Do the Nones Actually Hate Religion? The data says it's complicated.

New survey data shows most non-religious Americans aren't carrying around the resentment you'd expect. The exceptions are interesting.

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.

The overwhelming sense you get from this data is that the vast majority of nones are just not carrying around a huge amount of resentment when it comes to religion. In the full sample of the non-religious, just 26% agreed that religion has no place in the modern world, only 25% said religion was a form of child abuse, and just 22% said that religion needed to be eradicated. I would not describe that as overwhelming evidence of antipathy toward religion.

Now, that’s not to say that it doesn’t vary somewhat by the type of none that responded to each statement. Without a doubt, atheists are the most antagonistic toward religion. When it comes to the statement, “Religion has no place in the modern world” nearly half of them agreed (49%). Those numbers were lower for the other two statements (42% on each), but that’s still a sizable minority.

There is a clear line of demarcation between the atheists and the other two types of non-religious, however. For agnostics, agreement with those statements was 20+ points lower than the atheists and the nothing in particular category was even a bit lower than that. In fact, the “nothing in particulars” seem downright warm to religion across these three statements.

However, we aren’t just going to end there. There are a bunch of moving parts that I want to explore when it comes to antipathy toward religion. Let me start with age. For all the work that I’ve done on this survey data, I have a clear impression that anger toward religion abates with age. I wanted to check that here.