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Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
BUSTER G. SMITH and JOSEPH O. BAKER
Abstract
Research on the topics of atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion has been limited during
much of the last century. We explain the reasons for a lack of research in this field and
discuss the recent interest in this topic. The most recent wave of research has been
concentrated during the past decade and tends to look at the dual issues of who
composes the religiously unaffiliated and why they choose this self-identification.
Recent research has begun to take a much wider and deeper view on the subject. This
includes research on particular segments of the population such as atheists, as well
as understanding how the religiously unaffiliated are viewed by the broader culture.
We conclude by describing important directions for future research. In particular,
there is a need to break out the separate forms of irreligion and use creative new
methodologies to find and study this significant portion of the population.
INTRODUCTION
Research about the religiously unaffiliated and those who reject religion has
been largely understudied within social scientific studies of religion until
the recent emergence of a greater interest in the topic. The understudied
nature of this topic can be closely traced to two complementary forces within
the sociology of religion. The first is the assumed processes of secularization, which were largely taken as axiomatic by early scholars. While this perspective took many forms (Gorski & Altinodu, 2008), at its heart it assumed
that through processes of modernization and rationalization religion would
become extinct (or at least severely marginalized). As a result the study of
religion was largely a pointless one, much as studying silent films would be
far less worthwhile as talkies came into prominence. While it is now clear that
any possible disappearance of religion is by no means imminent, there were
many years of lag between this realization and a return to studying those
people who have abandoned or were never raised in a religious worldview.
A second cause of the understudy of irreligion by social scientists is due
to the emphasis on religious economies and supply-side studies of religion
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(e.g., Stark & Finke, 2000), which became the strongest challenger to secularization’s theoretical dominance. By focusing on religious organizations it is
easy to forget that some people are outside of the theoretical sampling frame
by virtue of not belonging to a religious organization and perhaps not even
wanting to belong. These two forces led first to an avoidance of all things
religious throughout much of the early twentieth century and then a narrow
emphasis on the presence of religion for the last few decades. Fortunately, in
the last 10 years there has been a slow but steady shift back to looking at a lack
of religion as a worthy topic of inquiry. This is important not only because
it represents a large segment of the population in many parts of the world,
but also because theoretically it provides a realistic foil against which to test
theories of religion. For example, how can we fully understand conversion
if we do not explain the pushes and pulls toward atheism or agnosticism as
alternatives?
Thus, over the past decade it has become obvious for a number of reasons
that the religiously unaffiliated and those who are irreligious need to be
studied in a more systematic manner. A major part of the need for this comes
from the realization that the religiously unaffiliated or disaffiliated compose
a substantial and growing portion of the population in many countries.
While in 1972 the General Social Survey found that 5% of adult Americans
self-identified as having no religious preference, this number had risen to
18% in 2010. Furthermore, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found
this number was 20% in 2012, suggesting the continuance of an upward
trajectory. One major difficulty in studying this group is that because they
were largely ignored for much of the twentieth century it is challenging to
study longitudinal changes in who falls into this category or how the causes
have changed over time, but recent work in the field is beginning to fill in
these gaps.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Research that explicitly studied the religiously unaffiliated from a social scientific perspective began in the 1960s but then largely disappeared in the
1980s (but see Condran & Tamney, 1985; Tamney et al., 1989). The prominent
works during this period included Campbell (1972), Filsinger (1976), Hadaway and Roof (1979), Hale (1977), Vernon (1968a, 1968b), and Welch (1978a,
1978b). Even during this period, the scholarly work in the field was quite
limited. As Hale summarized:
Only in the last decade or so has even a faint interest begun to emerge. Why
this is so remains a mystery … ‘irreligion,’ however conceptualized, and the
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
3
unchurched phenomenon, however quantified, continue to suffer from inattention
(1977, pp. 169–170).
Although Sherkat (1991; and Sherkat & Wilson, 1995) addressed issues of
apostasy in the course of examining religious “switching” more generally,
Hayes (2000) and Hout and Fischer (2002) represent the start of what may be
thought of as the second wave of research on religious nones. Sherkat Hayes
(2000) looked at the religiously unaffiliated across 10 developed countries
and found that they were more likely to be young, unmarried men, with high
levels of education. Hout and Fischer (2002) highlighted that this segment of
the population was growing in the United States and set about explaining the
rise as resulting from shifting views on identity as a reaction against the perceived overlap of religion and politics. Because the Religious Right had made
religion synonymous with conservative political values, Hout and Fischer
proposed that many liberals had abandoned the self-affiliation of religious
that existed before the 1990s. Recent research by Putnam and Campbell (2010)
supports their conclusions about the growing connection between secularism
and politics in the American context. This research made major contributions
to both explaining the religiously unaffiliated, but even more importantly
beginning to rekindle interest in the topic, which had largely been dormant
for two decades.
At the same time, Norris and Inglehart (2004) refocused the secularization
debate toward explaining religious affiliation as a result of existential security and in turn hypothesized that irreligion is higher where people are not
constantly worried about death and disease. The exceptional religiosity of
the United States is explained as a result of high rates of immigration from
developing countries and high-income inequality. This study has come to
be an important force shaping subsequent discussions of secularization and
irreligion, both explicitly and implicitly.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Bainbridge (2005, 2007) conducted one of the few quantitative studies dedicated to atheism (also see Hunsberger & Altemeyer, 2006; Sherkat, 2008).
Drawing on control theories of deviance, he attempts to explain atheism and
the rise in atheism as a result of low social obligations. Specifically those with
fewer social attachments and those who avoid social interaction are more
likely to be atheists, which explains in part why lower fertility around the
world can be correlated with rising atheism. In contrast, the vast majority of
studies have clumped atheists in with all other types of irreligion. This type
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of research is a good indicator of the benefits of noting nuances that exist in
this population.
Attempting to advance the study of secularism on its own terms rather
than as a residual of religion, Baker and Smith (2009a) examine the role of
identity in claiming no religion. They found that having religiously unaffiliated parents, low levels of childhood religious socialization, nonreligious
friends, and being married to a spouse who is not religious were strongly
associated with claiming no religion. These factors are far more predictive
than sociodemographic characteristics, such as race, age, education, or the
region of the county in which one resides. Analogous to the formation and
maintenance of a particular religious identity, there appears to be a similar
process of friends and family reinforcing an irreligious or unaffiliated identity. Qualitative studies of the narrative identities of atheists (Smith, 2011)
and apostates (Zuckerman, 2011), as well as of the “imagined community”
of secularism (Cimino & Smith, 2007, 2011) are beginning to flesh out this
perspective on secularism more fully. Understanding secularity as identity
opens up a wealth of research possibilities, such as using secular categories
as a meaningful status in psychological studies (e.g., Beit-Hallahmi, 2007;
Caldwell-Harris, 2012; Caldwell-Harris et al., 2011).
This sense of identity, rather than objective beliefs or behaviors is very
important, according to the work of Lim et al. (2010). By using a variety of
high-quality national surveys, this study found that many religious nones
were what the authors termed “liminal,” moving in and out of identifying
as nones without actually changing much about their religiosity other than
self-identification. This is a major contribution in that it helps demonstrate
the ephemerality of the label and explains how it is possible for the proportion of the population who is religiously unaffiliated to shift quickly one
way or the other. This work is closely related to a similar vein of study that
looks at the issue of apostasy and leaving religion. The key recent study
on this topic is by Vargas (2012), who looks at why people choose to leave,
based on political views and life stressors. These are essential elements both
for understanding why people are pulled toward disaffiliation and also
what pushes them away from religion.
In a work that suggests an important new direction in the field, Baker and
Smith (2009b; also Baker, 2012) attempt to specify some primary forms of
secularism by examining atheists, agnostics, and nonaffiliated believers separately. Each group has distinct political and religious characteristics, such
as agnostics being less opposed to religion and nonaffiliated believers showing the highest levels of personal spirituality. These distinctions show that
secularisms are not uniform and should not be treated as if they are.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
5
Edgell et al. (2006) take a different angle on the issue by looking at how
irreligion in the form of atheism is viewed by the broader American public. They found that not only is it perceived as a negative social status for
many Americans, but more people are willing to discuss their disapproval
for it compared to many other traditionally ostracized minority groups. For
example, as of 2003, people were less likely to want their child to marry an
atheist compared to a Muslim, African American, Hispanic, or Jew. Thus, the
stigma of atheism or irreligion is an important consideration for research in
the area because of potential response bias and disavowal of the labels even
if they are accurate, as well as studying the effects of stigmatization (Cragun
et al., 2012).
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
One of the major directions that future research can pursue is to emphasize
and outline the nuance present among the secular segments of the population. For all of the reasons listed, this has largely been an overlooked element of studies of irreligion. Typically, secularists are thought of as a single
group. This pattern can be traced at least in part to the massively influential
RELTRAD typology of Steensland et al. (2000). In this systematic creation of
religious tradition categories to better understand and quantitatively study
religion in the United States, a category of “nones” was created for all respondents who were not religious. While this was a useful and necessary solution,
it has meant that most studies over the past decade have chosen to describe
all people who are not religiously affiliated as being uniform, when in fact
there is substantial diversity within this general category. Most notably, while
atheists do not believe in God or a higher power, many people who are religiously unaffiliated still hold traditional religious beliefs, including theism.
Furthermore, the use of a general nones category means that the nominally
religious, those who claim an affiliation, but never attend religious services
or engage in any private acts such as prayer or meditation, are not studied as
a (relatively) secular segment of the population.
In order to begin to overcome this difficulty, we propose the use of four
subcategories of secularism: atheists, agnostics, nonaffiliated believers, and
nonpracticing believers. This has the simultaneous benefit of being relatively
feasible to accomplish with many existing datasets and of having clear, theoretically useful boundaries. Generally speaking, atheists and agnostics would
be grouped on the basis of beliefs about God or a higher power, nonaffiliated
believers are all other respondents who do not claim a religious affiliation,
and nonpracticing believers are those who self-identify with a religion, but
do not engage in religious behaviors. Of course, all of this raises issues of
methodology, as some techniques such as forcing respondents to identify
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
with a label such as “atheist” will yield lowers estimates of disbelief in God
than a questions specifically about theism.
Another area of future research that is emerging (e.g., Killen & Silk, 2004;
Smith, 2011, Zuckerman, 2011) is in the use of qualitative research to flesh
out what these categories mean in daily life and how they are understood by
those who identify with the labels. It is one thing to enumerate the number
of people with a particular identity, but quite another to explain how they
feel and understand this position. Even within the numerous studies of secularization there is rarely a direct study of those who are religiously dis- or
unaffiliated. Instead, there has tended to be speculation about the motivations and desires of these people. Future research should use ethnographic
methods to better understand how secular identities are formed, maintained,
and expressed. As with quantitative research, methodological caveats about
understanding the rich diversity of secularism apply.
From a methodological perspective, one of the primary difficulties in studying this segment of the population is the rarity. Especially for quantitative
techniques such as surveys, it can be very difficult in a nationally representative sample of 1500 people to analyze the 30 who might be atheists.
This difficulty is starting to be overcome because of much larger surveys,
but even so it poses problems that do not exist when studying larger groups
in society. One solution is to instead do purposive sampling. This has been
attempted recently by looking at atheist organizations (e.g., Hunsberger &
Altemeyer, 2006). The difficulty in this approach is that it gets at a very particular and likely skewed portion of the unaffiliated, those who feel so strongly
enough about religious disaffiliation that they engage in atheist affiliations.
This is not representative of the larger segment of the population who may
be more apathetic than antagonistic, or even “spiritual but not religious”
(Chaves, 2011, pp. 38–41). Moving forward, regardless of the methodologies
employed, researchers will be forced to use creative strategies that go beyond
organizational attachment to locate and study this growing portion of the
population in meaningful ways.
REFERENCES
Bainbridge, W. S. (2005). Atheism. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 1(2),
1–24.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2007). Across the secular abyss: From faith to wisdom. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books.
Baker, J. (2012). Perceptions of science and American secularism. Sociological Perspectives, 55(1), 167–188.
Baker, J., & Buster, S. (2009a). The nones: Social characteristics of the religiously unaffiliated. Social Forces, 87(3), 1251–63.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
7
Baker, J., & Buster, S. (2009b). None too simple: Examining issues of religious nonbelief and nonbelonging in the United States. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion,
48(4), 719–733.
Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2007). Atheists: A psychological profile. In M. Michael (Ed.), The
Cambridge companion to atheism (pp. 300–317). Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2012). Understanding atheism/non-belief as an expected
individual-differences variable. Religion, Brain, & Behavior, 2(1), 4–47.
Caldwell-Harris, C. L., Wilson, A. L., LoTempio, E., & Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2011).
Exploring the atheist personality: Well-being, awe, and magical thinking in
atheists, buddhists, and christians. Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 14(7),
659–672.
Campbell, C. (1972). Toward a sociology of irreligion. New York, NY: Herder and
Herder.
Chaves, M. (2011). American religion: Contemporary trends. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Cimino, R., & Smith, C. (2007). Secular humanism and atheism beyond progressive
secularism. Sociology of Religion, 68(4), 407–24.
Cimino, R., & Smith, C. (2011). The new atheism and the formation of the imagined
secularist community. Journal of Media and Religion, 10(1), 24–38.
Condran, J. G., & Tamney, J. B. (1985). Religious ‘Nones’: 1957 to 1982. Sociological
Analysis, 46(4), 415–423.
Cragun, R. T., Kosmin, B., Keysar, A., Hammer, J. H., & Neilsen, M. (2012). On the
receiving end: Discrimination toward the non-religious in the United States. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27(1), 105–127.
Edgell, P., Gerteis, J., & Hartmann, D. (2006). Atheists as “Other”: Moral boundaries
and cultural membership in American society. American Sociological Review, 71(2),
211–34.
Filsinger, E. (1976). Tolerance of non-believers: A cross-tabular and log linear analysis
of some religious correlates. Review of Religious Research, 17(3), 232–40.
Gorski, P. S., & Altinordu, A. (2008). After secularization? Annual Review of Sociology,
34, 55–85.
Hadaway, C. K., & Roof, W. C. (1979). Those who stay religious ‘Nones’ and those
who don’t. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 18(2), 194–200.
Hale, J. R. (1977). The unchurched: Who they are and why they stay that way. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.
Hayes, B. C. (2000). Religious independents within Western industrialized nations:
A socio-demographic profile. Sociology of Religion, 62(2), 191–210.
Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2002). Why more Americans have no religious preference:
Politics and generations. American Sociological Review, 67(2), 165–90.
Hunsberger, B. E., & Altemeyer, B. (2006). Atheists: A groundbreaking study of America’s
nonbelievers. New York, NY: Prometheus Books.
Killen, P. O., & Silk, M. (Eds.) (2004). Religion and public life in the Pacific Northwest:
The none zone. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Lim, C., MacGregor, C. A., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Secular and liminal: Discovering heterogeneity among religious nones. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion,
49(4), 596–618.
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2012. “Nones” on the rise: One-in-five
adults have no religious affiliation. Washington, DC. http://www.pewforum.org/
uploadedFiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/Unaffiliated/NonesOnTheRise-full.
pdf.
Putnam, R. D., & Campbell, D. E. (2010). American grace: How religion divides and unites
us. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Sherkat, D. E. (1991). Leaving the faith: Testing theories of religious switching using
survival models. Social Science Research, 20(2), 171–187.
Sherkat, D. E. (2008). Beyond belief: Atheism, agnosticism, and theistic certainty in
the United States. Sociological Spectrum, 28(5), 438–59.
Sherkat, D. E., & Wilson, J. (1995). Preferences, constraints, and choices in religious
markets: An examination of religious switching and apostasy. Social Forces, 73(3),
993–1026.
Smith, J. M. (2011). Becoming an atheist in America: Constructing identity and meaning from the rejection of theism. Sociology of Religion, 72(2), 215–37.
Stark, R., & Finke, R. (2000). Acts of faith: Explaining the human side of religion. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Steensland, B., Park, J. Z., Regnerus, M. D., Robinson, L. D., Bradford Wilcox, W., &
Woodberry, R. D. (2000). The measure of American religion: Toward improving
the state of the art. Social Forces, 79(1), 291–318.
Tamney, J., Powell, S., & Johnson, S. D. (1989). Innovation theory and religious nones.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28(2), 216–29.
Vargas, N. (2012). Retrospective accounts of religious disaffiliation in the United
States: Stressors, skepticism, and political factors. Sociology of Religion, 73(2),
200–23.
Vernon, G. M. (1968a). Marital characteristics of religious independents. Review of
Religious Research, 9(3), 162–72.
Vernon, G. M. (1968b). The religious “Nones”: A neglected category. Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 7(2), 219–29.
Welch, M. R. (1978a). Religious non-affiliates and worldly success. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 17(1), 59–61.
Welch, M. R. (1978b). The unchurched: Black religious non-affiliates. Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 17(3), 289–93.
Zuckerman, P. (2011). Faith no more: Why people reject religion. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
BUSTER G. SMITH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Buster G. Smith is an assistant professor of sociology at Catawba
College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He received his doctoral degree from
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
9
Baylor University in Sociology with an emphasis on the sociology of religion.
His dissertation focused on the interaction of American Buddhism with the
existing religious landscape. His recent publications have appeared in Social
Forces, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Contemporary Buddhism.
Primary areas of research include religion, transnationalism, and deviance.
JOSEPH O. BAKER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Joseph O. Baker is assistant professor in the department of sociology and
anthropology at East Tennessee State University and a senior research associate
for the Association of Religion Data Archives. His research focuses on sociological patterns of religiosity, the social and political dimensions of secularism,
public views of “science and religion,” paranormal subcultures, and social
theory. He is co-author of the book Paranormal America (NYU Press 2010) and
is currently working on a book about American secularism(s) with Buster
Smith.
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-
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
BUSTER G. SMITH and JOSEPH O. BAKER
Abstract
Research on the topics of atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion has been limited during
much of the last century. We explain the reasons for a lack of research in this field and
discuss the recent interest in this topic. The most recent wave of research has been
concentrated during the past decade and tends to look at the dual issues of who
composes the religiously unaffiliated and why they choose this self-identification.
Recent research has begun to take a much wider and deeper view on the subject. This
includes research on particular segments of the population such as atheists, as well
as understanding how the religiously unaffiliated are viewed by the broader culture.
We conclude by describing important directions for future research. In particular,
there is a need to break out the separate forms of irreligion and use creative new
methodologies to find and study this significant portion of the population.
INTRODUCTION
Research about the religiously unaffiliated and those who reject religion has
been largely understudied within social scientific studies of religion until
the recent emergence of a greater interest in the topic. The understudied
nature of this topic can be closely traced to two complementary forces within
the sociology of religion. The first is the assumed processes of secularization, which were largely taken as axiomatic by early scholars. While this perspective took many forms (Gorski & Altinodu, 2008), at its heart it assumed
that through processes of modernization and rationalization religion would
become extinct (or at least severely marginalized). As a result the study of
religion was largely a pointless one, much as studying silent films would be
far less worthwhile as talkies came into prominence. While it is now clear that
any possible disappearance of religion is by no means imminent, there were
many years of lag between this realization and a return to studying those
people who have abandoned or were never raised in a religious worldview.
A second cause of the understudy of irreligion by social scientists is due
to the emphasis on religious economies and supply-side studies of religion
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
(e.g., Stark & Finke, 2000), which became the strongest challenger to secularization’s theoretical dominance. By focusing on religious organizations it is
easy to forget that some people are outside of the theoretical sampling frame
by virtue of not belonging to a religious organization and perhaps not even
wanting to belong. These two forces led first to an avoidance of all things
religious throughout much of the early twentieth century and then a narrow
emphasis on the presence of religion for the last few decades. Fortunately, in
the last 10 years there has been a slow but steady shift back to looking at a lack
of religion as a worthy topic of inquiry. This is important not only because
it represents a large segment of the population in many parts of the world,
but also because theoretically it provides a realistic foil against which to test
theories of religion. For example, how can we fully understand conversion
if we do not explain the pushes and pulls toward atheism or agnosticism as
alternatives?
Thus, over the past decade it has become obvious for a number of reasons
that the religiously unaffiliated and those who are irreligious need to be
studied in a more systematic manner. A major part of the need for this comes
from the realization that the religiously unaffiliated or disaffiliated compose
a substantial and growing portion of the population in many countries.
While in 1972 the General Social Survey found that 5% of adult Americans
self-identified as having no religious preference, this number had risen to
18% in 2010. Furthermore, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found
this number was 20% in 2012, suggesting the continuance of an upward
trajectory. One major difficulty in studying this group is that because they
were largely ignored for much of the twentieth century it is challenging to
study longitudinal changes in who falls into this category or how the causes
have changed over time, but recent work in the field is beginning to fill in
these gaps.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Research that explicitly studied the religiously unaffiliated from a social scientific perspective began in the 1960s but then largely disappeared in the
1980s (but see Condran & Tamney, 1985; Tamney et al., 1989). The prominent
works during this period included Campbell (1972), Filsinger (1976), Hadaway and Roof (1979), Hale (1977), Vernon (1968a, 1968b), and Welch (1978a,
1978b). Even during this period, the scholarly work in the field was quite
limited. As Hale summarized:
Only in the last decade or so has even a faint interest begun to emerge. Why
this is so remains a mystery … ‘irreligion,’ however conceptualized, and the
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
3
unchurched phenomenon, however quantified, continue to suffer from inattention
(1977, pp. 169–170).
Although Sherkat (1991; and Sherkat & Wilson, 1995) addressed issues of
apostasy in the course of examining religious “switching” more generally,
Hayes (2000) and Hout and Fischer (2002) represent the start of what may be
thought of as the second wave of research on religious nones. Sherkat Hayes
(2000) looked at the religiously unaffiliated across 10 developed countries
and found that they were more likely to be young, unmarried men, with high
levels of education. Hout and Fischer (2002) highlighted that this segment of
the population was growing in the United States and set about explaining the
rise as resulting from shifting views on identity as a reaction against the perceived overlap of religion and politics. Because the Religious Right had made
religion synonymous with conservative political values, Hout and Fischer
proposed that many liberals had abandoned the self-affiliation of religious
that existed before the 1990s. Recent research by Putnam and Campbell (2010)
supports their conclusions about the growing connection between secularism
and politics in the American context. This research made major contributions
to both explaining the religiously unaffiliated, but even more importantly
beginning to rekindle interest in the topic, which had largely been dormant
for two decades.
At the same time, Norris and Inglehart (2004) refocused the secularization
debate toward explaining religious affiliation as a result of existential security and in turn hypothesized that irreligion is higher where people are not
constantly worried about death and disease. The exceptional religiosity of
the United States is explained as a result of high rates of immigration from
developing countries and high-income inequality. This study has come to
be an important force shaping subsequent discussions of secularization and
irreligion, both explicitly and implicitly.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Bainbridge (2005, 2007) conducted one of the few quantitative studies dedicated to atheism (also see Hunsberger & Altemeyer, 2006; Sherkat, 2008).
Drawing on control theories of deviance, he attempts to explain atheism and
the rise in atheism as a result of low social obligations. Specifically those with
fewer social attachments and those who avoid social interaction are more
likely to be atheists, which explains in part why lower fertility around the
world can be correlated with rising atheism. In contrast, the vast majority of
studies have clumped atheists in with all other types of irreligion. This type
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of research is a good indicator of the benefits of noting nuances that exist in
this population.
Attempting to advance the study of secularism on its own terms rather
than as a residual of religion, Baker and Smith (2009a) examine the role of
identity in claiming no religion. They found that having religiously unaffiliated parents, low levels of childhood religious socialization, nonreligious
friends, and being married to a spouse who is not religious were strongly
associated with claiming no religion. These factors are far more predictive
than sociodemographic characteristics, such as race, age, education, or the
region of the county in which one resides. Analogous to the formation and
maintenance of a particular religious identity, there appears to be a similar
process of friends and family reinforcing an irreligious or unaffiliated identity. Qualitative studies of the narrative identities of atheists (Smith, 2011)
and apostates (Zuckerman, 2011), as well as of the “imagined community”
of secularism (Cimino & Smith, 2007, 2011) are beginning to flesh out this
perspective on secularism more fully. Understanding secularity as identity
opens up a wealth of research possibilities, such as using secular categories
as a meaningful status in psychological studies (e.g., Beit-Hallahmi, 2007;
Caldwell-Harris, 2012; Caldwell-Harris et al., 2011).
This sense of identity, rather than objective beliefs or behaviors is very
important, according to the work of Lim et al. (2010). By using a variety of
high-quality national surveys, this study found that many religious nones
were what the authors termed “liminal,” moving in and out of identifying
as nones without actually changing much about their religiosity other than
self-identification. This is a major contribution in that it helps demonstrate
the ephemerality of the label and explains how it is possible for the proportion of the population who is religiously unaffiliated to shift quickly one
way or the other. This work is closely related to a similar vein of study that
looks at the issue of apostasy and leaving religion. The key recent study
on this topic is by Vargas (2012), who looks at why people choose to leave,
based on political views and life stressors. These are essential elements both
for understanding why people are pulled toward disaffiliation and also
what pushes them away from religion.
In a work that suggests an important new direction in the field, Baker and
Smith (2009b; also Baker, 2012) attempt to specify some primary forms of
secularism by examining atheists, agnostics, and nonaffiliated believers separately. Each group has distinct political and religious characteristics, such
as agnostics being less opposed to religion and nonaffiliated believers showing the highest levels of personal spirituality. These distinctions show that
secularisms are not uniform and should not be treated as if they are.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
5
Edgell et al. (2006) take a different angle on the issue by looking at how
irreligion in the form of atheism is viewed by the broader American public. They found that not only is it perceived as a negative social status for
many Americans, but more people are willing to discuss their disapproval
for it compared to many other traditionally ostracized minority groups. For
example, as of 2003, people were less likely to want their child to marry an
atheist compared to a Muslim, African American, Hispanic, or Jew. Thus, the
stigma of atheism or irreligion is an important consideration for research in
the area because of potential response bias and disavowal of the labels even
if they are accurate, as well as studying the effects of stigmatization (Cragun
et al., 2012).
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
One of the major directions that future research can pursue is to emphasize
and outline the nuance present among the secular segments of the population. For all of the reasons listed, this has largely been an overlooked element of studies of irreligion. Typically, secularists are thought of as a single
group. This pattern can be traced at least in part to the massively influential
RELTRAD typology of Steensland et al. (2000). In this systematic creation of
religious tradition categories to better understand and quantitatively study
religion in the United States, a category of “nones” was created for all respondents who were not religious. While this was a useful and necessary solution,
it has meant that most studies over the past decade have chosen to describe
all people who are not religiously affiliated as being uniform, when in fact
there is substantial diversity within this general category. Most notably, while
atheists do not believe in God or a higher power, many people who are religiously unaffiliated still hold traditional religious beliefs, including theism.
Furthermore, the use of a general nones category means that the nominally
religious, those who claim an affiliation, but never attend religious services
or engage in any private acts such as prayer or meditation, are not studied as
a (relatively) secular segment of the population.
In order to begin to overcome this difficulty, we propose the use of four
subcategories of secularism: atheists, agnostics, nonaffiliated believers, and
nonpracticing believers. This has the simultaneous benefit of being relatively
feasible to accomplish with many existing datasets and of having clear, theoretically useful boundaries. Generally speaking, atheists and agnostics would
be grouped on the basis of beliefs about God or a higher power, nonaffiliated
believers are all other respondents who do not claim a religious affiliation,
and nonpracticing believers are those who self-identify with a religion, but
do not engage in religious behaviors. Of course, all of this raises issues of
methodology, as some techniques such as forcing respondents to identify
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
with a label such as “atheist” will yield lowers estimates of disbelief in God
than a questions specifically about theism.
Another area of future research that is emerging (e.g., Killen & Silk, 2004;
Smith, 2011, Zuckerman, 2011) is in the use of qualitative research to flesh
out what these categories mean in daily life and how they are understood by
those who identify with the labels. It is one thing to enumerate the number
of people with a particular identity, but quite another to explain how they
feel and understand this position. Even within the numerous studies of secularization there is rarely a direct study of those who are religiously dis- or
unaffiliated. Instead, there has tended to be speculation about the motivations and desires of these people. Future research should use ethnographic
methods to better understand how secular identities are formed, maintained,
and expressed. As with quantitative research, methodological caveats about
understanding the rich diversity of secularism apply.
From a methodological perspective, one of the primary difficulties in studying this segment of the population is the rarity. Especially for quantitative
techniques such as surveys, it can be very difficult in a nationally representative sample of 1500 people to analyze the 30 who might be atheists.
This difficulty is starting to be overcome because of much larger surveys,
but even so it poses problems that do not exist when studying larger groups
in society. One solution is to instead do purposive sampling. This has been
attempted recently by looking at atheist organizations (e.g., Hunsberger &
Altemeyer, 2006). The difficulty in this approach is that it gets at a very particular and likely skewed portion of the unaffiliated, those who feel so strongly
enough about religious disaffiliation that they engage in atheist affiliations.
This is not representative of the larger segment of the population who may
be more apathetic than antagonistic, or even “spiritual but not religious”
(Chaves, 2011, pp. 38–41). Moving forward, regardless of the methodologies
employed, researchers will be forced to use creative strategies that go beyond
organizational attachment to locate and study this growing portion of the
population in meaningful ways.
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BUSTER G. SMITH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Buster G. Smith is an assistant professor of sociology at Catawba
College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He received his doctoral degree from
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion
9
Baylor University in Sociology with an emphasis on the sociology of religion.
His dissertation focused on the interaction of American Buddhism with the
existing religious landscape. His recent publications have appeared in Social
Forces, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Contemporary Buddhism.
Primary areas of research include religion, transnationalism, and deviance.
JOSEPH O. BAKER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Joseph O. Baker is assistant professor in the department of sociology and
anthropology at East Tennessee State University and a senior research associate
for the Association of Religion Data Archives. His research focuses on sociological patterns of religiosity, the social and political dimensions of secularism,
public views of “science and religion,” paranormal subcultures, and social
theory. He is co-author of the book Paranormal America (NYU Press 2010) and
is currently working on a book about American secularism(s) with Buster
Smith.
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