I wonder if God Shaped Hole is no longer a good way to think about this. Maybe the better question is - Do they experience awe or transcendence? And that question would also answer the question I have is: How do they spend their time? I think God Shaped Hole assumes Christianity.
A very interesting comment. I'm very much a Done myself but I think that finding awe is one of the most important things to find in life equal to things like love and peace. Our brains are definitely wired to experience awe and I feel sorry for folks who don't experience it (or don't give themselves time to find it). Personally I most often find awe in nature (mountains, forests) but I certainly wouldn't view that experience as being spiritual.
what’s ur approach to defining spirituality? bc that word has *really* tripped me up as a none/done over the past few years. i’ve since made peace with it lol but im curious about ur approach!
“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”. Only a US American study can consider that ‘staggering’. It is standard life in Europe and Australasia.
Perhaps consider thus why the figure is ‘staggering in the US’ but not so elsewhere. What does it imply about the isolated community that is US Americans?
I’m a done, but I have never ever felt anything religious. Talking about religion to me is like describing a colour to a blind person - it makes absolutely no sense. I know hardly anyone who feels the need for religion. Luckily for me I’m Australian so there’s no peer pressure to feel any differently. I find it fascinating that people would ever believe such weird things. But I like to read about religion in the same way as I read about history- wow there’s some crazy people in the world!! I put it down to differences in brain structure, just like some people have a “conservative” brain and other people have the opposite - there’s plenty of research that shows this.
As always, great analysis, Ryan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm noticing a bit of a discrepancy here. You say that the Dones are likely to be part of groups like the FFRF, but did you say elsewhere that the Dones were NOT trying to convince others to leave religion? I think you said that something like 75% of Zealous Atheists tried to convince others to leave religion,but it was only like 5% of Dones. My impression is that the Dones were "checked out" more than anything.
I wonder about the label. "Done" suggesting trying or experiencing something and then letting it go. I wonder how many "Dones" grew up in unchurched families and never experienced religion. Can you be "done" with something that you never experienced and have no real knowledge about?
Ryan has actually answered that. He recently posted a graph (I cannot locate it now), that charted the previous level of engagement in organized religion by current Nones (including all his categories of Nones -- SBNR, NiNo's etc.). It is helpful for evaluating how immersed in "the religious language game" (Wittgenstein) were those who are current None's.
I recall that SBNR showed higher past engagement in their religion than do people who are now active in the Episcopalian faith. (Ryan, correct me if I am misremembering!)
If the group tends to be older, it would make sense that most of them grew up with some form of religion, just based on how common going to church was in America in the past. I suspect the younger ones would be more mixed between growing up religious and growing up non-religious.
If the research question being asked is, "Does every human being actually yearn for God or some Higher Power?" then "Done" suggests "done with yearning".
But I agree with you that, in a general religious context, I associate "done" with being done with a particular religious community and practice – so that you could be "done" but not "none"; still a believer, but too burned out and alienated to keep participating.
I suspect the God Shaped Hole meme is something that is used to suggest to teens that actually they should be thinking about souls and heavens and hells, because that is the time in life where they are most swayable. Once you get to midlife, either you were brought up to have a GSH, or you weren't, and the probability of conversion is much lower. As Loyal Rue notes, religion is about community and power, not gods:
Rue, Loyal D. 2005. *Religion Is Not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They Fail*. Rutgers University Press.
Australians are overwhelmingly Dones (except that this term implies a change from previous state, which isn't the case for most). That includes not only most of the Nones, but a fair proportion of nominal believers. The proportion of people who say religion is important to them is lower than those who state a religious affiliation, and this carries across to prayer, attendance etc
On the question of whether there is a God-shaped hole among the Dones, isn't the fact that so many of the Dones are so rigorous, so “evangelical” about their irreligiosity the very evidence of a God-shaped hole?
You correctly note his point in this piece “that humankind has a craving for God ‘that he tries in vain to fill with everything around him.’” This doesn't mean that we should expect everyone to attend church or pray at least some of the time. Rather, as you show, the Dones have filled their God-shaped hole with “everything around them”: ardent atheism (joining the Freedom From Religion Foundation to spread their “faith” in there being no religion).
I would humbly submit this is what many others do with ideology and/or socio-political activism, on both the left (especially the case with Marxism) and on the right (see especially the religious devotion and totallizing effect that libertarianism and identitarianism have on adherents).
Ryan can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I thought Dones and New/Evangelical/Reddit Atheists were considered separate categories (in other words, the Dones aren’t neccessarily antitheists.)
FFRF is a political organization that seeks to protect the separation of church and state. There are many religious people who are members. It is not an atheist organization by any stretch, although, like many political organizations, I am sure there are atheist members. It is in no way an organization that promotes atheism.
I think FFRF is more about reducing the effect of religion in politics and governance/separation of church and state but would be less about convincing or not convincing people not to be religious. But I’m not super familiar with them so I could be wrong.
To "educate the public on matters relating to nontheism" whilst holding the view that "to be free from religion is an advantage for individuals" go beyond the Baptists' view of separating church and state.
I don’t know about the Baptists’ version of separation of church and state but you might be right that they do advocacy for giving up religion. That could definitely fall under ‘to educate the public on matters relating to non theism’. I also know that there is a meme that goes around among atheists that says that many Americans hate us, so education could also be about making atheists seem less scary. But I don’t know. I never felt hated for being atheist so I don’t really get into that stuff much.
No absolutely not. We just. don't. think. about. 'god'. No one in my family has ever been to church, prayed, read a holy book or anything like that. We dont do crystals, eastern woo, reiki, or political parties. We just don't know or care about religion.
I have a perfectly normal set of values, morals and passions, I just could not care less about some made up old story.
Where's the humble? Where's the logic, while we're at it? The very absence of a thing is its proof? Very handy kinda thinking in all sorts of situations.
This is fascinating research and clearly well executed, but I think the conclusion about the “God-shaped hole” overextends what the data actually measures. The study seems to assume that if some people do not feel a spiritual yearning or interest in religion, then the “God-shaped hole” idea must be false. In other words, the theory says all people have an inner longing for God (X), that longing can be measured by self-reported spirituality or prayer (Y), and because some score low on Y, X is disproven.
But that is not really what Pascal or Augustine before him meant. The “God-shaped hole” is not about a conscious emotion but an existential orientation, the human search for meaning and fulfillment that can only be satisfied by God, even if we try to fill it with other things. As Pascal wrote and it's mentioned above, humankind has a craving for God “that he tries in vain to fill with everything around him.” Measuring felt spirituality does not capture that deeper restlessness. So while the data is sociologically valuable, it does not actually test or disprove the theological idea it references.
"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."
It's a God-shaped hole/abyss not because the individual believes he or she is searching for God, but because God is the only one who can fill it.
This use of “done” seems likely to cause confusion.
I have been seeing that word for years as a label for those who still consider themselves Christians but who for various reasons have decided they are “done” with the institution of church.
Seems to me that what people are reaching for in the quote attributed to Pascal is pretty clearly presaged in Ecclesiastes 3:11.
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."
The dones' frustration with that latter point leads them to either never apprehend, or to abandon the struggle. Al makes a good point - done implies tried-and-abandoned, which is a different situation in my mind than never-examined, a category that (seems to) encompass Deborah's children.
Coincidentally, I think the psychology and behavioral economics wrapped around that is exceptionally interesting when viewed in the context of what Dan Gilbert proposed about Cartesian vs. Spinozan disbelief.
Interesting. I probably fall into the Done group myself. I’m the younger side of the age distribution and I wouldn’t have guessed that the Dones are the oldest group on average. But I guess it makes sense, because I think my dad would absolutely be a Done too and so I figure he’s probably more typical.
As a 50-year-old Done (full of awe/wonder and not at all rigorous or "evangelical" anymore) who was an ardent believer for 44 years, part of my journey has been coming to understand that what I thought for most of my life was a God-shaped hole was actually a parent-shaped hole. I have found psychological and relational explanations about the transmission of religious and spiritual identity to be more intellectually satisfying than religious ones.
I am curious if my experience is true for others--does a sincere longing for a relationship with God akin to hyper-religiosity/scrupulosity correlate with insecure attachment to one's caregivers? (I see this as different from a lower-demand, less seeking-focused faith that I assume is commonly passed on by securely attached believers). My four securely-attached teens and young adults are also Dones and don't seem to have any of the yearning for God that defined most of my life.
Do dones include people who have never been religious? The term done seems to imply that but I didn't see any clear assertion to that effect in this breakdown.
I wonder if God Shaped Hole is no longer a good way to think about this. Maybe the better question is - Do they experience awe or transcendence? And that question would also answer the question I have is: How do they spend their time? I think God Shaped Hole assumes Christianity.
A very interesting comment. I'm very much a Done myself but I think that finding awe is one of the most important things to find in life equal to things like love and peace. Our brains are definitely wired to experience awe and I feel sorry for folks who don't experience it (or don't give themselves time to find it). Personally I most often find awe in nature (mountains, forests) but I certainly wouldn't view that experience as being spiritual.
what’s ur approach to defining spirituality? bc that word has *really* tripped me up as a none/done over the past few years. i’ve since made peace with it lol but im curious about ur approach!
“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”. Only a US American study can consider that ‘staggering’. It is standard life in Europe and Australasia.
Well, I am an American. With data collected from the United States.
And my audience is….overwhelmingly American.
Perhaps consider thus why the figure is ‘staggering in the US’ but not so elsewhere. What does it imply about the isolated community that is US Americans?
I’m a done, but I have never ever felt anything religious. Talking about religion to me is like describing a colour to a blind person - it makes absolutely no sense. I know hardly anyone who feels the need for religion. Luckily for me I’m Australian so there’s no peer pressure to feel any differently. I find it fascinating that people would ever believe such weird things. But I like to read about religion in the same way as I read about history- wow there’s some crazy people in the world!! I put it down to differences in brain structure, just like some people have a “conservative” brain and other people have the opposite - there’s plenty of research that shows this.
Snap!
As always, great analysis, Ryan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm noticing a bit of a discrepancy here. You say that the Dones are likely to be part of groups like the FFRF, but did you say elsewhere that the Dones were NOT trying to convince others to leave religion? I think you said that something like 75% of Zealous Atheists tried to convince others to leave religion,but it was only like 5% of Dones. My impression is that the Dones were "checked out" more than anything.
Good points. Mea culpa in mixing up the two groups of nones.
I wonder about the label. "Done" suggesting trying or experiencing something and then letting it go. I wonder how many "Dones" grew up in unchurched families and never experienced religion. Can you be "done" with something that you never experienced and have no real knowledge about?
Ryan has actually answered that. He recently posted a graph (I cannot locate it now), that charted the previous level of engagement in organized religion by current Nones (including all his categories of Nones -- SBNR, NiNo's etc.). It is helpful for evaluating how immersed in "the religious language game" (Wittgenstein) were those who are current None's.
I recall that SBNR showed higher past engagement in their religion than do people who are now active in the Episcopalian faith. (Ryan, correct me if I am misremembering!)
If the group tends to be older, it would make sense that most of them grew up with some form of religion, just based on how common going to church was in America in the past. I suspect the younger ones would be more mixed between growing up religious and growing up non-religious.
If the research question being asked is, "Does every human being actually yearn for God or some Higher Power?" then "Done" suggests "done with yearning".
But I agree with you that, in a general religious context, I associate "done" with being done with a particular religious community and practice – so that you could be "done" but not "none"; still a believer, but too burned out and alienated to keep participating.
I suspect the God Shaped Hole meme is something that is used to suggest to teens that actually they should be thinking about souls and heavens and hells, because that is the time in life where they are most swayable. Once you get to midlife, either you were brought up to have a GSH, or you weren't, and the probability of conversion is much lower. As Loyal Rue notes, religion is about community and power, not gods:
Rue, Loyal D. 2005. *Religion Is Not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They Fail*. Rutgers University Press.
Australians are overwhelmingly Dones (except that this term implies a change from previous state, which isn't the case for most). That includes not only most of the Nones, but a fair proportion of nominal believers. The proportion of people who say religion is important to them is lower than those who state a religious affiliation, and this carries across to prayer, attendance etc
https://www.ncls.org.au/articles/how-religious-are-australians/
On the question of whether there is a God-shaped hole among the Dones, isn't the fact that so many of the Dones are so rigorous, so “evangelical” about their irreligiosity the very evidence of a God-shaped hole?
You correctly note his point in this piece “that humankind has a craving for God ‘that he tries in vain to fill with everything around him.’” This doesn't mean that we should expect everyone to attend church or pray at least some of the time. Rather, as you show, the Dones have filled their God-shaped hole with “everything around them”: ardent atheism (joining the Freedom From Religion Foundation to spread their “faith” in there being no religion).
I would humbly submit this is what many others do with ideology and/or socio-political activism, on both the left (especially the case with Marxism) and on the right (see especially the religious devotion and totallizing effect that libertarianism and identitarianism have on adherents).
Ryan can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I thought Dones and New/Evangelical/Reddit Atheists were considered separate categories (in other words, the Dones aren’t neccessarily antitheists.)
Fair point. Mea culpa for mixing up the two.
FFRF is a political organization that seeks to protect the separation of church and state. There are many religious people who are members. It is not an atheist organization by any stretch, although, like many political organizations, I am sure there are atheist members. It is in no way an organization that promotes atheism.
So, um.
I actually know the answer to this question. We surveyed the members of FFRF about a year ago. We got over 11,000 respondents.
62% of them self-ID as atheists.
19 of them. Not 19 percent. 19 total out of 11,422 (.2%) told us that they identify as "religious"
So this statement is empirically false: "There are many religious people who are members"
Wow. I am wrong and stand corrected.
Thanks. You saved me the trouble of digging through my inbox for the reference to your survey!
I think FFRF is more about reducing the effect of religion in politics and governance/separation of church and state but would be less about convincing or not convincing people not to be religious. But I’m not super familiar with them so I could be wrong.
To "educate the public on matters relating to nontheism" whilst holding the view that "to be free from religion is an advantage for individuals" go beyond the Baptists' view of separating church and state.
https://ffrf.org/frequently-asked-question/about-the-foundation/what-is-the-foundations-purpose/
I don’t know about the Baptists’ version of separation of church and state but you might be right that they do advocacy for giving up religion. That could definitely fall under ‘to educate the public on matters relating to non theism’. I also know that there is a meme that goes around among atheists that says that many Americans hate us, so education could also be about making atheists seem less scary. But I don’t know. I never felt hated for being atheist so I don’t really get into that stuff much.
Any Christian holding hatred toward someone else needs a mirror (or so we must continually remind ourselves).
No absolutely not. We just. don't. think. about. 'god'. No one in my family has ever been to church, prayed, read a holy book or anything like that. We dont do crystals, eastern woo, reiki, or political parties. We just don't know or care about religion.
I have a perfectly normal set of values, morals and passions, I just could not care less about some made up old story.
Where's the humble? Where's the logic, while we're at it? The very absence of a thing is its proof? Very handy kinda thinking in all sorts of situations.
This is fascinating research and clearly well executed, but I think the conclusion about the “God-shaped hole” overextends what the data actually measures. The study seems to assume that if some people do not feel a spiritual yearning or interest in religion, then the “God-shaped hole” idea must be false. In other words, the theory says all people have an inner longing for God (X), that longing can be measured by self-reported spirituality or prayer (Y), and because some score low on Y, X is disproven.
But that is not really what Pascal or Augustine before him meant. The “God-shaped hole” is not about a conscious emotion but an existential orientation, the human search for meaning and fulfillment that can only be satisfied by God, even if we try to fill it with other things. As Pascal wrote and it's mentioned above, humankind has a craving for God “that he tries in vain to fill with everything around him.” Measuring felt spirituality does not capture that deeper restlessness. So while the data is sociologically valuable, it does not actually test or disprove the theological idea it references.
I believe Pascal was still right:
"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."
It's a God-shaped hole/abyss not because the individual believes he or she is searching for God, but because God is the only one who can fill it.
Exactly. This research, while interesting, misses the point.
This use of “done” seems likely to cause confusion.
I have been seeing that word for years as a label for those who still consider themselves Christians but who for various reasons have decided they are “done” with the institution of church.
Seems to me that what people are reaching for in the quote attributed to Pascal is pretty clearly presaged in Ecclesiastes 3:11.
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."
The dones' frustration with that latter point leads them to either never apprehend, or to abandon the struggle. Al makes a good point - done implies tried-and-abandoned, which is a different situation in my mind than never-examined, a category that (seems to) encompass Deborah's children.
Coincidentally, I think the psychology and behavioral economics wrapped around that is exceptionally interesting when viewed in the context of what Dan Gilbert proposed about Cartesian vs. Spinozan disbelief.
http://www.jimdavies.org/summaries/Gilbert1991.html
Fascinating review--thanks for sharing.
Interesting. I probably fall into the Done group myself. I’m the younger side of the age distribution and I wouldn’t have guessed that the Dones are the oldest group on average. But I guess it makes sense, because I think my dad would absolutely be a Done too and so I figure he’s probably more typical.
As a 50-year-old Done (full of awe/wonder and not at all rigorous or "evangelical" anymore) who was an ardent believer for 44 years, part of my journey has been coming to understand that what I thought for most of my life was a God-shaped hole was actually a parent-shaped hole. I have found psychological and relational explanations about the transmission of religious and spiritual identity to be more intellectually satisfying than religious ones.
I am curious if my experience is true for others--does a sincere longing for a relationship with God akin to hyper-religiosity/scrupulosity correlate with insecure attachment to one's caregivers? (I see this as different from a lower-demand, less seeking-focused faith that I assume is commonly passed on by securely attached believers). My four securely-attached teens and young adults are also Dones and don't seem to have any of the yearning for God that defined most of my life.
I’d be curious to know the breakdown of the various religious backgrounds of the Dones. What are they done with?
Do dones include people who have never been religious? The term done seems to imply that but I didn't see any clear assertion to that effect in this breakdown.