The Nones Project: Dones

If you hang around Christian spaces long enough, there are these little turns of phrase that pop up every once in a while. One that seems to be evergreen is “people have a God-shaped hole.” It’s often attributed to the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. However, like many oft-repeated quotes, there’s no evidence that Pascal ever wrote or even uttered that specific phrase. However, he did write about that general idea in his book Pensees when he noted that humankind has a craving for God “that he tries in vain to fill with everything around him.”

When Tony Jones and I won a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, it was organized under the Spiritual Yearning Initiative. There were several stated goals of such a project, but one of them was to answer a really basic—but difficult to conceptualize—question: Does every human being actually yearn for God or some Higher Power? If you ask most evangelical pastors, they will certainly respond in the affirmative, but social science has never been able to pin down if it’s empirically true or not.

We don’t want to overstate the rigor of our methods or analysis, but through the course of The Nones Project, we have managed to isolate a portion of non-religious Americans who don’t seem to express any type of real yearning for God. When we saw this cluster of nones pop up out of the algorithm it was pretty easy to name this group: The Dones.

We found that about 33% of all non-religious Americans are in the Dones subgroup. Which means that about one in ten American adults has nothing to do with religion at all, and no interest in changing that. Let me show you just how devoid of religious behavior and belief the Dones are by visualizing some survey results from our project.

It’s become my custom to start these posts with a heatmap of two questions we asked each person: one was about spiritual importance, the other was about religious importance. After generating hundreds of graphs based on this data, I still think that this analysis is the most effective at visualizing the landscape of non-religion in America.

For the Nones in Name Only (NiNos), a huge chunk of them are in the top right corner of the heatmap - that’s high on religious importance and spiritual importance. But, generally speaking, the vast majority of NiNos (66%) say that spirituality is very important to them. For the SBNRs (spiritual but not religious) they are more in the top left- that’s high in spirituality but very low on religious importance. Just 4% of SBNRs say that religion is “somewhat” or “very” important.

What about the Dones? Well, it’s pretty simple to see where they fit on both dimensions - very, very low. In fact, 68% of them said that religion was not at all important to them and spirituality was not all important either. Another 22% said religion was not at all important and spirituality was not too important. That’s 90% of the sample scoring about as low as you can possibly imagine. About 70% of them are not spiritual at all. While 94% are not religious at all.

When we say that the Dones are done, we mean it. And it’s not that they have walked away from organized religion. They aren’t too keen on spirituality either. It’s like they just don’t have a God-shaped hole that needs filling. The Dones don’t yearn.

That comes through when looking at questions about religious attendance. I am comparing the Dones with all the other non-religious samples, and Protestants and Catholics below.

Here’s a staggering statistic: 90% of the Dones never step foot inside a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. They just don’t go, ever. And then another 9% describe their religious attendance as “seldom.” Said another way, the Dones just have nothing to do with a house of worship. In comparison, 40% of all the other nones go at least seldom, and 15% are going on a yearly or greater basis.

This is an important point to reflect on for just a second — a significant chunk of nones (who are not Dones) are going to a house of worship at least once in a while – maybe it’s on a religious holiday, or for a funeral or wedding, but it does happen. But when you throw the Dones in the mix, it significantly drags down attendance measures.

But what about another measure of religious behavior: frequency of prayer? I like this one because it doesn’t require any real outward expression of religion like going to church does. I had a theory that a lot of Dones were actually doing a bit of praying because that seemed a bit more accessible than actually schlepping to a house of worship on the weekend.

But no, the Dones do not pray. This is one of those results that I’ve been thinking about a whole lot over the last couple of months. Almost 90% of Dones say that they never pray and 11% indicate that they pray only occasionally. When I say that the Dones are done, this is exactly what I mean. The prayer frequency question is always one that I think is rife with social desirability bias. That’s the simple idea that people give responses to survey questions that they think are the “right” answers, not the true answers. It’s easy for a respondent to say, “oh yeah, I pray a bit.” It’s not like we can check the veracity of that claim.

But the fact that almost all the Dones simply say, “Nope, I don’t pray,” without any concern with how that would look to other people is a testament to their distance from any concept of religion and/or spirituality. This is where they really stand out from the other nones. I mean, when we remove the Dones from the rest of the non-religious, only 33% report not praying at all. In fact 30% of all non-Done nones say that they pray on a weekly (or greater) basis.

But those are religious behaviors — what about religious beliefs? We asked respondents to indicate which of the following statements best describes their belief in God.

1. I don't believe in God and I have no doubts.

2. I don't know if there is a God and I don't believe there is any way to find out.

3. I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a higher power of some kind.

4. While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.

5. I know God exists and I have no doubts about it.

As you can probably guess, the Dones stand out on this one as well.

About half of all Dones chose the atheist statement, “I don’t believe in God and I have no doubts about it.” And another 42% described their religious beliefs as essentially agnostic. Just 8% said that they believed in some vaguely conceived higher power and essentially none of them expressed any real, concrete belief in a concept called God.

There’s a huge chasm on this question between the Dones and all the other non-religious respondents. Among the other nones, only 12% said that they didn’t believe in God at all and 22% said they couldn’t be sure if God existed. Which means that about two-thirds of all the non-Done nones have some kind of belief in the Divine. What’s even more surprising is that one third of them chose one of the top two options: they are doubt-filled believers or believe in God with certainty.

On religious behavior and religious belief it’s readily apparent from our analysis that Dones are just on a different planet entirely from other non-religious Americans. Sometimes I like to describe American religion as a continuum. On the far end of one side you’ve got the fundamentalists who have oriented their entire lives around their faith (how they dress, who they marry, etc.). In my estimation, the Dones are on the far opposite side of this spectrum. They are about as far away from religion and spirituality as one can get.

Before I conclude, I want to show one more angle of the Dones that is not traditional measures of religiosity to help reframe how readers are thinking about this group. Here’s a simple age breakdown.

One thing that I want to make exceedingly clear: the Dones are the oldest of the four types in The Nones Project. This is not a group of 25-year-olds who have just walked away from religion and have nothing to do with any of it. Nope, in fact, one-third of all the Dones have celebrated their 65th birthday. And about half of them are at least 55 years old. In comparison only 33% of the rest of the nones are in these top two age brackets.

You know who I think the Dones are? It’s the kind of folks who join an organization like the Freedom from Religion Foundation. A couple of years ago we surveyed the membership of FFRF and found that 76% of them were at least 60 years old. These are folks who have fought all the religious battles over the course of their lives and as they get older they just have thrown up their hands and walked away from all of it.

When I talk to pastors and religious leaders about this research, the one thing that I want to make clear to them is that I just don’t think that every type of none is receptive to any sort of efforts toward evangelizing. That’s certainly the case with the Dones. They have basically nothing to do with religion. And, as I’m going to show you in a future post, when asked about topics like meaning and purpose, the Dones don’t look any different from Protestants or Catholics.

Which means that the idea of the “God-shaped hole” may not be true for all of us.

Code for this post can be found here.