A secular wind is blowing across America.
Consider the numbers. Seventeen percent of Americans now claim “none” as their religion, up from 8.2 percent in 1990—a doubling in just over 20 years. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reports that 16.1 percent of Americans are religiously “unaffiliated.” In 2003, according to a Harris Poll, 4 percent of Americans were atheist; in 2006 it was 6 percent; and in 2008, the number was 10 percent—with an additional 9 percent identifying themselves as agnostic. These are the highest rates of secularity ever reported in an American survey.
Irreligion is increasing not because secular people are having more children. Quite the contrary; compared with all religious groups, nonreligious people have the fewest children. Thus, a growing number of people raised with religion have now abandoned it. In the words of the social psychologists Bruce Hunsberger and Robert Altemeyer, the “real story” behind the recent rise of secularism in America is “the growth in apostasy.”
Meet Nathan, a 42-year-old African-American who was raised in Philadelphia but now lives in Alabama, where he is a college professor. For his first 27 years, he was devoted to religion. He attended his family’s Pentecostal church several times a week, prayed constantly, and was so devout that his family called him “little Jesus.” After high school, Nathan attended Oral Roberts University, majoring in church ministry and leadership. During his summers, he went on missions abroad, preaching to anyone who would listen. A master of both Old and New Testaments, a man of God, a convinced believer—Nathan’s life was his faith, his church, and his Bible.
Then came the doubts and the questions. Nathan believed in God’s power to heal, but one day it finally occurred to him that he had never actually seen proof of miraculous healing. “If God doesn’t heal, then the God of the Bible does not exist,” Nathan told me. “If the God of the Bible does not exist, then I don’t believe in God. It was really that simple.”
Apostates like Nathan are rare. But they exist—now more than ever. Over the past three years, I’ve interviewed 87 apostates at length, learning more about why they decided to reject religion.
Such investigation is necessary, given that the social-science literature on apostasy is minimal. As the sociologist Stan Albrecht has noted, “religious leave-taking has received far less attention than has religious conversion.” However, some things are clear from the few studies that have appeared. Apostasy rates are higher among men than women; apostates are more likely to lean left politically than nonapostates; and apostates tend to be better educated and more likely to describe themselves as having an intellectual orientation than their religious peers are.
That men are more likely to become apostates aligns well with a much broader pattern: Men tend to be less religious than women. This may be the result of genetic or physiological predispositions, patterns of childhood socialization, or different levels of wealth, power, status, agency, or prestige. As for apostasy being strongly correlated with left-leaning political views, this too conforms with a broader trend: Secular people are less likely to support the death penalty, the war in Iraq, and the use of torture, and are more likely to support Democratic candidates, women’s equality, and gay rights. Does rejecting religion make people liberals, or is it the other way around—does holding liberal values lead people to become apostates? Or are both caused by some third, as-yet-unidentified factor? We can’t be sure, but it seems plausible that people who question their religion will be more comfortable questioning what the sociologist Peter L. Berger called “official versions of reality.”
As for the connection between apostasy and intellectualism, this pattern is also consistent with a large body of research showing that higher education is positively correlated with atheism and irreligion. It’s difficult to maintain a strong belief in religion after learning about the social construction of religion, the history of religious development, and the inability of many religious claims to be scientifically verified. Also, attending college often means meeting people with different views, which can undermine one’s allegiance to a religious ideal. Furthermore, college can be a time away from family and childhood friends, thereby loosening social bonds that otherwise might keep tendencies toward apostasy in check.
While the above research is important, it does have its shortcomings. First, nearly all of the studies published on apostasy over the past 50 years are based on samples made up solely of college students. Second, the majority of studies are based on survey data, wherein people answer short questions by checking a box or filling in a bubble. Such survey data can be informative. But the answers tend to be shallow and truncated. Apostasy is a story, and stories aren’t amenable to surveys. For most people, their apostasy is larger, more colorful, more personal, and often more complex than can be captured or measured by a short questionnaire. Hence the importance of qualitative data to augment and deepen the existing survey data.
The people I interviewed come from various parts of the country, range in age from late teens to late 70s, and represent a diversity of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds. Of course, my approach is not without its methodological shortcomings. Some people may inadvertently reconstruct events or embellish memories. Others may not know why they are apostates; if Freud taught us anything, it is that we are not always completely aware of our own motives.
So what did I learn?
Religion is not universal or necessary. Many people live without religion—in fact, prefer it that way. That bald fact strongly counters the notion that people—as people—are intrinsically religious or that religion is inextricable from the human condition. That might seem obvious, yet some scholars continue to write about religion as an inevitable force. Paul Froese, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, calls religion an “essential aspect of the human condition.” Beliefs about God, he continues, “lie at the core of human understanding,” and religion is universal and essentially unalterable. Reginald W. Bibby, a sociologist at the University of Lethbridge, describes religion as one of the “essential needs” of humanity, like food. The existence and recent increase in apostasy renders such notions highly suspect.
What are apostates like, as people? For one thing, they are courageous. “There is a bravery,” writes the mathematician John Allen Paulos, “associated with disbelief and honest doubt.” For many individuals, their loss of faith was frightening, emotionally and psychologically. It takes nerve to openly reject something that is important to family and friends. The apostates I met are also keenly moral: Those who have rejected religion still desire a world of fairness, kindness, goodness, and justice. Finally, apostates are life-lovers—or at least strong life-appreciators. They either don’t believe in an afterlife, or they don’t worry too much about it. Instead they focus on the here and now, deriving joy, emotional sustenance, and individual purpose by engaging in this world and appreciating the time they have on earth.
Will more people reject religion in the years ahead? Yes, I think so. The proportion of Americans disassociating themselves from religion has been swelling, unabated, since the 1990s. And even though surveys today reveal a general dislike of atheists among the American people, greater acceptance appears to be imminent, as evidenced by President Obama’s inaugural speech, in which he described the United States as a nation of “Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and nonbelievers.” That was the first time that an American president had ever acknowledged the existence of nonbelievers in such a public forum. The increasing acceptance of nonreligious Americans will make apostasy a much easier choice for people in the future.
Additionally, the mushrooming of atheist and secular-humanist groups around the country will serve as a source of encouragement for people who lose their faith and seek a group of like-minded people for social support and intellectual pollination. I am also certain that the Internet will play a crucial role. In the past, if someone—especially someone living in a religious part of the country—felt his or her faith evaporating, or an alienation from religion growing, he or she would usually have to navigate this potentially difficult process alone. But with the Internet, one can connect to others in similar straits, sharing ideas, discussing, debating on countless Web sites devoted to spreading and supporting secularism.
I would not, however, go so far as to predict an imminent or irreversible wave of apostasy resulting in widespread secularization. A decline in religiosity is by no means inevitable. While the factors that might contribute to increased secularization are numerous, so too are those that could just as easily spark a resurgence of religiosity. For instance, if the potential ravages of global warming begin to manifest themselves with greater frequency, if the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, if more and more Americans lack decent jobs, adequate health care, and good child and elder care, and if the economy tanks for significant stretches—in short, if life in the decades ahead becomes harder and more precarious for most Americans—then apostasy will remain uncommon. After all, religion is one of the great sources of psychological comfort and social solidarity in times of widespread insecurity.
Apostasy is a persistent social reality—and has been for thousands of years. Today it is more common than ever. Many men and women find that life is better, freer, richer, and more honest without faith in God or involvement with religion. Such individuals are not sociopathic, maladjusted, or unnatural. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner our understanding of the human condition will improve.
