely to give to secular charitable organizations than those who are affiliated with a religion. Importantly, religious affiliation is not a strong predictor of likelihood to donate or how much an individual decides to give.
2025-07-17
Lieke L. Schrijvers
This article analyzes Christian-nonreligious couples in the Netherlands, shedding light on the various manifestations of the secular/nonreligious in the context of couple interviews. Starting from an understanding of the secular as relational and contextual, this research highlights relationality by focusing on intimate relationships. Drawing on the conceptual approach into ‘mixedness’—where what is mixed is understood to be fluid, context-bound and intersectional—this article asks to what extent these couples can be considered mixed. It explores how these couples give meaning to religious-secular difference, particularly emphasising the perspectives of nonreligious men to further understand the negotiations of Christian and secular positionalities in everyday life. The findings show that men socialised as nonreligious often remained indifferent to religion but engaged more when in a relationship with a Christian partner, while nonreligious men socialised as Christian were more explicitly negative. In all cases, the secular was the norm with science serving as a framework of truth as opposed to religion. Moreover, whilst Christian values were seen by these men as connected to a universal ethical framework, there was little awareness of the historical and present-day interconnectedness of secularity and Christianity in the Netherlands.
2025-06-26
Katie E. Corcoran, Christopher P. Scheitle
Berger (1967) argued that the plausibility of a religious worldview depends on the strength of the plausibility structure supporting it. We hypothesize that a weaker religious plausibility structure (or, alternatively, a stronger non-religious plausibility structure) will increase the odds of adopting an atheistic worldview. We use waves 2 and 4 of the National Study of Youth and Religion to test the relationship between non-religious and religious friendship ties and adopting an atheistic worldview in the United States. We find that a stronger non-religious plausibility structure, regardless of how it is operationalized (e.g., percent, majority, or entirety of one’s friendship network who are not religious), is significantly associated with increased odds of adopting an atheistic worldview as an emerging adult. Even having one friend who is not religious among mostly religious friends may potentially serve for some to relativize one’s religious worldview thereby increasing the odds of adopting an atheistic worldview. Still, regardless of one’s friendship network’s composition, maintaining a non-atheistic worldview is more common than adopting an atheistic worldview suggesting that worldviews may not be as fragile as some prior research has suggested.
2025-02-20
Alexandr Zamușinski
This study examines The Clergy Project (TCP), an online support network for current and former religious leaders who no longer hold supernatural beliefs. Through in-depth interviews, surveys, and the analysis of over three hundred participant profiles from more than twenty countries, this research explores the experiences of nonbelieving religious professionals. While existing literature on organized nonbelief (Blankholm 2022; Cragun et al. 2017; LeDrew 2016) acknowledges the diversity of nonreligious organizations, each with its own mission and agenda, little is known about the specific role of The Clergy Project within this broader landscape. In particular, the motivations behind clergy members joining TCP and the organization’s distinct position within the nonreligious sector remain underexplored. This study addresses these gaps. Drawing on grounded theory methodology, the findings reveal that TCP functions not as an anti-religious front but as a supportive community for individuals navigating the complex process of deconversion. Participants exhibit a wide range of identities and perspectives, with nearly half (47%) of respondents avoiding identification with the term “atheist” altogether. This research contributes to ongoing academic debates regarding the nature of secularism, nonbelief, and the intersection of religion and identity, offering a critical perspective on the TCP and its participants.
2024-09-17
Timo Duile, Prince Kennex Aldama
The notion of plural societies has often been used to refer to a common feature of many Southeast Asian societies, namely their fragmented diversity under a single political unit. Despite the criticism this concept has received, we argue that it is still relevant for many Southeast Asian societies today. Through nation-building processes, the plural societies from the late colonial era have dialectically been sublated. What ensures social cohesion and national identity within these post-plural societies, this article argues, is the notion of the religious, while, at the same time, distinct religions contribute to the ongoing fragmentation of these societies. In order to understand these processes and the social cohesion deriving from religions and the religious, we analyze how the negation of the religious, namely atheism as non-belief, is referred to in these societies and what discourses on atheism have emerged. We thus demonstrate that different societies in Southeast Asia have found different ways to relate to atheism, but in all of them, atheism depicts limits of the post-plural societies. We demonstrate how atheism challenges the harmony ideologies in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and how atheism emerges there in different discourses.
2024-07-16
David Speed, Kathryn Nason, Anna Sturdy-White
Religion plays a predictive role in which values adults will prioritize in childrearing. However, little research addresses how atheists may emphasize different parenting values from religious individuals, particularly within an American context. We accessed data from the 2021 General Social Survey (N = 1,501) to explore if Atheists differed from Agnostics, Nothing-in-Particulars, slightly religious Protestants, moderately religious Protestants, very religious Protestants, slightly religious Catholics, and moderately religious Catholics, concerning their value rankings of obedience, popularity, independent thinking, helping others, and popularity, for children. Consistent with our hypotheses, Atheists ranked obedience as less important and independent thinking as more important than either Protestants (particularly very religious Protestants) or Catholics. However, there was a large degree of agreement across what respondents valued regardless of whether they were nonreligious or religious. All groups ranked intellectual autonomy, helping others, and working hard as more important than either obedience or popularity. The conclusion that secular groups have radically different values than religious groups is unwarranted.
2024-06-25
Carlos Miguel Lemos
In this article, I used data from the 2018 Religion survey of the International Social Survey Programme to compare Protestants affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the religiously unaffiliated in the five Nordic countries. I was primarily interested in significant predictors of disaffiliation. I found that the differences between Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated within countries are far more pronounced than the differences between these two groups across the countries, and that the lack of confidence in churches is a very strong predictor of disaffiliation. The religious or nonreligious socialization during the formative period (described by the parents’ affiliation and the frequency of churchgoing during the formative period) is also an important predictor of disaffiliation. Ceasing to believe in God and having negative perceptions about the relevance and timeliness of religion are also significant predictors of disaffiliation, albeit weaker than mistrust in the Churches and religious or nonreligious upbringing. In addition, there are important differences between the countries: the odds of disaffiliating in Norway, Sweden, and (especially) Finland are significantly higher than in Denmark. These differences are due to path-dependent and country-specific factors unaccounted-for by the other predictors. Moreover, disaffiliation occurs across a wide range of ages, and only the elderly (75 years or more) seem to be an exception.
2023-12-29
Felipe Manuel Rosa González, Leopoldo Cabrera
This paper explores patterns of religious identification in Spanish society, focusing particularly on the predominant religion, Catholicism, which constitutes 97% of the religious population. Over time, a declining trend in religious beliefs has been observed: in 2000, 80% of Spaniards identified as religious, a figure that decreased to 75% a decade ago, and further dropped to 59.5% in 2022. Simultaneously, the process of secularization has increased, impacting approximately 40% of the Spanish population. Non-believers are not a homogeneous group; rather, they constitute heterogeneous subgroups. Males tend to exhibit lower levels of religiosity than females, and the youth are less religious than the elderly. Additionally, individuals with higher education show lower levels of religiosity than those with lower education and left-leaning individuals tend to be less religious than their right-leaning counterparts. This article investigates and analyzes the profiles of religious identification in Spanish society, utilizing a comprehensive database that amalgamates 144 datasets from the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), spanning from January 2013 to December 2023. The dataset comprises responses from 467,187 Spanish adults aged 18 and above. This extensive dataset enables a multidimensional descriptive analysis of secularization/religiosity based on respondents’ demographic characteristics and ideological positions, functioning as a meta-analysis with secondary data. To further complement the study, a binomial logistic regression is also employed.
2023-08-10
Rebecca Catto, Rachael Shillitoe, Stephen H. Jones, Tom Kaden, Fern Elsdon-Baker
Previous sociological research on science and religion, and secularity and nonreligion, has highlighted a consistent connection between science and nonreligious identities. Yet, the dynamics of this association have not been explored in depth. Building upon a growing body of work, this article adopts a relational approach to science and nonreligion to analyze nonreligious life scientists and members of the public in Canada and the UK’s narratives around science and religion. Across a variety of nonreligious identities, they tend to presume religion is irrational and consequently incompatible with science, idealize science, and refer to religious people as a less scientific outgroup. Upbringing, friendships, workspaces, and education all contribute to beliefs about science, (non)religion, and society. The social imaginary that to be modern is to be secular and scientific has enduring cultural power within these Western contexts, affecting daily life. Whether this is the case in other countries is a question for future research.
2022-06-30
Robin Isomaa
In late March 2019, British atheist YouTuber “Rationality Rules” published a video in which he argued that trans women should be excluded from women’s sports. Accused of transphobia, he was denounced by a prominent atheist organization, which led to intense arguments in Anglophone atheist spaces on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, lasting throughout the year. This article uses the controversy, an instance “YouTube drama,” as an opportunity to investigate the ways in which an imagined “atheist community” is constructed through internal atheist conflict. Through critical discourse analysis of 157 YouTube videos, published between the end of March and the end of November, it identifies six different discursive formations, which affected the development of the drama and offer competing conceptions of the community. By utilizing Michael Warner’s theory of ‘publics’ and ‘counterpublics,’ spaces that exists only for the circulation of discourse, this study approaches the drama not as an interpersonal conflict, but as a battle over the norms of discourse within the atheist community. It suggests that a public lens is useful for understanding contemporary atheism, and that the nature of publics and counterpublics helps explain the dynamics of atheist disagreement on social issues.
2022-02-24
Sébastien Urbanski
This paper aims at exhibiting a convergence between particular ‘religious sensibilities’ that would require, according to prominent anthropologists, a transformation of the way in which freedom of speech is usually understood under Western secular-liberal law. In particular, Saba Mahmood’s anthropology gains from revealing its potential, but also its limitations, in the Eastern-European context that could require an effort of ‘cultural translation’. Could some Muslims’ relation to images of Muhammad be founded not only on representation, but also on attachment and cohabitation with Muhammad himself? Probably, but then it is necessary to underline that it is also the case, for instance, of Polish Catholics in their relationship to (images of) the Virgin Mary. This parallel is all the more interesting to explore in the case of the dominant political current in Poland, supported by several pro-government intellectuals, which perceives the European law on freedom of speech as too ‘Western’.
2021-08-08
Lori G. Beaman
The notion of enchantment has been largely imagined as relating to religion, broadly defined, including magic, sorcery, and the transcendental. The idea that the world has largely become disenchanted has been associated with science, modernity, and rationality, among other things. Along with others such as William E. Connolly, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, and Jane Bennett, I challenge the dominant configuration and narrative of (dis)enchantment. Building on their work, I argue that a reclaimed notion of enchantment is pivotal for the reconceptualization of human/non-human animal relations and sustainable life on earth.