atheism

Erik Ingram via flickr.com.
Erik Ingram via flickr.com.

Public opinion polling in America dates back to the 1930s, and religious beliefs and behaviors have always been topics of interest. However, polls do not produce perfect measurements and their results can both shape and misrepresent the reality of public beliefs and behaviors. Religion Dispatches recently interviewed sociologist Robert Wuthnow about his new book Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith in which he details the ways in which polls have shaped the religious makeup of the American population.  

Wuthnow explains that in the 1970s, the Gallup poll’s overly broad and vague questions about evangelical identity resulted in a huge overestimation of the number of evangelicals in America at the time. He explains:

The year of the evangelical was 1976, when Jimmy Carter achieved election to the White House and the role of polling was to greatly expand the number of Americans who were evangelicals… How is that possible that a poll could do that? …Gallup said there might be 50 million Americans who are evangelicals, and journalists ran with that… The way they got 50 million was basically inventing a new question that said something to the effect of, “Have you ever had a born-again religious experience, or something similar to a religious awakening?” And that was pretty much it… There was a lot of diversity among evangelicals themselves that got masked by being lumped together in the polls as if they were all the same thing.

The results of that 1976 poll influenced not only perceptions of the number of evangelicals among journalists, but also political perceptions of evangelicals as a voting bloc. If there were that many evangelicals in America, then politicians could cater to them to gain votes. Evangelicals began to be treated as one homogenous group instead of the highly heterogenous group that they really were.

Wuthnow explains how a similar phenomenon is happening with the rise of the non-religious in America—commonly known as the “nones.” Polls and surveys are reporting an increase in those who are saying they are not religious, but these general trends can mask huge variation among the non-religious. Many, for instance, still believe in a god and go to church, and only a very small percentage actually identify as atheist. Further, Wuthnow says, people often change their beliefs and opinions over time, and poll data glosses over that fact:

Polls have always assumed that whatever a person says is reliable, and that they really mean it and stick with it. So if you find any changes over time, that’s significant because polls are measuring stable opinions—if those change, that’s important.

Courtesy the Boston Public Library.
Courtesy the Boston Public Library.

It’s been a busy time for social facts on religion in American life. First, The Washington Post reported new data from the Pew Forum suggesting that more Americans would be willing to vote for an atheist president. While the original report noted that atheism is still a “top negative” for voters—with more respondents saying it would make them less likely to vote for a candidate than drug use, political inexperience, or an extramarital affair—there is still some optimism in the fact that this number has declined by 10% since 2007.

Second, a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that Americans are still over-reporting their church attendance, moreso in phone than in online surveys. The Huffington Posthosted a roundtable on the issue, and a take in The Atlantic emphasized the political implications of this data—liberals are more likely to inflate their church attendance than conservatives, and this may be because of negative stereotypes that liberals are “anti-religion.”

In a journalistic trifecta, all three stories noted research from Minnesota sociologists Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and TSP’s own Doug Hartmann on the continued stigma faced by atheists in American culture. From The Atlantic:

When three University of Minnesota sociologists surveyed American religious attitudes in 2006, they found “not only that atheists are less accepted than other marginalized groups but also that attitudes toward them have not exhibited the marked increase in acceptance that has characterized views of other racial and religious minorities over the past forty years.” Americans are today more likely to say they would vote for a Muslim or a gay or lesbian for president than an atheist.

Edgell also discussed current trends in church attendance on The Huffington Post and updated her 2006 research in The Washington Post:

A 2006 study by University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell found atheists were the most mistrusted minority in the U.S. Edgell said Tuesday that an updated study based on a 2014 online survey would be released soon. Preliminary results show the mistrust meter hasn’t budged.

Despite an inclusive trend in what Americans say they look for in a candidate, religious identities are still an important marker of who can lead the flock(s).

For more on the cultural factors that may be driving these trends, check out this classic TSP feature: The Social Functions of Religion in American Political Culture.

Here's hoping... Photo by Erik Ingram via flickr.com.
Here’s hoping… Photo by Erik Ingram via flickr.com.

This year’s hot trend in religion research is definitely the “spiritual but not religious” (SNBRs), a growing group of Americans who choose not to affiliate with any particular religious tradition, but don’t want to take the plunge into full-blown atheism. While a lot of scholars are still working through the concept, this new identity label is already cropping up in all kinds of research. How do SNBRs feel about religious practices like prayer, are they a stronger political force than conservative Christians, and—most recently—are they even more criminal than their religious peers?

A recent report from the science news website phys.org starts in on this latest question with research from Baylor sociologists Sung Joon Jang and Aaron Franzen.

Young adults who deem themselves “spiritual but not religious” are more likely to commit property crimes than those who identify themselves as either “religious and spiritual” or “religious but not spiritual”… a fourth category—who say they are neither spiritual nor religious—are less likely to commit property crimes than the “spiritual but not religious” individuals.

Franzen suggests that the SBNR identity reflects weaker ties to social networks that may prevent these crimes:

We were thinking that religious people would have an institutional and communal attachment and investment, while the spiritual people would have more of an independent identity.

Of course, this doesn’t quite explain why those who were neither spiritual nor religious were less likely to commit crimes than the SBNRs. The next question is whether strong ties to religion actually prevent crime, or just show up after criminals have been caught.

Photo by Erik Ingram via flickr.com.
Photo by Erik Ingram via flickr.com.

Now that one in five Americans chooses not to affiliate with a religion, media outlets in both the sacred and secular worlds have taken a new interest in atheists—a small, yet dynamic subset of the growing religious “nones.” In a recent interview with UNT sociologist George Yancey about his new book with David A. Williamson, There is No God: Atheists in America, The Christian Post hits upon a key point: these identities are not static, but are actively shaped by social relationships.

CP: Atheism changes over time and is a reaction to the dominant religious beliefs of the time. Today’s atheism is, in part, a reaction to the political activism of conservative Christians, or the “Christian Right.”

Yancey: They don’t proselytize in the way that Christians tend to proselytize. Atheists tend to believe that people are religious because they are socialized to be that way.

The article also illustrates how media “makes” atheist identities while discussing them.

CP: You find that atheists are mostly highly educated, wealthy, old, white, men, and that was consistent with some random samples as well.

Yancey: …they tend to be men, educated, older. Although, there is some indication of some younger atheists coming up.

CP: So demographically, they look, more or less, like the U.S. Senate.

Yancey: [Laughs] I hadn’t thought about it that way, but, yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it.

CP: You’re basically talking about a privileged group—wealthy, old, white guys. You say it makes sense that atheists would come from a privileged group. Explain.

While atheists are more likely to be educated white males, they don’t really look like the U.S. Senate at all. In fact, open atheism may actually be a barrier to political participation. Currently, there is only one religiously-unaffiliated Congressional Representative. According to research from the 2003 American Mosaic Project, about 40% of Americans say that atheists “do not at all agree with my vision of society,” a higher level than the levels of distrust for any other racial, religious, or sexual minority group in the study. And a 2011 Pew Center for People and the Press report found that 61% of voting Americans were “less likely” to vote for a hypothetical presidential candidate who did not believe in God. Social interactions clearly shape atheists’ identities, but it’s also interesting to see how they shape others’ perceptions of atheist identities as well.

At The Reason Rally 2012 in Washington, DC. Photo by makelessnoise via flickr.com.

Americans are extremely dubious about the integrity of atheists. In fact, an article by several of Minnesota’s own sociologists, “Atheists as Other,” found that atheists are the least trusted minority. Most Americans think that the absence of belief in the divine renders one prone to turpitude and without basis for morality.

According to Rohan Maitzen in a recent article from Salon, the remedy for this ethic-less reputation lies in the most unlikely of places, namely the semi-obscure novel Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by famous atheist George Eliot. In contrast to Richard Dawkins’ and Christopher Hitchens’ confrontational stance toward religion, Eliot understood “religion as the form through which many people have, historically, expressed their best moral impulses.” She did not mind religiosity so long as it fostered feelings of sympathy and responsibility for human suffering.

At once a “stringent moralist and an unbeliever,” Eliot wove a tale of human suffering, loss, and redemption through the experiences of the title character, using the “affective power of fiction to convert us to faith, not in God, but in humanity.” Indeed, through the tale of Silas Marner and her own letters to her deeply religious family, Eliot poignantly makes the case for the morality of atheism, mainly because “in a material universe there are no rewards or punishments to come later.” Summing it up, Eliot explained to another writer,

It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery.