The Afterlife Isn’t Going Away
Souls, heaven, hell, and the persistence of religious belief
One thing I am always probing the edges of is how deeply religion is embedded in each one of us. There’s a saying that bounces around the sociology of religion: “you may be done with religion but religion is not done with you.” I really like how Daryl van Tongeren describes this phenomenon: religious residue. You may not have gone to church in a decade and have no plans of raising your kids in a religious household, but there are probably parts of your psyche that are still impacted by religious concepts and frameworks.
I think that the idea of the afterlife is one of those things. It seems pretty common to reject the idea of Moses parting the Red Sea or to question whether Jesus died and actually resurrected. Lots of folks cast serious doubts on those types of miraculous events. But then when surveys include questions about concepts like having a soul and what happens to your existence after you die, that religious residue reemerges, and you can see that lots of Americans do tend to have some type of supernatural belief.
Pew added this little battery of questions to their Religious Landscape Survey that probed these general concepts, and I thought I would poke around those ideas in today’s post.
For instance, they asked, “Do you believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body?” It’s certainly not definitively predictive of whether someone has a deep well of spirituality, but it seems telltale that holding to the concept of a soul is pretty widespread in the data.
In the full sample, 88% of folks said that they did believe that each being possesses both a soul and a physical body. I look at survey data all day, and here’s what I know: it’s hard to get 88% of Americans to agree on anything, really. If you tried to pull together a battery of ten public policy proposals, it’s very unlikely that any of them would get 88% support. But the data tells this story clearly: almost all Americans believe that there’s something happening beyond our physical bodies.
And that belief is absolutely widespread among nearly every religious group in the survey. It’s at least 95% of every single Christian group. And even among non-Christian faiths like Islam and Buddhism, it’s at 90% agreement. The religious tradition that is the least likely to believe in a soul is Jews, at just 75%. I think this may be due, in no small measure, to the fact that lots of Jews are essentially secular in their religious beliefs. They embrace Judaism from a cultural/ethnic perspective.
Among the non-religious, there’s also a huge divide on this question. Among nothing in particulars, 80% believe in a soul. That’s just a few clicks away from the national average. Agnostics score 11 points lower than nothing in particulars. But then take a look at atheists—just one-third of them believe “in a soul or spirit in addition to their physical bodies.” When I say that not all nones are the same, this is the graph that makes that point exceedingly clear. The overall spiritual beliefs of atheists are significantly different from agnostics.
Now, let’s move to a pair of questions that asked about the existence of heaven and hell. For those wondering, the full question wording is:
Do you think there is a heaven where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded?
Do you think there is a hell where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished?
I thought it would be most insightful to look at how respondents fell across both axes at the same time; that way, we could isolate the share who believes in heaven but not hell, for instance.
Just a bare majority of Americans (55%) believe in both heaven and hell as described in each question. That’s surprising given that about 70% of the full sample is aligned with some type of religious tradition. The corollary to that is that 29% of folks do not believe in either heaven or hell. It’s just a coincidence that this is exactly the share of respondents who claim no religious affiliation. I will break these results down by religious tradition a bit later.
That leaves about 16% of folks who believe in one, but not the other. Easily the most popular combination is “heaven exists but hell does not.” That encompasses 14% of all Americans. In contrast, a bit less than three percent of Americans believe in the existence of hell but do not believe in heaven. I can’t say that I’ve met too many folks like that in all my travels and discussions about religion in the United States.
When I analyzed this by birth decade, I found a really interesting trend that is worth some reflection.
For clarity’s sake, I just plotted the share who believed in both heaven and hell and the share who said that neither existed. Among older Americans, the gap in beliefs about the afterlife is really large. Nearly 60% believe in the existence of both destinations, while about a quarter don’t believe in either. That’s a gap of about 35 percentage points.
When we get into folks born in 1970 or later, you can see that beliefs begin to shift. For this birth cohort, 57% believe in both and 28% believe in neither—a gap of 29 percentage points. But then the gap gets a whole lot smaller in the next two birth decades: 18 points among people born in the 1980s and 11 points for respondents born in the 1990s. You can see that this narrowing is occurring because both points are moving toward the center.
But then something interesting happens among respondents who were born in the early 2000s: belief in heaven and hell jumps back up. It’s 52% of the youngest adults. That’s four points higher than those born in the 1990s. And the share who believe in neither drops by five percentage points. So maybe this group of folks does have a bit more belief in spiritual things. But then again, that may wane as they move into their late twenties or early thirties.
How do these responses vary by religious tradition? That’s below.
The group that is the most likely to believe in both heaven and hell is Black Protestants, at 84%. In contrast, just 5% don’t believe in either. That’s a gap of 79 points. For evangelicals, that gap is 72 points (79% vs. 7%). For Catholics, the gap is 60 points, and it’s 47 points for mainline Protestants.
But one result that should really jump off the page comes from the Latter-day Saints. A bare majority (53%) say that they believe in both heaven and hell. That’s right in line with the national average. But then 39% say that they do believe in heaven but do not believe in hell. That’s easily the highest percentage in the bottom-right square of any religious group in the data. I don’t have the space (nor the expertise) to fully explain this finding, but some cursory research indicates that the conception of hell for LDS is just different than for many other groups.
What about the non-religious? Well, it’s fair to say that nothing in particulars have a completely different posture than atheists or agnostics. About one-third of them believe in both heaven and hell, while half say that neither exists. For agnostics, 82% believe in neither, and it’s a whopping 94% of atheists. It’s worth pointing out that atheists have more homogeneity on these issues than any Christian group.
I did wonder, though, specifically about the existence of hell. I think for lots of churchgoing folks, that’s the one that is harder to really embrace. It’s quite a bit easier to believe in the existence of a place where good people are eternally rewarded than to believe in a place of eternal punishment.
I really like this graph because it tells a compelling story about the impact of church attendance on beliefs. Among both evangelicals and Black Protestants, the share who believe in hell does rise as church attendance becomes more frequent. But the effect is pretty minimal: 12 points for evangelicals and 11 points for Black Protestants when going from never attending to more than once a week. So even non-attenders hold to a pretty orthodox view of things.
For mainline Protestants, the story is a bit muddier. Belief in hell has a real inflection point—going from never attending to being a seldom attender raises belief by 11 percentage points. From that point forward, there’s not much change. Among weekly attending mainliners, about two-thirds believe in hell. That’s 20 points below evangelicals.
But check out that Catholic graph in the bottom-left corner. That result is as pretty as a picture. Each step up the attendance ladder leads to an increased belief in hell. Those bumps are incremental and statistically significant from one level to the next. The total percentage increase among Catholics from the bottom of the scale to the top is 38 percentage points. That’s easily the largest change in this data.
So here’s what we know.
Almost everyone believes in a soul—except for atheists. They are the clear outlier on this question.
A bare majority of Americans believe in both heaven and hell, while about 30% believe in neither. Belief in the afterlife is really high among older Americans but is waning among folks who are middle-aged.
When it comes to religious tradition, the results look about how one would expect—lots of Christians believe in both, but that’s not the case with the non-religious. Latter-day Saints are a big outlier here.
Church attendance does seem to drive up belief in hell for pretty much every group, but the impact is larger for some (Catholics) than others (evangelicals).
I think there’s some pretty compelling evidence that religious beliefs are still very sticky in the psyche of lots of Americans. Even as the pews empty out, the share of folks who believe in the afterlife won’t fall at the same rate.
Code for this post can be found here.
Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
33% of atheists believing they have a soul is wild.
Compelling Ryan. Thanks for this one.