What do you believe? (2024)

“In God We Trust” may be the official motto of the United States, but religious belief in the country appears to be on the decline.

The Pew Research Center found that 4% of American adults identified as atheists and 5% as agnostics in 2018 and 2019, compared with 2% atheists and 3% agnostics in 2009. Another 17% of Americans described their religion as “nothing in particular” in the survey, up from 12% in 2009 (Pew Research Center, 2019).

Polls may underestimate the true number of nonbelievers, since atheists often face stigma and may be reluctant to identify themselves, says Will Gervais, PhD, an evolutionary and cultural psychologist at the University of Kentucky. His analysis suggests the true prevalence of atheism may be closer to 26%, and is almost certainly greater than 11% (Social Psychological and Personality Science, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2018).

Despite the rising numbers, atheists and agnostics aren’t well understood. For all the research on religion and spirituality, the systematic study of nonbelievers has only taken off in the last 10 or 15 years. “For a hundred years, [psychologists] have been looking at belief mostly through the lens of Protestant Christianity,” says Miguel Farias, PhD, a professor of psychology and head of the Brain, Belief and Behaviour group at Coventry University in England. “It’s only recently that we realized there are all these people we haven’t really looked at. To actually look at belief, we must take into account all the variety of things that atheists or agnostics might believe.”

With that shift, researchers have begun painting a clearer picture of the psychology of nonbelief. And though atheists still encounter prejudice in religious nations such as the United States, much of the evidence suggests that nonbelievers and believers might not be so different after all.

Analytic atheists?

Nonbelief comes in many varieties. Technically, an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a god, while an agnostic is someone who doesn’t believe it’s possible to know for sure that a god exists. It’s possible to be both—an agnostic atheist doesn’t believe but also doesn’t think we can ever know whether a god exists. A gnostic atheist, on the other hand, believes with certainty that a god does not exist.

Yet nonbelievers often use these terms imprecisely—and many people who lack belief in a god don’t favor labels at all. Farias co-authored a report of the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional Understanding Unbelief research program, a three-year project to explore nonbelief in Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The team found only a fraction of nonbelievers used the terms “atheist” or “agnostic,” often preferring terms like “nonreligious,” “spiritual but not religious,” “secular,” “humanist” or “freethinker.” In the United States, for example, just 39% of people who said they don’t believe in God described themselves as atheists (Understanding Unbelief, University of Kent, 2019).

Despite the fuzzy definitions, researchers are beginning to home in on the factors that influence whether someone believes. Some prominent and outspoken atheists, such as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, PhD, have famously argued that anyone with keen critical thinking skills should reject religion. According to this line of thinking, people with stronger analytical abilities are more likely to be nonbelievers, since belief in a higher power requires having faith in something that can’t be proven. The flip side of that argument is that believers may be more inclined toward intuitive thinking—trusting their guts that a god exists, even in the absence of hard evidence.

Back in 2012, Gervais was one of several researchers who published results suggesting analytic thinking was associated with atheism (Science, Vol. 336, No. 6080, 2012). However, newer research casts doubt on the idea that analytical thinking leads people to reject religion. “The current picture is a lot more nuanced,” Gervais says.

Farias, for example, looked at analytic versus intuitive thinking in two different populations: a culturally and religiously diverse group of people on a spiritual pilgrimage route in Spain, and adults from the general population in the United Kingdom. In both groups, the researchers found no association between intuitive thinking and religious belief. In a related experiment, Farias used neurostimulation to enhance participants’ cognitive inhibition, or their ability to stop intuitive thoughts and impulsive behaviors. If belief is associated with intuitive thinking, ramping up cognitive inhibition should make people more skeptical of supernatural belief. But the researchers found that reducing cognitive inhibition had no effect on religious or spiritual beliefs (Nature Scientific Reports, Vol. 7, Article 15100, 2017).

“These experiments suggest there is no association between analytical thinking and atheism or agnosticism,” Farias says.

Other findings have bolstered that conclusion. Looking beyond the United States, Gervais and colleagues drew on a global sample from more than 13 diverse societies to explore the connection between belief and cognitive reflection, the tendency to override gut reactions and reflect on problems. They found that cognitive reflection was associated with atheism in only three countries: Australia, Singapore and the United States. And even in those countries where the association held up, the relationship was modest (Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2018). “Popular [modern] atheist discourse trumpets how rational and analytical they are, [but that’s] not really supported by our best science,” Gervais says.

Though atheists might not be inherently analytical, there’s evidence that some might embrace a scientific worldview. Since religious people often turn to their beliefs to cope with stress and anxiety, Farias wondered if, during times of stress, nonbelievers might put their faith in science instead. He compared two groups of competitive rowers, one group about to engage in a high-stress competition and the other in a low-stress training session. Both groups tested low in religiosity, but rowers in the high-stress group reported a stronger belief in science than rowers in the low-stress group. In a second experiment, Farias primed people to think about their own mortality—a scenario that often prompts people to defend their belief systems. The primed group, too, reported greater belief in science than a control group.

Together, these findings suggest that science, like religion, can provide a source of personal meaning (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 49, No. 6, 2013). “In some countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., science has become godlike in a way,” Farias says.

Other research also suggests nonbelievers may find meaning in science and nature. A study led by Jesse L. Preston, PhD, at the University of Warwick in England, found that while religious people were likely to cite religious events as a source of spirituality, nonbelievers reported spiritual experiences related to nature, science, meditation or so-called “peak” experiences (such as riding a motorcycle or using psychedelic drugs). Though the sources of spirituality differed, both religious and nonreligious people derived feelings of awe from the experiences (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 70, No. 1, 2017).

Religion and health

Atheists may find moments of spirituality on a mountain hike or a roller coaster ride, but are those experiences as beneficial as religion? A large body of research indicates that belonging to religious organizations and attending religious services are associated with better health.

“The logical implication of that research is that if religion is good, then atheists should be less healthy—but we don’t find that,” says David Speed, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. Using data from the 2008 General Social Survey, a large survey of a representative sample of U.S. adults, Speed compared people who did and didn’t believe in God and found both groups had similar levels of self-reported health. Notably, though, staunch atheists experienced religiosity more negatively than believers. When people who said they did not believe in God reported atypically high participation in religious events (such as people who participated because of family or social pressure), they reported worse health overall (Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2016).

“This suggests that there’s not an intrinsic benefit to religious attendance or prayer. You have to have the right mindset to be getting the benefits,” Speed says.

When it comes to health benefits, belief might be less important than all the things that go along with participating in organized religion, say Speed and Luke Galen, PhD, a professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Reviewing the literature on the benefits of religious belief, Galen found that most benefits of religiosity can be ascribed to factors such as social engagement and being a member of a supportive social network. Just as religious people benefit from affiliating with a religious group, atheists who participate in like-minded groups, such as humanist organizations or atheist alliances, experience greater well-being (Science, Religion & Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2015).

“It’s not the religious belief that’s the special sauce. It’s simply being a member in a supportive group of like-minded people,” he says.

Some of Galen’s other work suggests that having strong convictions about your worldview may be more important than what you believe. He found that both religious believers and atheists who were confident in their beliefs reported greater overall well-being than those who were unsure or confused about their belief in God (Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Vol. 14, No. 7, 2011).

“The people in the middle of the curve might have a certain amount of distress or anxiety related to the lack of coherence in their worldview,” he says.

Meaning within

Good health isn’t the only positive outcome attributed to religion. Research also suggests that religious belief is linked to prosocial behaviors such as volunteering and donating to charity.

But as with health benefits, Galen’s work suggests such prosocial benefits have more to do with general group membership than with religious belief or belonging to a specific religious group (Social Indicators Research, Vol. 122, No. 2, 2015). In fact, he says, while religious people are more likely to volunteer or give to charitable causes related to their beliefs, atheists appear to be more generous to a wider range of causes and dissimilar groups.

Nevertheless, atheists and other nonbelievers still face considerable stigma, and are often perceived as less moral than their religious counterparts. In a study across 13 countries, Gervais and colleagues found that people in most countries intuitively believed that extreme moral violations (such as murder and mutilation) were more likely to be committed by atheists than by religious believers. This anti-atheist prejudice also held true among people who identified as atheists, suggesting that religious culture exerts a powerful influence on moral judgments, even among non­believers (Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 1, Article 0151, 2017).

Yet nonreligious people are similar to religious people in a number of ways. In the Understanding Unbelief project, Farias and colleagues found that across all six countries they studied, both believers and nonbelievers cited family and freedom as the most important values in their own lives and in the world more broadly. The team also found evidence to counter a common assumption that atheists believe life has no purpose. They found the belief that the universe is “ultimately meaningless” was a minority view among non­believers in each country.

“People assume that [non­believers] have very different sets of values and ideas about the world, but it looks like they probably don’t,” Farias says.

For the nonreligious, however, meaning may be more likely to come from within than from above. Again drawing on data from the General Social Survey, Speed and colleagues found that in the United States, atheists and the religiously unaffiliated were no more likely to believe that life is meaningless than were people who were religious or raised with a religious affiliation. However, atheists and the religiously unaffiliated were more likely to believe that meaning is self-produced (SAGE Open, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2018).

“There’s no [higher power] telling them to love their families or to work hard or to be a good person, but they seem to arrive at very similar conclusions,” Speed says.

Neither believers nor non­believers can claim the moral high ground, Gervais adds. “If you zoom out, religions might have been instrumental in cementing large-scale cooperation [over the course of human history]. Zooming in, it’s actually the most secular countries on Earth right now that are doing the best job taking care of their most vulnerable, not being violent and doing other things that seem moral,” he says. “So, it’s messy, but we can say quite confidently that the intuitive association between religion and morality is a lot stronger than any actual relationship.”

In the United States, a nation where religious traditions run deep, there’s a lot left to learn about nonbelievers. And there’s good reason to try, given that belief exists at “the intersection of culture, evolution and cognition,” Gervais says. “Religion is a core aspect of human nature, and any scientific explanation of religion needs to understand atheism.”

Special Issue: Atheism, Agnosticism, and Nonreligious Worldviews
Hood, R.W., Jr., et al. (Eds.), Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2018

Atheists
Schiavone, S.R., & Gervais, W.M., Social & Personality Psychology Compass, 2017

Understanding Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics Around the World
Bullivant, S., et al., University of Kent, 2019