Do Non-Religious People Actually Hate Religion?
(ANALYSIS) To me, there’s always been a pretty big blind spot when it comes to the study of non-religion in the United States. There are plenty of survey questions that ask about religious attendance and belief in God.
However, there are very few questionnaires that ask people to express their views of religion, generally speaking. Do folks think that churches, synagogues, and mosques are a net positive? Or do they really think that there’s nothing good that comes out of houses of worship?
It’s something that Tony Jones and I spent a long time working on for The Nones Project, but before I roll out the findings from that survey I wanted to present to my readers another set of questions that appeared in the Pew Religious Landscape Survey.
There’s a nice little section where they ask respondents to agree or disagree with the following statements:
Churches and other religious organizations focus too much on rules
Churches and other religious organizations are too concerned with money and power
Churches and other religious organizations are too involved with politics
Churches and other religious organizations protect and strengthen morality in society
Churches and other religious organizations bring people together and strengthen community bonds
Churches and other religious organizations play an important role in helping the poor and needy
I think the value of these questions is that the first three are clearly a negative portrayal of religion while the last three put religion in a much more positive light. Let me start by just showing you the share of the entire sample that agreed with each of those six statements.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on his Substack page.
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.