Transcript:
Last week, I talked about how “nones” are the second fastest growing “religion” in the world. That’s N-O-N-E “nones,” not “N-U-N “nuns” – people who do not identify with any religion at all, whether they consider themselves atheist, agnostic, or otherwise. N-U-N “nuns” only get popular around, well, this time of year, where they remain a popular costume choice as you can customize your nun as “sexy,” “pregnant,” or “MAGA.”
But this week, I’d like to talk about a related group: the “dones,” which is the kind of pun that could only be created by sociologists who are obsessed with studying nonreligious people. “Done” refers to “done with religion,” meaning someone who was raised religious but at some point left and became a “none.” An N-O-N-E none. Sigh.
Anyway, the study I’d like to talk about today is this one: “Religious Dones Become More Politically Liberal After Leaving Religion.” This paper, published in the August edition of the Journal of Personality, was actually a collection of three studies that sought to shed light on a phenomenon known as “religious residue.” That’s the term for the religious beliefs, behaviors, and values that a person continues to hold after they’ve left that religion. The researchers wanted to know if political ideology was one aspect of such a residue: do people who leave their religion continue to hold the average conservative political leanings of religious people, do they move towards the more liberal leanings of the average person who never had a religion, or do they have a reactive response that pushes them to become even more liberal than those raised without religion?
In the first study, psychologists surveyed more than 7,000 adults from the US, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands to simply state their political leanings from conservative to liberal and then to state whether they are currently religious, formerly religious, or never religious. Sure enough, they found that the people who left religion were more liberal than those who remained religious, AND they were even more liberal than those who were raised without religion, suggesting that reactivity.
I paused there, because that describes me to a “T”: I was raised evangelical Baptist, and I realized I was an agnostic atheist when I left home at the age of 17. At that time, I wasn’t super political and looking back, I’d call myself a moderate or even a moderate conservative.
Over the next few years, I became more and more liberal, and today I consider myself to be a fairly far left progressive. And honestly, if I thought about my political views in light of my religious upbringing at all, it was that I had always been a big fan of Jesus as I understood him as a kid: I highly valued loving people regardless of our differences, caring about others health, safety, and happiness, sacrificing oneself for the good of humanity, and of course standing in the spotlight and lecturing people on how they should act.
And like many people, in the past ten years I’ve learned that that “religious residue” I have is nowhere to be found in the people who taught it to me, who are to this day still, supposedly, “Christians.”
But I do think those values helped push me to the left, aided by no longer having the anchor of garbage the Church also taught me: that people I didn’t like would end up in Hell, or that there would be some paradise waiting for me and all my good Christian friends and family, and that we don’t really need to worry too much about people’s quality of life here on Earth so long as we secure their eternal soul. I do truly believe that I am a more liberal person today then I would have been were I raised with no religion at all.
But alas, the rest of the studies in this paper suggest that I’m either wrong about that or an outlier. In the second study, the researchers combed through the National Study of Youth and Religion, which tracked the political attitudes and religious beliefs of 2,000 Americans as they transitioned from adolescence to adulthood. This time, they found that those who left religion did get more liberal than those who continued to be religious, but they were about the same as those who were raised without religion.
In the third and final study, the researchers examined data from the Family Foundations of Youth Development project, which followed about 1,800 adolescents and young adults to gauge their political orientation and religious beliefs at several different points in time. Again, they found that those who left religion became more liberal than their religious peers, and about the same as those who grew up without religion. But the really cool thing about this study was that it suggested a possible causative direction: by checking in on the same people over time, they could figure out whether someone got more liberal first and THEN left religion, or the other way around. Sure enough, they found that leaving the religion came first, followed by a move to the left politically.
Of course, that still doesn’t prove causation, but it does give future research a very interesting possibility to study. Also, it’s worth noting that this study was NOT pre-registered, which means that it might be more prone to cherrypicking data to meet a desired conclusion. Finally, it’s worth noting that most of the subjects studied were Christians living in heavily Christian places, so it’s not clear how these results would translate to other regions or religions.
I have to admit something a little embarrassing, here: after going through this research, I looked to see who had conducted it. I was surprised to find that the researchers came from Hope College, a Christian liberal arts school in Michigan, and Baylor University, a Baptist school in Texas. My first thought was “Huh, that makes me put more respect on these results because these are researchers at explicitly Christian schools but the data is so complimentary towards those who leave the Christian faith.
That first thought was stupid. My second thought was that while I don’t know anything about Hope College, academics at Baylor regularly produce excellent research in a variety of fields and it’s pretty insulting that my first thought was to assume that everyone at a Christian college is a Christian AND that they can’t control for their own biases.
My third thought was, “Oh, and ‘becoming more liberal’ is not necessarily a positive to everyone.” Even IF this paper was authored by a biased Christian, that person may very well think that moving to the political left is a BAD thing.
So yeah, I just want to self-report that I had a stupid and lazy first thought.
Anyway, I found all this a bit interesting because it seems like “dones” are an understudied group. There was a study a few years back that supports this new one, though: researchers in New Zealand looked at about 500 people who converted to Christianity over a period of nine years and compared them to another group of about 700 people who left Christianity during the same time. They found that after converting, the new Christians became more rightwing and authoritarian, while the group that left Christianity showed declines in rightwing authoritarianism both before and after deconverting, and they also became more egalitarian after deconversion.
Considering the results of that study and this more recent one, maybe the answer to our current authoritarian crisis is, in fact, pointing out that Christianity is dumb and wrong. Oh no, it’s happening, I’m becoming more and more supportive of New New Atheism. Please, don’t tell Richard Dawkins.
Rebecca Watson
@skepchick.org
25692 Followers 531 Following 4510 Posts
is this the one that wins
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