Do Non-Religious People Actually Hate Religion?

Is Religion a Force for Good? Depends Who You Ask.....

To me, there’s always been a pretty big blind spot when it comes to the study of non-religion in the United States. There are plenty of survey questions that ask about religious attendance and belief in God. However, there are very few questionnaires that ask people to express their views of religion, generally speaking. Do folks think that churches, synagogues, and mosques are a net positive? Or do they really think that there’s nothing good that comes out of houses of worship?

It’s something that Tony Jones and I spent a long time working on for The Nones Project, but before I roll out the findings from that survey I wanted to present to my readers another set of questions that appeared in the Pew Religious Landscape Survey. There’s a nice little section where they ask respondents to agree or disagree with the following statements:

1. Churches and other religious organizations focus too much on rules

2. Churches and other religious organizations are too concerned with money and power

3. Churches and other religious organizations are too involved with politics

4. Churches and other religious organizations protect and strengthen morality in society

5. Churches and other religious organizations bring people together and strengthen community bonds

6. Churches and other religious organizations play an important role in helping the poor and needy

I think the value of these questions is that the first three are clearly a negative portrayal of religion while the last three put religion in a much more positive light. Let me start by just showing you the share of the entire sample that agreed with each of those six statements.

It’s interesting to note that at least half of the sample agreed to every single one of the statements - positive or negative. But there is overwhelming agreement on two points - churches strengthen community bonds and churches help the poor and the needy. In both cases, at least 80% of folks agreed. Then, two in three Americans said that “churches protect and strengthen morality.” So, from this angle religion is pretty well respected in the general public and the average American believes that churches serve an important role in terms of community building, serving the disadvantaged, and strengthening morality.

But, what about those three statements that are more negative? Well, a slim majority agrees with each of them, too. For instance, 61% of respondents said that churches are too concerned with money and power. And 56% agreed that churches are too focused on rules and that churches are too involved with politics. So, I think that’s clearly a mixed bag of views about religion. Yes, religious groups serve a purpose but the majority of Americans believe that they are deeply flawed, too.

Of course, age has to be playing a role here. We know that older Americans tend to be more religious compared to younger ones. I broke the sample down into decades of birth and here’s the share who agreed with each statement by birth decade.