Many people around the world believe that to be moral, one must believe in God. However, individuals who do not believe in God also hold distinct ethical beliefs. Similar to theists, non-theists in different cultures may share overarching narratives about morality and what it is founded upon—a possibility that remains understudied. In the present research, we utilised open-ended survey data to explore what non-theists from ten countries (N = 996) described as the basis of their views on right and wrong. We also investigated how different beliefs about morality clustered together. The findings show diversity but also point towards cross-culturally recurring patterns in non-theistic beliefs and belief clusters concerning 1) important moral principles and 2) perceived sources of morality. We furthermore discuss country-specific findings, such as the importance of ‘conscience’ for Turkish and Czech participants and ‘cultural Christianity’ in the Danish sample. Altogether, the results support research indicating that a lack of belief in God does not entail moral relativism and question views on non-theists primarily seeing morality as self-constructed. Instead, our findings point towards a more prominent role of social interaction and ‘social contract’ in views about the basis of right and wrong. In light of the results, we suggest that predominant ways of measurement in moral psychology may currently obscure diversity in non-theistic moral outlooks, such as more communal secular ethics. The main limitation of the research is convenience sampling. We therefore encourage future work to utilise representative samples to explore differing secular moralities and their predictors.
Current literature on atheism, due to a lack of cultural nuance or specification, often assumes that religious decline in Hinduism functions similarly to Abrahamic religions. In doing so, it ignores the pluralistic nature of Hinduism, where religious practice varies by linguistic community and caste. We propose that, to understand religious decline in Hinduism, we must first understand group differences in how the religion is practiced. We conducted qualitative interviews with two Indian linguistic communities, Gujaratis and Maharashtrians, to better understand the factors that influence theism and, consequently atheism. Through 75 qualitative interviews spanning across the two communities and high, middle, and low castes, we suggest that Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs) and secular education influence religiosity, though their effects differ by community and caste. Gujaratis exhibited higher religiosity due to high CREDs exposure through time-consuming rituals, signalling trustworthiness in trade, but this varied by caste. Maharashtrians showed more caste-based variability in the strength of belief. Brahmins (high-caste members) maintained strong religiosity through CREDs and religious education, while middle-caste individuals engaged in fuzzy fidelity. Their religious engagement was selective, participating socially without strong belief, due to lower CRED exposure and higher secular education. Lower-caste Maharashtrians, exposed to anti-caste, secular literature and fewer CREDs, recognized that even minimal religious participation reinforced their subjugation and hence actively opposed religion. Our findings suggest that atheism within Hinduism is plural, not merely a rejection of orthodoxy, but a response to intersecting social structures (e.g. community and caste) that shape one’s identity.
Scholars in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion have examined various hypotheses to explain the individual differences in religious disbelief. One such hypothesis is the analytic atheism hypothesis, which predicts an association between higher analytic thinking and lower religious beliefs. Although previous studies have found evidence supporting this hypothesis, some suggested cultural constraints (i.e. the association was observed only in religious countries). To accumulate empirical data on this hypothesis, this pre-registered study examined the analytic atheism hypothesis in Japan, where it has rarely been tested. We employed two different measures of religious beliefs: the 13-item measure used in previous studies conducted in Japan in Study 1 and the Supernatural Belief Scale in Study 2. We also compared the relative strength of the association with religious beliefs among measures of analytic thinking (Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT), empathic concern, and exposure to parents’ credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) during childhood. Study 1 (N = 1,460) found that higher CRT scores were associated with fewer religious beliefs, as predicted. However, empathic concerns and CRED exposure were more strongly associated with these beliefs. These findings were replicated in Study 2 (N = 1,306), confirming the robustness of our results. This study provides reliable evidence for the analytic atheism hypothesis. The implications of understanding the cognitive foundations of religiosity are also discussed.
The importance of the teenage years in shaping a person's worldview can be considered a well-established fact. This was also true in politicalregimes that tried to enforce atheism on their population. In East Germany, surveys among the 14-25-year-olds by the Central Institute for Studies on the Youth observed a decline in atheism between the 1960s and 1990 among young people, both at the population leveland in individual trajectories. The ideologicalimperative to foster atheisation, which did not progress autonomously, made the search for causal factors all the more urgent. By examining the influence of parents and young people's social environment, researchers drew a complex picture of the possible links between politicalopinions and worldview and of different types of atheists. These insights were intended to inform 'communist education' across a wide range of actors.
By unearthing the intricate interplay between the cognitive and the affective, this study examines the trajectories of nonreligious Arab women, arguing that emotions such as anger and aversion play a role in triggering “active engagement”, ultimately leading to doubt and religious disengagement. What is particular about these trajectories is that they emerge from the experiences of formerly religiously-committed and pious women. This urges us to rethink scholarship that frames piety as a fixed closure in the process of moral self-transformation. By examining the role of the internet in the process, this article seeks to capture moments of disruption in which an idealised vision of Islam is confronted with newly discovered information that unsettles my interlocutors’ religious attachment.
In a society that is increasingly secularizing, understanding why and how individuals’ worldviews change is important; yet those processes remain only partially understood. Developing deeper insights into worldview dynamics has the potential to improve both our understanding of secularization and the support offered to people experiencing the challenges associated with deconversion. This study used Reflexive Thematic Analysis to explore data from 20 semi-structured interviews with ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses in the UK, investigating why participants left the organization and how their worldviews changed during their deconversion. We found participants left due to the cumulative effects of intellectual doubts, social experiences, and identity conflicts. The deconversion process was usually slow, difficult, and painful; it was also complex, idiosyncratic, and embedded in the participants’ social and cultural contexts. To help understand these processes of worldview change, a systemic stage model was developed by drawing on the wider academic literature. This model suggests that individuals experiencing crises sometimes perform existential exploration that can lead to various forms of resolution (including deconversion, when conflicts cannot be adequately reconciled within one’s existing religious group) that often have long-term consequences for both them and others. These findings suggest that individuals struggling with various forms of spiritual crisis should be supported sensitively as they explore the existential beliefs available to them and their potential consequences. Researchers studying secularization, deconversion, and other types of spiritual transformation should also be sensitive to both the complexity and heavily contextualized nature of these processes for the individuals experiencing them.
This article shows how the law can be used in attempts to silence the emotions of activists and counter opposition to the strategic and doctrinal evolutions of a secular organisation. At the end of the 1980s, France's biggest confederation of associations, the Ligue de l'enseignement, shifted its doctrinal base from a secularism closed to any dialogue with religions to a recognition of their importance as a cultural fact. Discussions were held with leaders of the main religions present in France, the teaching of religion (from historical and sociological perspectives) was advocated, and reflections on Islam were carried out. But this evolution was initiated by the sole organisation's leaders and not by the whole confederation, resulting in opposition within the movement. Based on a study of the archives of the Ligue and on interviews with the organisation's national leaders, this article examines the use of legal arguments to counter opposition within the organisation generated by its changing approaches to secularity. To address emotional responses conveying divisions within the movement, organisation's leaders put forward legislative arguments referring to the the long-standing legal recognition of religious establishments (with the Goblet law of 1886) and a law on religious symbols passed in 2004. By showing how legislative argumentation has been utilised in managing and mitigating emotional responses such as the anger, disillusionment and fears of secular activists to prevent internal mobilization, the results contribute to ongoing discussions on law, emotion, and collective mobilization. The effectiveness of the legal argumentation in the French context is discussed.
The deconstruction of the traditional meaning of religion emerges in supranational law through the increasing hegemony of the legal formula ‘religion or belief’. The formula ‘religion or belief’ first appeared in the human rights vocabulary of freedom of religion via the innovative expression ‘freedom of religion or belief’ (FoRB) and later in the category of religious minority thanks to the new concept of ‘religious or belief minorities’. Building on this background, this article aims to map the constructive trajectories and legal evolution of the category ‘religious minority’ in international and European law. For this purpose, the main legal documents and sources contributing to the deconstruction of religion via the construction of FoRB are analysed. Furthermore, the transplantation of FoRB in the specific context of religious minority rights by international institutions is traced. In practice, this means examining the construction of the new legal concept of ‘belief minority’ and its implications for the legal status of confessional and non-confessional denominations. If this legal concept and its recent interpretations are mobilised, as argued in the conclusion, European states have demonstrated resistance to the inclusion of this international standard at the national level.
The present study sheds light on the unique experiences of demographically diverse nonbelievers who do not fit the "stereotypical" privileged-atheist schema on which most nonbelief research has centered (Zuckerman 2009). Using data from 888 nonbelieving participants with marginalized identities (either people of color and/or LGBTQ+ identities), we conducted latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify subgroupings of our secular sample. Profiles were estimated using the continuous variables that addressed aspects of belief and practice (i.e., salience of nonbelief, New Age beliefs, religious service attendance). Additionally, categorical variables assessing current/prior beliefs about God and secular community involvement were also used to estimate profiles. These analyses resulted in three profiles with distinct characteristics across the variables of interest: (1) Adamant Nonbelievers (n = 549, 61.82%), (2) Ambivalent Maybelievers (n = 132, 14.86%), and (3) Spiritually Inclined (n = 207, 23.3%). The role of more internalized, individual-level factors (i.e., intolerance of uncertainty, pressure to conceal one's secular beliefs) and demographic differences within these profiles discussed alongside directions for future research.
Leaving religion is a profoundly emotional process that is experienced and expressed in various ways. Those labelled as ‘apostates’ (individuals who leave a religion) in societies with restrictions on blasphemy and/or apostasy undergo a particularly unique experience, yet their accounts remain absent in research on non-religion and forced migration. This paper aims to address this gap by foregrounding the role of emotion across three stages of the refugee journey: leaving a religion in societies with restrictions on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB), the challenges in proving apostasy during Refugee Status Determination (RSD) procedures, and the dynamics of belonging, identity, and recognition after asylum. Drawing on qualitative analysis of international human rights law, Home Office asylum policies, and interviews with both individuals with lived experience of seeking asylum in the UK (n = 12) and human rights advocates (n = 22), this study shows how fear, grief and relief shape (non-)religious identity construction. The findings suggest that these emotional dynamics, coupled with complex identity reconstructions, create inherent risks for successful bureaucratic recognition. By exploring these affective dimensions, this paper offers insights into how non-religious refugees construct their identities and the shortcomings of RSD processes for claims of apostasy. These findings connect the fields of non-religion and forced migration, which are often treated as separate, to deepen scholarly understanding of the process of becoming non-religious. In doing so, it emphasises the need for asylum systems to better engage with the lived realities of apostasy.
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.
We examine the strengths and weaknesses of different “absence measures” scholars use to classify individuals as religious or nonreligious. Drawing on a novel dataset with data from eight countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Norway, the UK, and the USA), we analyze how many people would be considered nonreligious based on four common measures: religious affiliation, religious service attendance, belief in a monotheistic god, and self-reported religiosity. We find that different measures lead to substantially different estimates of the number of nonreligious people in a country. The single measure that identifies the highest percentage of nonreligious people is never attending religious services, while the measure that identified the lowest percentage was those who report they are not at all religious. We also show that self-reported religiosity is a stronger predictor of attitudes toward religion than the other measures. Our findings suggest that scholars need to consider carefully the implications of using different measures of nonreligion, as this decision can have a meaningful impact on research findings.
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.
How and why do individuals who do not believe in God, and were raised by nonbelieving parents, and grew up in majority nonbelieving societies engage in prosocial, altruistic behavior? Based on in-depth interviews with seventeen individuals who engage in such endeavors and are 1) atheistic in orientation, 2) were raised by people who did not believe in God, and 3) live in a society where the majority of people lack a belief in God (Estonia), this qualitative analysis explores the motivations, values, reflections, and experiences of thoroughly secular, godless people who engage in voluntary activities that help other sentient beings, alleviate their suffering, or increase their well-being. These non-believers do not draw from religion in any sense as they engage in altruistic activities; most have a difficult time articulating their values, as they are taken for granted and seldom if ever need to be explained or justified; all find their altruistic activities rewarding.
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.
The qualitative study of declining religious influence in society, or secularization, has been conducted almost exclusively in Western societies. As a result, our theoretical understanding of the social psychologicaland institutional mechanisms driving sex differences in secularity are over-reliant on a relatively small subset of societies. In this study, one of the first of its kind, we examine the process of secularization amongst a sample of men and women raised Muslim in Iran. We draw from 21 in-depth interviews (52% female) to identify three themes central to individuals' uncertainty about religion. In doing so, we uncover several unexpected findings with little precedence Western secularization research. Given the dearth of research on sex differences in secularization amongst people raised Muslim in Muslim-majority countries, our results provide new and novel directions for scholars to pursue in future work.
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.
Australia has witnessed a significant rise in people claiming ‘No-Religion’ in recent censuses with the percentage having more than doubled in the last two decades. Academic literature addressing Australian non-religion focuses on explaining this rise and/or investigating the inherent diversity of the substantial religious ‘none’ category. Existing research also tends to refer to two broad categories of non-religious people in Australia: those who become non-religious while living in Australia and those who were born non-religious. There is little understanding of the migration of non-religious people to Australia. Similarly, current migration literature abounds with analyses of religious migrant groups who contribute to the religiosity of Australia, but there is minimal investigation of non-religious migrants. The 2021 Australian national census identified that close to one-quarter of non-religious people were born outside of Australia, but it is unclear if they were already non-religious or if they ‘lost’ their religion after migration or settlement. This article seeks to understand the increase of the no-religion category by focusing on those born overseas. This investigation finds that, although not a central driver, migrants are also contributing to the ‘non-religious’ population. These findings challenge much of the migration scholarship that characterises migrants as religious and complicates understandings of migrants solely driving increased religiosity in Australia.
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.
In Latin America, unlike in Europe, religion is not a variable commonly used to analyse electoral behaviour in constitutional referendums, where theoretical approaches such as systematic political reasoning, heuristic approaches, and economic voting predominate. However, religion matters even in countries with high levels of secularisation. Chile's Constitutional Referendum 2022, in which citizens were to approve or reject the proposed new constitution, is a good example. Four findings indicate the relevance of the religious cleavage. First, religion affected voting intentions, even after controlling for theoretically more powerful variables such as ideology. Second, Evangelicals were more homogeneous than Catholics, who were divided according to the content of the constitutional proposal. Third, rejection responds to the opposition to the five axes of the constitutional proposal: plurinationality, gender parity, elimination of the senate, abortion, and the creation of a public National Health System. Fourth, Evangelicals rejected abortion across the board, so much so that Evangelicals on the left and right opposed it in almost equal proportions.
