The Nones Project: What Do They Believe?

Heaven, hell, ghosts, crystals, nirvana, etc.

There are three facets to measuring religiosity — belief, behavior, and belonging. I think those last two are actually pretty easy to measure. We ask you how often you attend religious services, and you just do a little mental math and come up with a decent estimate of frequency. When we ask, “What’s your present affiliation, if any?” you can just scan through the choices and pick one like Protestant, Muslim, or atheist.

The belief one is a bit trickier, though. That’s what I hear all the time when I show people a typical survey question about their belief in God, for instance. They look over the response options, grimace a bit, and say something like, “None of those really do a good job of describing my belief in God.” There’s this reluctance to put our beliefs in a tidy little box on a survey.

In our Making Meaning Survey, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Tony Jones and I tried our best to come at the belief dimension of religiosity from a number of angles. We started by mimicking a question about belief in God from the General Social Survey. It simply asks: For the following, please select the statement that best describes your view on 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.

I know that some of you (or likely all of you) don’t love these five choices. But guess what? It’s the best we can do.

Here’s how the Four Types of Nones responded to this question in our survey.

For those of you who have been following along with The Nones Project, I think it should come as no surprise that the Nones in Name Only (NiNos) clearly express the strongest belief in God. In fact, about half of them indicate that they do not doubt God’s existence. In contrast, just 5% of NiNos indicate an atheist or agnostic viewpoint. This is another piece of evidence supporting the fact that a huge chunk of the non-religious are actually quite religious.

For the Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNRs), the plurality answer is the one that I think a lot of us would have guessed — they don’t believe in a personal God, but they do believe in some Higher Power. Forty-three percent of SBNRs gave that response. But nearly the same share (40%) chose the atheist or agnostic option. Certainly, belief in God was the least likely to be chosen at just 5%.

For the Zealous Atheists and the Dones, these responses also comport with how we’ve conceptualized their belief systems. The most popular response for the Zealous Atheists was “God doesn’t exist” at 42%, and the Dones were just slightly higher at 49%. However, Dones were significantly more likely to indicate that they had an agnostic view compared to ZAs (42% vs. 26%). But both groups are typified by a very small share who believe in God.

But we moved beyond a simple belief in God to a bunch of other topics like heaven, hell, ghosts, miracles, the power of prayer, and healing crystals. The heatmap below indicates the share of each of the four types who said “definitely yes” about their belief in the existence of these options.

Again, the NiNos are just a huge outlier here in every possible way. Among the 11 options presented in this belief battery, the NiNos were the most likely to believe in every single one of them — and often by a very wide margin. For instance, 42% of NiNos said that they believed in angels. That was 34 points higher than SBNRs and 41 points higher than Dones. There were really only two options that did not elicit much belief among NiNos: nirvana and healing crystals, at 10% and 20% respectively.

What’s also really striking is how the Spiritual But Not Religious crowd didn’t express much belief in all kinds of “new age” stuff. For instance, just 6% said that they believed in the power of healing crystals, and 8% believed in angels. In fact, the only two items where sure belief reached double digits were ghosts and the afterlife.

What about the last two categories of Zealous Atheists and Dones? Well, it should come as little surprise that neither group believed in much. Only ghosts and reincarnation cracked double digits among ZAs. But among the Dones, there’s essentially no belief here. Ghosts were the most popular, and even then just 5% believed. Many options scored 0% for the Dones.

Here’s a fun little aside, though: I was wondering if some of the nones believed in heaven but didn’t really believe in hell.

For NiNos, about half said that they believed in both, while only 7% said that they believed in neither. For SBNRs, just 14% said that Heaven and Hell both existed, while a much larger share (37%) doubted the existence of both. For the ZAs, a majority said that neither existed, and for Dones it was nearly all of them (81%) who did not believe in Heaven or Hell.

But here’s what may be the bigger upshot for me on this — look at the bottom-right corner of each heatmap. That’s folks who said that Heaven existed but Hell did not. That was not a popular option at all. Among the NiNos, it was 7% of that subgroup. But in the other groups, it was an incredibly marginal belief at 2% or less. Even if you throw in the “unsure” option, I don’t get the impression that a lot of nones want to believe in the “good side” of the afterlife without also believing in the bad side.

Speaking of the afterlife, we did include a series of statements that asked respondents to consider where they go when they shuffle off this mortal coil.

These bars clearly cascade exactly like we would expect them to: the NiNos have the strongest sense of something happening after their life ends, and the Dones are the least likely to believe in any type of afterlife. About three-quarters of the NiNos believe that “when I die my spirit/energy lives on.” That’s a sentiment shared by a majority of the SBNRs, too. However, look at the Dones. Just 16% believe that their spirit will live on, while 58% disagree with that statement.

I do think it’s noteworthy how large shares of SBNRs seem really unsure about the afterlife, though. Forty-three percent are unsure if “when I die, I will go to a place of peace,” and a majority of them couldn’t commit to this statement: “When I die, I will reunite with a higher power.” There just seems to be a whole lot of ambivalence there about what happens upon death.

For the Dones (and to a lesser extent the Zealous Atheists), they think this is it — when you die, you become worm dirt. A huge share of Dones agreed that “when I die, my existence ends” — 77%. It may be even more stunning that only 7% of Dones disagreed with that statement. For ZAs, 54% agreed and 19% disagreed. Still decidedly tilted toward annihilation, but not so lopsided.

But we tried to move away from just assessing more traditional religious belief metrics by including a battery of questions that played a central role in Secular Surge by Campbell, Layman, and Green. They devised a “secularism scale” that tried to understand to what extent the nones embraced a worldview that focuses on science, reason, and rationality. Here’s how the four types of nones responded to each of these positive statements of secularism.

These results look exactly like what I would have guessed before I built this graph. The NiNos are undoubtedly the least likely to embrace secular ideas. That’s true across all five statements from this battery. However, I do need to make this point clear — a majority of the NiNos do embrace these statements about secularism. For instance, 53% agreed that “all of the greatest advances for humanity have come from science and technology.” The same share agreed that “factual evidence from the natural world is the source of true beliefs.”

I was also really struck by the level of agreement with the statement at the bottom of the graph — “When I make important decisions in my life, I rely mostly on reason and evidence.” Among the nones, this receives very strong support: 74% among the NiNos but 92% among the Dones. This is pretty compelling evidence to me that the non-religious have embraced a largely secular worldview, even if some of them still tend toward beliefs in more traditionally religious ideas.

Then, there were three statements that were written in a more negative orientation toward religion.

The results here make me hedge a little bit on the previous findings, but not by that much. One thing that jumps out is that a majority of NiNos agreed that “what we believe is right and wrong cannot be based only on human knowledge.” But even among the other three types of nones, there was quite a bit of uncertainty. Only a small majority of Dones (54%) clearly disagreed with that statement.

But then the top statement — “It is hard to live a good life based on reason and facts alone” — points to a pretty clear divide in the non-religious. Among the Dones, two-thirds disagreed with that idea. For the NiNos, it was only 29%. I just don’t get a strong impression from these last two sets of questions that a huge majority of nones have embraced a clearly secular and rationalistic worldview.

I do this kind of work a lot, and here’s where I’m at on belief metrics right now: very few Americans (religious or not) actually have a coherent, consistent, and easily articulated belief system. Most people don’t draw “bright lines” in their minds. They engage in situational ethics on a nearly daily basis. That seems to be the case with the non-religious.

Yes, the NiNos tend toward a more traditional religious understanding of the world, and the Dones are much more likely to embrace secularism. But it’s more of a continuum than discrete buckets of belief. Human beings are messy. Belief systems change. We are human, after all.

Code for this post can be found here.