We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Questions About Leaving Religion

What was the religious composition of their household? Did they leave religion quickly or slowly? Why did they leave?

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One organization that I have worked with quite a bit in the last couple of years is The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). After a podcast interview I did with them a few months ago, the possibility of doing a survey was floated and I was obviously eager to get to work on a project like that. Together with my friend and collaborator Paul Djupe, we discussed with FFRF some ideas on how to use data to understand the growing number of non-religious Americans.

We settled on two different pieces of data collection.

1. A random sample survey of non-religious Americans using the Qualtrics platform. We ended up putting together a survey that was fielded in the Summer of 2024 and yielded a total of 2,406 responses.

2. A survey of the members of FFRF. This would be sent out to them via email and they could choose to take the instrument or not. A lot of questions that were asked via Qualtrics were then replicated in the FFRF membership survey. That collected over 11,000 responses.

There is so much that we can do with this. Today, all I am going to show you is some interesting results from the Qualtrics survey. In future articles, I am going to analyze the differences between the general population sample and those members of FFRF.

I am just scratching the surface of what is possible with this instrument and I hope that this serves as a way to begin some interesting conversations about non-religious Americans and helps to clear up some misconceptions about the nones.

The first question battery was focused on the family circumstances of those who were currently non-religious. I wanted to break this down by age to see if younger nones were more likely to be raised in a non-religious household compared to older nones.

About two thirds of nones who were between the ages of 18 and 34 years old said that they were raised with at least one sibling who was also not religious. It was basically the same percentage of nones between 35-54 years old. The big deviation were the oldest nones - only about half of them had a non-religious sibling. But, it’s still pretty striking that a significant majority of nones had a non-religious brother or sister considering that about 30% of the general population is non-religious. It points to the fact that if one member of a household is non-religious that makes it more likely for another member to also be a none.

In terms of mother vs father being non-religious, there’s no real age difference that needs to be considered. But what is striking is this - current nones are much more likely to say that their father was non-religious compared to their mother. Nearly half of respondents said that their father was a none, it was only about a third who said that their mother was non-religious. Also, it’s worth pointing out the bottom right graph - about a third of nones say that they are the only none in their family and that doesn’t vary much by age.

There was a section of the survey in which we gave the respondents a big list of possible labels that they would use to describe themselves. Many of them are prevalent in the non-religious community. The most popular moniker that were chosen by folks in the survey was ‘freethinker’ - about a third of the sample checked that box. Then, there were several clustered between 25-30%. That included ‘atheist’, ‘agnostic’ and ‘spiritual’. The terms that didn’t score so high were interesting and worth some reflection. Very few nones want to be described as ‘humanist’ (15%), and even fewer said that they were ‘secular’ (9%).

But can I just say how struck I am by how none of this labels scores very high? It’s striking to me that the one that got chosen the most ‘freethinker’ was only selected by one in three nones. That means that this is a group that actively rejects labels of any kind, really. Of course they don’t say that they are ‘religious’ (5%), but three quarters of them did not say that they were ‘spiritual’ either. This is why it’s hard to talk about this community. It’s so incredibly amorphous.

What about this question - how old were you when you left religion? I will admit that methodologically these questions are tricky. If someone is 35 years old today and they left religion behind in their early forties, we can’t capture this on surveys because it hasn’t happen yet. So, something like this is always going to be biased toward people who became nones earlier in their life. With that in mind - here’s what the data looks like.

Less than five percent of the sample reported that they had left religion between birth and 10 years old. But, then the numbers begin to ramp up pretty quickly. About 40% of the sample left religion by their 16th birthday. The share of non-religious people who left religion behind before their 18th birthday was just over half (52%).

But there’s a really crucial period that I note in the graph above - it’s between 15 and 25 years old. In this ten year window of time, just over half of the sample left religion behind. In total, about three quarters of nones said that they became nones between birth and their 25th birthday. So think of it like this:

• About a quarter of people leave between birth and 14 years old.

• Another quarter leave between 15 and 18 years old.

• Another quarter by their 25th birthday.

• And the rest are after 25 years old.

In other words, if people leave religion, half do it as children, and three quarters are gone by their mid-twenties.

We also tried to figure out if this was an abrupt break or if they just slowly drifted away from a religious tradition. They were given the option to describe the process as very slow, somewhat slow, somewhat quick, or very quick.

What I am fairly surprised about is how the vast majority of nones describe the process as quick. It was at least two-thirds of nones who chose somewhat or very quick. However, it is worth pointing out that about 43% of nones between the ages of 18 and 54 year olds say that it was very quick, it was ten points lower among the oldest nones.

But, make no mistake, this sample of nones left in a pretty dramatic way. It’s hard to square this with the fact that about half of nones left before their 18th birthday. Maybe they were aware of the political and cultural views of their faith tradition at an early age and that caused them to walk away as teenagers, but it’s hard to know for certain with this data.

Finally, we gave them a bunch of different reasons why someone could leave religion behind. They could check as many boxes as they wanted.

The most popular reason by a significant margin was “religious hypocrisy.” About 42% of the sample chose that reason for leaving. That was seven points higher than the second most popular - “religion doesn’t make sense.” That was chosen by 35% of the sample. The only other response that scored above 30% was religious bigotry (31%).

What didn’t really register with this group? “I moved away and just never went back.” Only about one in ten nones chose this one. Less than ten percent said that reading the Bible led them away from religion and even fewer indicated that “reading skeptical authors” was a catalyst for them to no longer be religious.

But, again, it’s important to point out that there’s not one single check box that describes most of the reason why people leave religion behind. The most popular option did not crack fifty percent of the sample. Many of these were only chosen by a quarter of respondents.

This is what makes social science fun - the group that we are trying to describe doesn’t really seem to like labels and doesn’t seem too keen on picking one (or more than one) reason why they left a religious tradition behind. One thing I have to constantly remind myself of is the fact that other people don’t think about religion as much as I do. For some, it’s an incredibly marginal part of their life. I think for many it’s not even considered on most days.

Thus, it makes sense why these survey results aren’t often as “clean” as we want them to be. There’s not a really strong signal amidst all the noise. And that’s probably okay. Sometimes things don’t fit into neat boxes. But it would be a lot easier if they did!

Code for this post can be found here.