What Do The Nonreligious Really Think About Religion?
(ANALYSIS) For the uninitiated, let me pull back the curtain just a little bit. I am basically doing as much as I can with very little survey data. Most datasets that exist just weren’t really designed to be focusing entirely on religion and religious topics.
Of course, almost every instrument asks about religious affiliation and religious behavior (like church attendance). Many questionnaires ask respondents to indicate how important religion is to them and even a few ask questions about religious or spiritual beliefs.
But that’s really the extent of most of them. Many are really focused on political topics (like the Cooperative Election Study) or a wide variety of topics, including religion (like the General Social Survey).
Pew’s Religious Landscape Study is an exception. It’s a rich treasure trove of information about many aspects of American religion. The only downside is that it doesn’t go into the field that often: 2007, 2014, and 2023-2024 are the three waves of that instrument.
That’s why the grant that Tony Jones and I received from the John Templeton Foundation is so incredibly important, because it allows us to pull together a long survey that was given to a large sample which focuses specifically on unexplored topics surrounding American religion.
One thing that has always intrigued me is how little we know about how the non-religious actually feel about religion. It’s just not a topic that appears that much in many of the most widely used instruments. It’s a bit too niche for their liking.
But we included a short battery of statements to the nones in our sample (over 12,000 of them) that tried to get a handle on a pretty straightforward question: Do the non-religious actually hate religion? And, what factors drive up (or tamp down) disdain for religion?
Let’s start by just giving you all a sense of how the non-religious responded to three statements in the survey.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
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.