ReligionWise

Beyond Belief: Considering the World's Religious "Nones" - Jonathan Evans

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 5 • Episode 3

Share episode

The religiously unaffiliated, often called "nones", represent one of the fastest-growing segments of populations across North America, Europe, and beyond. Jonathan Evans, Senior Researcher at Pew Research Center and lead author of a groundbreaking 22-country study, joins us to discuss surprising findings about what "nones" believe, how they practice (or don't), and what their growth means for religious life around the world.

Show Notes:

Send us a text

Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host, Chip Gruen. I'm super excited about today's episode. It features Jonathan Evans, who is a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, about their recent report entitled 'Many Religious Nones Around the World Hold Spiritual Beliefs', that was released in just September of this year, in 2025 so if you're a longtime listener to religion wise, you know this is a question that we've addressed on a few occasions. And I think, as I refer to in this conversation, that this is a very 21st Century question about religious affiliation, about people with a lack of religious affiliation, and I wanted to have Jonathan on the show to talk about that and to talk about what it means, because what it doesn't mean, as you'll hear him describe, is that there is a total lack of religious belief and practice for people who don't see themselves as religious affiliated. And so we dig into that a little bit, we dig into the questions that surround that and about what that means. I think as we write the story of the late 20th and early 21st Century narrative of religious identity and what's going on religiously in the US and around the world, it's not as if people who lack institutional religious affiliation don't ask the big questions. You know, where did we come from? What does it mean to be human? What is the good life? Etc. Like those are a part of being human, to ask those questions. As it turns out, the correlation between how we answer those questions, and either religious institutions or religious affiliation larger than that don't always neatly match up, and so I really appreciate Jonathan's perspective here on the complexity of how we as humans navigate our world, and how that bears out in the quantitative data that pew collected in this study that happens in a number of different contexts around the world. So with all that being said, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jonathan Evans. As always, if you have ideas for a show or a topic you'd like to hear more about or questions, please reach out to us. And also, if you think what we're doing is useful for the public conversation on religion and is helpful in the public discourse on religion on your favorite podcast app, please go and give us a review and a rating so that we can be even more broadly consumed. Jonathan Evans, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

Jonathan Evans:

Thank you so much for having me.

Chip Gruen:

So before we get started in thinking about the report itself, I was hopeful that you could just give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are, what your role is at Pew Research, and just a little bit about Pew Research in general, for those who aren't familiar with it.

Jonathan Evans:

Certainly, Pew Research Center is an organization where we collect data from surveys and demographic data, all sorts of data sources to then provide analysis for the public. Our goal is to make our data and our analysis available as a public good, because we believe that a foundation of facts is useful for society. So I work on a team that specializes in looking at religion, specifically religion around the world is what I study. But there are folks at the center who also study race and ethnicity, politics, the intersection of science with our daily lives and how people are interacting with new technologies. And so there's a lot of different research beats that are here at the center, and I've been at the center a little over nine years, all of that looking at religion in different contexts. I've been parts of studies where we look at religion and public life in Central and Eastern Europe, for example. Or we did a big survey of religion in India. And then the project we're talking about today is about 36 countries where we surveyed in 2024 all around the world. And yeah, excited to talk about it today.

Chip Gruen:

All right, so let's get right into that report then. So this recent report that you mentioned considers or examines religiously unaffiliated adults, or what we will refer to here as nones. I always, since none is a religious term, I always like to hesitate over that, because it's not 'n u n', the people in the black and white habits, but 'N O N E S', people who say that they have no affiliation. But before we dive into that and we'll think about the sort of the texture of that report itself, can you talk about the methodological challenges of studying religious identity through polling and some of the. Opportunities and limitations for you to get what you're after. You're after this factual base, but that's you know, as as we know from political polling in the last decade, right, that that's not always the easiest thing thing to do. So can you talk a little bit about that confluence?

Jonathan Evans:

Certainly, I can talk about that. Surveys, we find are really useful in studying religion, because they allow people to tell us how they see themselves. They allow us, you know, what religious identity do they use? What do they say that they believe? What do they or how do they practice? What are they doing to be religious or spiritual or not in their lives? And I think it's really important to to do this, because it tells us about them. They are the experts on themselves, and we're asking for how they are practicing and believing. And it's true that there are situations, it's not uncommon, where people will tell us that they have different beliefs or practices that might be considered unorthodox in the faith tradition that they say is their identity. But we rely on this survey data because it allows people to really tell us how they are practicing their faith, and this might be different, yes, from what a set of scriptures or holy texts say, or what a religious leader says people should be doing to be part of this tradition, and allows us to have point estimates for what is the prevalence of this practice or this belief in a society. And at the same time, we acknowledge that surveys, while they are a great tool, they are just one tool for for quality research efforts, so they can't tell us everything. It's really great to pair survey work that we do, it's a lot of what we do at the Pew Research Center, and it's great to pair that with qualitative work from other scholars, other academics, to gain a more full picture. Because when you do qualitative work, when you're doing focus groups, or you're doing in depth interviews, it allows for a lot more nuance, perhaps than we can get in a closed ended like here are your four answer options. Pick one of the four, but we need both to understand what's going on, because we also don't know from a qualitative data collection, how prevalent is this belief or practice? And so the two two sides of things can work really well together. And the times where I've been able to do some qualitative work, it has been very rewarding and useful as well. But like I said, in our closed ended or in our surveys, we frequently are using closed ended answers, because that's how we can tell you, 52% of Americans say this, or 48 Brits say that.

Chip Gruen:

So on that issue of what, what you can get, and some of the method questions, I mean, particularly since you're working across a number of different countries here. So actually, could you straighten something out? In my mind, I've seen the number 36 and 22. So, so this is a study of 36 countries, but there's data from 22. Can you help me with that?

Jonathan Evans:

Certainly, this was part of a larger effort, this report, where we did survey in three dozen countries in 2024 looking at religious beliefs and practices, religious identity, and also we did had some questions about the relationship between church and state, sorts of things like, how involved should religion be in public, in public affairs at the governmental level? So that was three dozen countries. However, as we look to analyze in more detail, the, the nones, the 'N O N E S', we. We only had enough sample in 22 countries to start looking at what they think and feel, because in other places, there's far too few respondents for us to responsibly report on their views. So for example, Turkey, only 3% of Turkish adults said that they are religiously unaffiliated. And so when our sample size in a country is roughly 1000 people, that would end up being far too few respondents for us to responsibly say, okay, then X percent of Turkish nones say this or feel that way or do this practice that wouldn't be responsible. So that's where the 22 versus the 36 comes from.

Chip Gruen:

All right. So on a similar note, then, because you're dealing in these you know, what you're reporting on is the 22 countries, which will have a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. I mean, it is, I think, a common place to talk about how the concept of religion, right? It's a Latin word that has very western style roots, and as we think about belonging and organization, those things are culturally embedded as well. What are the challenges of thinking about this across cultural contexts? I mean, how do we think about your data and the language that you use when you're in a, you know, in Northern Europe versus Latin America versus the US? What have you what are the, you know, the channel, or the challenges, or say, the opportunities you see, and in thinking closely about those sorts of method issues.

Jonathan Evans:

Yeah, methodological concerns really do - they are important as we approach a project like this. It is a lot of different contexts like you, you highlighted, from Northern Europe to Sub Saharan Africa to East Asia, and it, of course, is the case for religion. But it's even more broadly, just any topic that we're asking about in that many cultures and languages can, can lead to some challenges. And so when we conduct our cross national studies with with several dozen countries and lots of languages, we work with local, reputable survey firms. So that's our first step is getting these local firms and they collaborate with us. We, they provide their feedback on questionnaire design and the survey administration. We also consult with linguistic and cultural experts, just to make sure that the questionnaire will be as easy as possible to translate into different languages, because grammar, of course, what works in English, doesn't work say in French or or Hausa or Japanese, and so working to iron out as much of that as possible, even just in the core questionnaire, before it starts getting translated or administered, and then during the translation process, we also, what we do is we work with that same local firm that will end up doing the survey administration, they provide us a translation of it, but then we have a separate, independent translation agency that then goes through the each language and basically reviews it and tells us 'Are There issues with this' and the two sides then have to reach an agreement. Any point where they disagree, they have to reach consensus. And so it does take a lot of effort to make sure that we are getting at the same concepts. While I do not speak the 60 plus languages that these surveys are administered in, there are times where the translators, or the people who are verifying their work will come back to us and say, Well, what is the underlying concept that you're trying to get? There are three words we could use in our language. And here's sort of the definition of the three. Which of these is more aligned? It's like at times we will weigh in when they ask for our guidance. We also, you know, just provide some notes up front, like this is what we're going for, but it's, it's very important to be aware of that. And you touched on just even the regional variation. And, yeah, one of the key findings we do find, I know we'll get to findings a little later, but it's just that being religiously unaffiliated can look very different in different parts of the world. We see majorities of nones in Latin America, in the countries you surveyed there, expressing a belief in God. But it's very different in Europe, where it's, you know, tends to be a quarter or less of the nones who say that they have a belief in God. So there is a lot of regional variation, even after paying attention to all the nuances necessary on the methodological side.

Chip Gruen:

So even beyond the concept of religion, I mean something, as I was reading through the report again and thinking about was the concept of affiliation, right? Which, even that might vary religious tradition to religious tradition. So to say that you're an affiliate of a Catholic church, right? That there are very clear boundary maintenance markers that are there, whereas, if you're a adherent to, I don't know, an Evangelical Church, just to stay within Christianity, right, those markers of membership might be different, much less, if you think about a Buddhist practitioner or a pagan or something you know that is different institutional structures. So even even that, that concept of affiliation, like, what exactly were We were you going for here? Were you going for something that looks like membership or just a self understanding? Can you tease that out a little bit, too?

Jonathan Evans:

Sure, we use a very we have a core question that is asked all around the world when we ask this. So we ask, what is your current religion, if any? So that is there. But then in each country, we do list off some of the most common options, so that people know what we are getting at and then, but we leave it up to them. So it's not asking if they are a member of a church. It is not asking. We don't ask first, are you religious or not, or do you have a religion? We just say, What is your current religion, if any? And then, you know, would would list off a few and pertinent to the study on the nones in every country at the end of the list goes: atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in particular. So if, for whatever reason, you're maybe in a super small group relative to your country population, you can still give us your answer, and people, we do code the write ins that our interviewers take of people who are in some of the potentially smaller groups, and then the other three groups that I just read off the atheist, agnostic and people who say they have no particular religion, those are the three that all around the world we combine to be considered the religiously unaffiliated or the nones.

Chip Gruen:

Interesting. I want to take host prerogative and just share something that I find particularly interesting when I teach my Christian traditions class and we go and we visit local communities. If you go somewhere like the local Presbyterian Church, for example, they will say, we have, you know, 2000 members and 150 people who come on any given Sunday. And then you go down the next week, and you go to the evangelical community, and they'll say, we have, you know, 200 members and 3000 people who come on any given Sunday, right? So that the idea about, like, what it means to a belong to a community is just so totally different. And so, I mean, the the answer that you give is actually very satisfying that you don't define, you know what, what constitutes affiliation for, for anybody in particular, but, but I think it's interesting to think about how even something like that can be slippery, right when you're when you're looking across different types of religious groups,

Jonathan Evans:

For sure. And I think this is part of why we do surveys, is to let people self identify, self categorize. We, we don't want to make assumptions about who they are. We want them to tell us., 'This is how I see myself'. Now, whether or not other people in that community would consider themselves part of the community, or say that those beliefs are right or wrong, like that's not what matters for us. It's how does the individual see themselves? How do they define themselves? How do they define their life? Because, yeah, that's what a survey can tell us

Chip Gruen:

Alright, so the moment we've all been waiting for, let's turn to the substance of the report itself. So one of the most striking findings is that many of these nones actually hold religious or spiritual beliefs, or at least they believe things that we would normally categorize as religious or spiritual, including things like belief in God and afterlife or the spirits on one level. I mean, as a professor of religion, this doesn't surprise me at all, right, but on, I think on another sort of a public discourse level, I think that this would seem counterintuitive or surprising, right? If you say you don't have religious affiliation, why do you have these religious beliefs? So what do you think explains that apparent contradiction.

Jonathan Evans:

I'm so glad you brought this up and you highlighted about being a scholar and academic looking at religion, because there are, of course, some scholars who have argued that inconsistency or incongruence is actually what should be expected; it is not the exception, it is the norm, by some scholars' understanding that when we start looking deeply into how people belong and believe and behave, and this also highlights just how complicated all of us are as as people, that we as humans do at times, hold beliefs or attitudes that maybe to others might seem inconsistent, but to ourselves, that's, That is who we are, that is what we believe. And I think you're, you highlighted this. You mentioned belief in God. I think this is an interesting example of this that, of course, people probably would expect that atheists are among the least likely to self identified atheist when asked about their religion, are among the least likely to say that they believe in God. We find that even within the religiously unaffiliated, that atheists are less likely than people who are in the nothing in particular religious identity, but they are less likely than them, even within the unaffiliated community, to say they believe in God. But that doesn't mean that all people who say 'I am an atheist' when asked about their religion say that they don't believe in God. So for example, in Germany, 14% of people who self identify as an atheist when asked about their religion, 14% say that they on a separate question believe in God when given the yes, no option of that. And this isn't just limited to people who are in the broader nones bucket that it is. This is not just limited there. It also applies to people. People who are, for example, Christians. So if we look at the report we published earlier this year that was looking at not just the nones, but also Christians and Muslims and others all around the world, perhaps an outsider might think, or someone not too involved in the literature might expect, that it's universal, or near universal belief in God among Christians that okay, well, to be Christian, you must believe in God, and that's not always the case there. That's not the case in all countries. So in the countries where we surveyed, where we had enough Christians to do the analysis, in no country was it a minority belief that there is God. But in Sweden, 58% of Christians said that they believe in God, which is, you know, a far cry from universal belief in God. Or we also had a few country other countries in Europe where it was about three quarters, France, Germany and Hungary, about three quarters of Christians in those countries saying they believe in God. So still, of course, a majority, but potentially to someone on the outside, maybe that would seem as some degree of incongruence or whatnot. And so it isn't just the unaffiliated who potentially appear this way to to an outsider. And so I think that's a really interesting finding of this, this study.

Chip Gruen:

So another distinction that you sometimes see here is is between those who say none, that is, they have no religious affiliation, and sometimes referred to colloquially as the dones. They're people who might have grown up with a religious affiliation, or have said they're finished with religion, or they're disenchanted with religion, and so they're just not any part of it. So we might say that they were actively religious, but left out of dissatisfaction. Does your research allow you to make that kind of distinction about sort of someone's religiosity over time, rather than just a snapshot of the survey data itself?

Jonathan Evans:

Our research design and survey samples do allow us in about a dozen of the countries where we did our work to see if there are differences between lifelong nones and those who have disaffiliated within their lifetime. So in addition to asking about people's current religion, what is your current religion, if any, and giving the examples, we also ask people what religion they were raised in. So while we do not have every point in time and can't track if they've been in and out or something, we can tell Okay, is the general trajectory, perhaps from from lifelong unaffiliated or switching to that category, and we can determine, then if someone was raised Christian, Muslim, what have you. And then, then is out. We did look at the two groups as you call them, the nones and the dones, and to see if there were big differences. And we did not find an overarching, major story, that, that people who have disaffiliated in their lifetime or are much less likely to believe these things, or something like that. We did not find that we had lots of instances where the two groups were very similar in most of the countries where we could do this comparison.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, I always think about again, from my own, you know, work and interactions with religious communities. I remember a priest basically saying something like, you know, if we have someone within a Catholic educational setting, you know, until they're eight or 10 years old, it doesn't matter what they say. They're a Catholic all their lives. You know, like the idea that there's kind of a, you know, an imprinting of worldview that happens, happens really early. So it's interesting to see that that that doesn't really bear out that much in in your data. So the next place I want to go in the report shows pretty dramatic regional variation. So large majorities of nones in Latin American countries believe in God, for example, while very few of those self described nones in Northern Europe do given the historically strong role of Catholicism, for example, in Latin America, perhaps this isn't surprising, but what does it tell us about the nature of religious disaffiliation in these different contexts? Does leaving organized religion mean something fundamentally different in these places, or the nones in Latin America on a similar trajectory, or what we've already seen happen in Europe, right? So is there an argument to be made here that if we had thought about a survey like this in Europe 50 years ago or 75 years ago, right? It would look very much like what the Latin American data looks like now, given the historical differences? Does that make sense where I'm trying to go here?

Jonathan Evans:

Yeah. There, there really is some dramatic regional variation in in the survey, I think a great question that we can use to highlight the variation is just the sort of standard survey question where we ask people, How important is religion in your life? So in about half of the analyzed countries here, we find that 60% or more of the unaffiliated give the least religious answer. So they're saying that religion is not at all important. So that's majorities, solid majorities, in about half the countries, but in a few countries, about half or more of nones say that religion is either somewhat or even very important in their lives. This is the case in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and also South Africa. And this could possibly reflect the prevalence in these countries of traditional African or Afro Caribbean or indigenous and Indian religious beliefs and practices, even among people who don't themselves necessarily identify with their religion, there are scholars who study in detail how and why people are leaving and changing. So I am not one of those scholars who knows a ton for my own data about that, but I am excited to see how much or how this regional variation continues or changes in the future. We hope to be able to ask some of these questions again in future years to see are religiously unaffiliated becoming more or less religious by these measures, are they more, more likely to be attending religious services, or what have you? So I'm curious to see what the future holds.

Chip Gruen:

So let me ask that question then that you point to about sort of a longitudinal study, then. Is, so is this the first time that this design has been done in this way by Pew, if not, when was it done previously? If so, do you it sounds like you plan on doing a very similar instrument into the future? What would the interval of that look like? How long would it take to bear that fruit?

Jonathan Evans:

So the team I'm on has previously done more focused deeper dives on specific regions of the world. So previously, the team has done work specific to Latin America and the Caribbean and surveyed close to 20 countries in the region, and did was able to do very deep dives on topics that were very specific to Catholic, Protestant switching and all of the dynamics there, versus we did a project in Central and Eastern Europe where, again, we, we did more than a dozen countries there, but it was looking in part at like the fall of, you know, post Berlin Wall falling, and the collapse of communism in the region, and how that played into religion and national identity and all of that. So we, we've sort of done that sort of that kind of work all around the world in different regions, and this, then as far as the religion focuses, the first time, we've done three dozen countries all at the same time. And designed the questionnaire not to be specific to a region or a specific religious tradition, but we designed the questions, really, to work in as many cultures, as many religious, traditional backgrounds as possible, not using in language, but just getting at what are we underlying, trying to measure here. So this is the first time we've done that. I have colleagues where they do surveys in dozens of countries every year. We work together on this work, but a lot of their topics tend to be more on political and looking at global dynamics. So this, yes, this is sort of a continuation of earlier work, but with a new a new angle. Yes, we are hoping to continue it forward into the future. But it's not the sort of thing where we would ask these exact questions and a year or two, because a lot of times, religious change takes a while, so it will be a few years before we ask these exact questions, though, we we plan to ask other questions related to religion and public life in a broad spectrum of countries and the interval.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah. I mean, it seems to me like, I mean, this is a very 21st Century framing of this conversation. That seems like, I mean, I can't imagine this conversation happening in this way when, when I was a kid, you know, 30 years ago, or whatever. So, I mean, that's not surprising. And I sort of wonder, you know, I wonder how relevant this particular framing this conversation will seem in a decade, or 20 years or 30 years, because it might be, you know, this might be the opening volley of a new way of thinking about religious identity, and it might be a flash in the pan. I mean, it's very, it's very hard to know at this point, I think

Jonathan Evans:

I'm really excited to see as we take the time, it will be a long time, but yet to see how it how these beliefs and practices do change and evolve. Are are things stable, that that is a possibility? Are they declining? Are they increasing and, and not just within the religiously unaffiliated, but the broader societies at large, in these three dozen countries where we're able, where we were able to survey, it'll be very interesting as we were able to to track the potential for change.

Chip Gruen:

So thinking about that change, I mean, one thing that I think is is undeniable, and it bears out in a million different data sets, is that that number of unaffiliated adults has climbed rapidly in recent years. I mean, just as a, to satisfy my own curiosity, for example, I look at data at Muhlenberg College, where the institute is located, and the number of, you know, unaffiliated, what the classifications that you used? I use something very similar. When I first got to the college 20 years ago was 5,6,7, percent. Now it's something like 40, right? So that's obviously a particular kind of demographic of who attends a residential liberal arts college in the northeast, but, but I think it's clear to see this kind of thing is growing, you know, not only in the US, but, but around the world. However, it's not uniform, right? And we can't say that religious, every religious institution is being affected similarly around this issue of disaffiliation, or people choosing not to affiliate at all. Can we see, and maybe this isn't part of this study, but maybe the previous study that you that you did, can we see places where there are religious communities or traditions that are bucking the trend? Can we see particular kinds of religious institutions, or worldviews, in a more in a less institutional way, that are becoming, you know, more prevalent and are, maybe, you know, getting a larger share or religious people, as opposed to other groups that might be be suffering more because of these trends.

Jonathan Evans:

So I have colleagues who study the demographic trends of religion around the world and how, how all these things intersect. It's not my area of expertise. So I can only give a few high level findings from what I know they've done, but their most recent study looked at the change globally between 2010 and 2020, so the last decade, basically, and they found that over that decade, that Muslims were the fastest growing religious group in the world. Over that decade, and that was followed by the religiously unaffiliated, so the nones were the second had the second highest rate of growth. Meanwhile, the overall number of Christians around the world grew, the overall number, but the share of the world's population that is Christian declined. So as for what the future holds, I don't know if nones of the future will look more like the ones you were highlighting in Europe or like we were talking about in Latin America, but I do think that it's a really fertile ground for future research to test those theories and see, see if things are staying the same. If, as you highlighted, maybe is Latin America going to end up looking more like Europe or whatnot? That's something we can, in the future, test with the data. So I'm excited to see what what happens.

Chip Gruen:

So let's focus on the United States specifically for a couple of questions here, and dig into that, because, you know, we have a global audience for the show, but we're in the United States, and you know, a lot of our listeners are in the in the US. How do American nones compare to those in the other countries you you studied, if you could paint with a broad brush, are there distinctly American patterns in terms of what the unaffiliated believe, or how they relate to religion.

Jonathan Evans:

For many of the religious beliefs, the practices, the attitudes towards religion that we asked about, we found that nones in the United States are toward the middle of the 22 countries that we were surveying and are able to analyze this time. So a good example could be the shares who say that animals can have spirits or spiritual energy. So we asked this question all around the world. The 22 country median among the unaffiliated was 60% of nones saying that, yes, animals can have spirits in the US. 59% of the unaffiliated say this, and that was roughly typical of what we were seeing, similar to the median towards the middle of the list of countries, if you ordered them from from highest to lowest. But there are some items where the US did stand out. So we asked all of our survey respondents how often they pray, and among nones, the median across the 22 countries, was 26% saying that they ever pray. And in the US, it's 55% of nones who say that they ever pray. Still, nones in some of the countries we mentioned earlier, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and South Africa were more likely than nones in the US to say they ever pray. But still, 55% is quite a bit different from the 26% medium we saw around the 22 countries. Another item where the US, the religiously unaffiliated in the US, stand out, was about the Bible and how much influence they see that the Bible has on the laws of their country. So 70% of the nones in the US say that the Bible has a great deal or a fair amount of influence on the laws of the United States. And the next closest country among the nones was Greece, where it was 56% of nones saying this. So that was one where the US did stand out.

Chip Gruen:

So, I want to get back and particularly, I think this is both in the US, but we could think about it more generally too, that you found that many people become nones, not primarily because they don't believe in God, as you've highlighted earlier, right? Like those two things do not necessarily go together, the being religiously affiliated and not believing in God, and as you just underscored, even a majority of those people who are unaffiliated say that they pray at least sometimes, as you say ever so, it's not necessarily about the content of belief or practice or even worldview, but because they've had negative experiences with religious people or don't like religious organizations, the report also reveals that many nones view religion negatively as encouraging intolerance and superstitious thinking. So what? What do you think these findings tell us about the current state of religious institutions is this, you know, a canary in the coal mine for organized religion. Is there something that organized religion should be learning, maybe, from the kind of data you collected here?

Jonathan Evans:

So some of what you highlight is from a 2023 study that we did in the United States asking nones why they are non-religious, and we asked about a variety of reasons that they might be in that category. And yeah, 32% said that they don't believe in God or a higher power, and that's why they're non-religious. 30% of nones also said that they were non-religious because of bad experiences with religious people and approaching half of nones, 47% of nones in the United States told us that they don't like religious organizations. This is an extremely or very important reason why they're non-religious. So while that study was specifically within the US fairly recently, it is a helpful reminder that, as you know, non-belief is not always the main reason people have no religious affiliation. We find in this cross national project from from this last year that, as you said, many nones do express negative views about the influence of religion on society. So in 12 of the 22 countries that we study here, religiously unaffiliated adults are more likely to say that religion encourages intolerance than that it encourages tolerance. So in Germany, nearly three quarters of nones hold this view that religion encourages intolerance, compared with just about a quarter who say that it encourages tolerance. We also find that the views of nones towards religion are generally a lot more negative than the corresponding views of people who identify with a religion. So in Australia, for example, 76% of nones say that religion encourages intolerance, but it's only 35% among people who have some sort of religious affiliation, be that, Buddhism, Christianity, what have you. But again, as we talk about the views that religion is intolerant or superstitious or encouraging superstitious thinking, there are, again, the regional differences. So nones in Europe tend to be especially likely to voice these negative views. So it's 74% of nones in Greece and 62% in Spain who say that religion mostly hurts society, as opposed to mostly helps society. But in other places, there are more positive views towards religion from from the unaffiliated. So in Brazil, Singapore, and South Africa, majorities of nones take that opposite view, that religion mostly helps society. So again, I think it comes down to some really strong regional variation that makes it hard to paint too broad a brush on on the relationship between the unaffiliated and their views towards religion.

Chip Gruen:

So one of the reasons that this survey really captures my imagination is because it's one of the few places where, particularly when you're thinking about the unaffiliated, we get a commentary about religion from, not people who consider themselves insiders. You know, like that, as you say, you know, you give them, people the opportunity to speak for themselves. And we think about religious authority residing inside religious institutions, but we're thinking when we're thinking about these questions of tolerance or intolerance, superstitious thought patterns or the other one, the relevance or the impact of scriptural traditions on the law. It's interesting to see people who claim that they are unaffiliated, you know, sort of holding forth on those sorts of issues, because we don't really, that's not really that often, the kind of thing that's measured, which sort of gets back to one of my my points about the Institute, and I'm sorry I'm going to rattle on here for a second, but that the conversation about religion, whether you're religious or not, is an important conversation, right? Like if, even if you see yourself as not particularly religious, that doesn't mean it's not impactful in your society. So I think it's really interesting to see some of those data points that are sort of capturing people who don't see themselves as affiliated and how they think religion is impacting their world related to that. And I want to point to an older survey, and I'm going to spring this one on you, but I'm sure you're familiar with it, but I use it in almost all of my professional development that I do with teachers or what have you, is the Pew finding that warmth towards religious individuals increases when literacy for the tradition in question increases, and I just find that to be so affirming to what we do when we teach about religious literacy, that that warmth towards a tradition in only a few cases is not the case or tolerance towards the tradition in the language of this this instrument increases when people know something about the religion, rather than it being a point of ignorance. So I don't know. I'm just looking for affirmations that the religious literacy product, project is really worth doing here.

Jonathan Evans:

That's really interesting to hear. I do know, yeah, that there has been other work as well. I've read some other scholarly literature that that speaks about the relationship between knowledge of, or familiarity with people in a community, and how people view it, so it is interesting to have these, you know, dozens of countries, to look at the data. I also think it's interesting to note that the the questions we asked about is religion mostly helping society, or mostly harming, is it is encouraging intolerance? And separately asking about, does it encourage superstitious thinking? It's interesting that while broadly patterns are aligned, that those three items do not measure the exact same thing. So there are people who potentially view that religion does more good than harm, but they also think potentially that it encourages superstitious thinking and that asking about a multitude of items really helps us display the complex beliefs and attitudes, whether people are religious or not, that they feel towards religion, and I think that's important for us to capture.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, the complexity. And we'll put links to the surveys that we've mentioned here in the show notes, so people can go and find them. But it's really worth combing through, because the complexity at first blush might seem, it might seem like contradiction, right? But the more you study this, it's not contradiction. It's just that people, people have complicated ways of thinking about these things, and sometimes it's, you know, potentially paradoxical or ironic, right? But, but that doesn't mean that it that it is random, right? So I think that that's been really useful is sort of looking through all of these measures to keep in mind.

Jonathan Evans:

And I think that's why it's great to have measures, not only of people's identity, but also their beliefs, their practices and to ask about a variety even within those categories, to really allow people to give us as much of the nuance and how they do or don't live a spiritual or religious life. And it's important to to give people the chance to to express the details of that.

Chip Gruen:

So the question in these conversations I always like to end on is, what am I not asking about? Like, what is there? What is something, and I don't know, it could be something that surprised you through this study, or, you know, just something that you know, not being a data science scientist myself, not being, you know, having the same quantitative, analytical mind I might have looked past in thinking about this, that you think is really important, you know, what's something that we can end on here, that that you think we should talk about, that I haven't brought up yet.

Jonathan Evans:

Sure, I think we've talked about several of the questions that we asked on the survey, but I think maybe to close out, just highlight a few of the most widespread beliefs among the religiously unaffiliated, we found that sizable shares of of the nones say that they believe something spiritual exists beyond the natural world, as opposed to saying that the the natural world is all there is. About a dozen countries, half or more of the nones hold this view that there is something spiritual beyond and it's a variety of places, it includes, where it's a majority or half or more saying this, it's places like Brazil and the US, but also Singapore and France. So these are a variety of cultures, different backgrounds, that potentially the people who are unaffiliated are exposed to on a regular basis, but sizable shares do hold that belief. We also find that significant shares also say that animals and parts of nature can have spirits or spiritual energies. So I think it's interesting to think about what things large shares of the unaffiliated around the world, what beliefs fall into that category? I also we've hit on it earlier, but just thinking to the future. I'm excited that this is a point in time and we are able to measure what's going on, but I'm hopeful that others do similar studies in the future, and also, as we have a have a chance later, to hopefully ask some of these questions again in some some of these places, just to see how, how things are changing for the religiously unaffiliated, or are they? Are they staying constant? And so that'll be an interesting thing for the future that I hope we can or others can study.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, it's interesting to think, just on that note, like one might imagine that when we're thinking about these unaffiliated like, like, words like humanists or materialists, or things like that that are sort of been a, I mean, particularly a product of the late 20th century, would would really dominate the survey data. But that doesn't seem represented hardly at all here, you know, or at least it doesn't show up in the questions you're asking.

Jonathan Evans:

Well, we what we found is the most common identity in a lot of these places for the among the unaffiliated is that category of nothing in particular more common than atheist or agnostic. It's not to say it's the case in all of the countries, but it is the overarching trend that a lot of these folks fall into just the broad no religion in particular, that's where they feel most at home as far as religious identity,

Chip Gruen:

Alright. Well, I think that is a great place for us to leave this conversation. As I said, we're gonna put links in the show notes so people go and read this stuff for yourself. It's super fascinating to see. Jonathan Evans, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on ReligionWise.

Jonathan Evans:

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a great conversation.

Chip Gruen:

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you next time.