We Asked Nones A Bunch Of Questions About Leaving Religion
(ANALYSIS) One organization that I have worked with quite a bit in the last couple of years is The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). After a podcast interview I did with them a few months ago, the possibility of doing a survey was floated and I was obviously eager to get to work on a project like that.
Together with my friend and collaborator Paul Djupe, we discussed with FFRF some ideas on how to use data to understand the growing number of non-religious Americans.
We settled on two different pieces of data collection.
A random sample survey of nonreligious Americans using the Qualtrics platform. We ended up putting together a survey that was fielded in the Summer of 2024 and yielded a total of 2,406 responses.
A survey of the members of FFRF. This would be sent out to them via email and they could choose to take the instrument or not. A lot of questions that were asked via Qualtrics were then replicated in the FFRF membership survey. That collected over 11,000 responses.
There is so much that we can do with this. Today, all I am going to show you are some interesting results from the Qualtrics survey. In future articles, I am going to analyze the differences between the general population sample and those members of FFRF.
I am just scratching the surface of what is possible with this instrument, and I hope that this serves as a way to begin some interesting conversations about nonreligious Americans and helps to clear up some misconceptions about the nones.
The first question battery was focused on the family circumstances of those who were currently nonreligious. I wanted to break this down by age to see if younger nones were more likely to be raised in a nonreligious household compared to older nones.
About two thirds of nones who were between the ages of 18 and 34 years old said that they were raised with at least one sibling who was also not religious. It was basically the same percentage of nones between 35-54 years old.
The big deviation were the oldest nones — only about half of them had a nonreligious sibling. But, it’s still pretty striking that a significant majority of nones had a nonreligious brother or sister considering that about 30% of the general population is nonreligious. It points to the fact that if one member of a household is nonreligious, that makes it more likely for another member to also be a none.
In terms of mother versus father being nonreligious, there’s no real age difference that needs to be considered. But what is striking is this: Current nones are much more likely to say that their father was nonreligious compared to their mother. Nearly half of respondents said that their father was a none — it was only about a third who said that their mother was nonreligious. Also, it’s worth pointing out the bottom right graph: About a third of nones say that they are the only none in their family, and that doesn’t vary much by age.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.