The Nones Project: Well Being

One of the most important questions we are trying to answer in The Nones Project is: Do non-religious people have feelings of self-worth and satisfaction that are similar to traditionally religious Americans? In many ways, this may be the most important issue to address when talking about the rising share of nones in the United States.

I’ve had many people say to me, “If those atheists and agnostics are living lives of meaning and hope, then all those Christians out there just need to leave them alone.” Or, sometimes I hear the opposite: “There’s no way the nones have a life of peace and satisfaction that is on par with people of faith. If they don’t have a personal relationship with God, their mental health is going to struggle.”

These perspectives are certainly strongly held by a vocal number of people online, and we felt like it was our job to try and understand just what was going on with concepts like self-worth, optimism, purpose, and life satisfaction.

One simple question we added was, “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” They were given a total of seven response options that ranged from completely dissatisfied to completely satisfied. Here’s the average score for each of the four types of nones, as well as the Protestants and the Catholics in the sample.

The most apparent result from this graph is that Christians do express a demonstrably higher level of life satisfaction compared to the non-religious in the sample. On the scale from 1-7, both Catholics and Protestants scored an average of 5.2. That’s just slightly above “somewhat satisfied.”

Among the nones, the group that was clearly the most satisfied were the Nones in Name Only (NiNos) at 5.0. Slightly below that were the Dones at 4.85, then the SBNRs at 4.75. The group that easily scored the lowest of all four types were the Zealous Atheists at 4.57.

There’s a lot to talk about here. Notice how the Dones, despite their almost complete abandonment of religion, did not score the lowest on this metric.They were about a quarter of a point lower than Protestants or Catholics. But compare that with the Zealous Atheists (remember those are folks who have tried to convince someone to leave religion in the prior year). The ZAs are over a quarter of a point lower than the Dones. It seems like the Dones have come to terms with their lack of religion, while the Zealous Atheists are still actively fighting those battles.

While calculating the mean on a question like this, I thought it would be wise to do another calculation — the share of each group who chose “quite satisfied” (6) or “completely satisfied” (7). That gives us a good sense of who is feeling really good about the state of their lives right now.

Here, the overall impression is a bit different than the prior calculation. We see that about half of Christians express a great deal of satisfaction with the state of their lives. But then look at where the Dones end up in the graph compared to the prior one. When calculating mean scores of satisfaction, they were clearly behind Roman Catholics, Protestants and the NiNos. That’s not true in this case, though. Now they are neck-and-neck with the NiNos. In fact, they are also statistically tied with the Protestants.

If you grew up in an evangelical church, it was just assumed that people who have no capacity for religion or spirituality must be suffering. Their lives were a mess, obviously. But this data casts serious doubts on that. Among folks who never pray, never attend church, and almost uniformly say that religion or spirituality has no importance, they are essentially just as likely to be satisfied with their lives as Christians.

But before we move on, I need to point out a consistency in these first two sets of graphs. Zealous Atheists always score at the bottom of the list. And it’s not even close in some of these cases. They are, without a doubt, the group that is struggling the most. You will see more of that in the analysis to come.

Beyond that single question, we pulled a whole bunch of questions from the Monitoring the Future Survey of American high school students. It’s always been really good at including provocative statements about how people feel about themselves and their place in the world.

Here’s the share of each religious group that agreed with four statements that were generally positive in nature.

The one overarching conclusion here is that the gap between the Christians and nones isn’t that large across all four of these statements. I just don’t get a strong impression that Catholics and Protestants are significantly more likely to agree with positive life assessments compared to the non-religious. The data does seem to put the Christians on top, but only by a few percentage points in most cases.

For instance, 85% of Protestants and 80% of Catholics agreed that, “I feel I am a person of worth.” For NiNos it was 81%. The Dones were at 78% and the SBNRs were at 77%. Note that the group that was clearly the lowest was the Zealous Atheists at just 71%. That’s a rock solid finding from all this work - the Zealous Atheists are not doing well.

I do want to point out that in the statement, “It feels good to be alive,” there’s a clear dividing point. Christians and NiNos all scored between 86% and 88%. The other three types of nones are basically stuck around 75%. There’s also that same basic pattern on “I take a positive attitude toward myself” with the top group being around 75% and the bottom three types of nones about ten points lower than that.

What about a series of statements that were negative in their approach?

On all four of these, we see that the Zealous Atheists are clearly at the top of the graph. For instance, 31% of the ZAs agreed with the statement, “I feel that my life is not very useful.” That’s basically ten percentage points higher than any other type of none. It’s also 13 percentage points higher than the two Christian groups in the sample. The Zealous Atheists were the most likely to say that “I feel that I can’t do anything right” (27%), that “life often seems meaningless” (37%) and “the future often seems hopeless” (32%).

But beyond the overall finding that Zealous Atheists are really struggling compared to the rest of the sample, I don’t look over these numbers and come away with the impression that the other types of nones are really having a hard time with feelings of uselessness and pessimism. About a quarter of NiNos, Dones, and SBNRs say that the future is hopeless. Among Catholics and Protestants, it’s about 2-3 points less.

But I wanted to try and give the most comprehensive look at this data possible. So here’s what I did. I used all 13 questions from the Monitoring the Future Battery. Five were written in a positive direction (“I enjoy life as much as anyone”) and eight were written in a negative direction (“I feel that I can’t do anything right.”) For the positive statements, strong agreement was coded as +2, agreement was coded as +1, no opinion was 0, disagreement was -1 and strong disagreement was -2. For the negative statements, the scale went in the opposite direction.

I generated scores for every respondent and then normalized those scores from 0 (meaning doing very poorly) to 100 (meaning doing well). Here’s the distribution of scores along with the mean for all six groups that we’ve talked about above.

The mean score for Protestants in the sample was 71.5 and for Roman Catholics it was only slightly lower at 71.1. Those scores are statistically and substantively the same. It’s interesting to see that the largest concentrations of Protestants were found right around the 100 mark, too. For Catholics, there was a really strong bunch of them at 80/100 and above. We just can’t say if Protestants have more well-being than Catholics, though, on average.

But then notice how close both NiNos and the Dones are to the Christians in the top row. The mean score for NiNos was 69.2 and the Dones were right behind at 69.1. Those are essentially the same score. But they are also only 2 points lower than the Christians. Just ruminate on that a little bit — a Done scores 69/100 on well-being. A Protestant scores at 71.5. That certainly will come as a surprise to many.

The SBNRs are noticeably lower than the Dones at 65.9. The issue there is that very few of them scored close to 100 on this index. Their biggest portion of respondents was in the 75 to 90 range. But look at those Zealous Atheists. The overall average score was just 62 out of 100. That’s seven points lower than the Dones and the NiNos and about ten points lower than the Christians. And notice where the bar is the highest for them, right around 40/100. That’s the only group where the tallest bar is so low in the distribution.

There’s a lot here, so a few takeaways:

1. Christians do seem to express a slightly higher level of life satisfaction compared to the nones. But the difference there is marginal from a real-world perspective.

2. It does seem the case that Christians are slightly more likely to agree with positive statements about their self-worth and optimism compared to the nones. They are also slightly more likely to disagree with negative statements.

3. But what we consistently find in this data is that the Zealous Atheists score the lowest of any of the four types of nones - sometimes by a very wide margin.

4. Meanwhile, the group that is the furthest from traditional religion and spirituality (the Dones) don’t seem to be doing demonstrably worse on these metrics compared to Christian groups. They do score lower on some of these questions, but the numerical gap is actually quite small.

I’m glad I’m not a theologian, because there are so many questions that will need to be wrestled with based on these findings. I’ve often heard members of the secular committee say, “We are good without God.” And, generally speaking, I think that’s a fairly true statement for many of them.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.