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    David Gibson

    Columnist

    Smiley Face Atheists: Survey Finds Non-Believers to Be Upbeat

    Posted:
    08/7/09
    154 Comments  + 
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    Last time we looked in on America's unbelievers, they were registering a growing disappointment in President Obama's track record on their issues, with special concern that he was spending too much time on God talk and on placating the religiously inclined.

    Now, however, comes word that could give the godless reason to smile -- if they aren't already: A new study of some 5,800 non-believers reports that contrary to popular conceptions of atheists as crabby misanthropes, they in fact tend to be as happy as their believing brethren, and are in fact more satisfied than people who are uncertain in their beliefs, or in their unbeliefs.
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    "This new survey reports that confident nonbelievers are more emotionally healthy with respect to 'fence sitters' or religious doubters, shows that 'spirituals' report less satisfaction with their lives than those who identify with other self-labels, and suggests that the common assumption that greater religiosity relates to greater happiness and life satisfaction is not quite true," says a release from the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a leading association of secularists, humanists, agnostics and atheists -- the range of "non-theists" who are often lumped in the polling category of "Nones," or those who reported no religious affiliation.

    CFI conducted the Non-Religious Identification Survey (NRIS) with Luke Galen, an associate professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich., who has an article on the study, "Profiles of the Godless," in the current edition of CFI's magazine, Free Inquiry.

    One might expect that non-believers would already be pretty happy, given the high profile of recent best-selling neo-atheist authors Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and the fact that recent national surveys have shown a steady growth in the "Nones" to more than 16 percent of the U.S. population -- a real eye-opener (and rallying cry) for those who preach about America as a "Christian nation." That 16.1 percent figure comes from the huge U.S. Religious Landscape Survey released by the Pew Forum in April.

    Similarly, the latest American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), released in March, showed those professing no religious affiliation was at 15 percent, and nearly double the 8.2 percent figure of the 1990 ARIS. The latest survey also showed that the Nones were the only category to gain in every state in the Union, while the percentage of Americans who are Christian continued to slip, to 76 percent from 86.2 percent in 1990.

    The impetus for the new CFI survey was in part the frustration at perceived gaps in those and other studies, which Galen said tend to focus on believers and to give short-shrift to the nuances of non-belief within the Nones category, which is so small that it is difficult to profile accurately. There is also a problem in labels: Some identify as atheists, others as agnostics or humanists or secularists. And many of the unaffiliated, even those who would self-identify as non-believers, still like to describe themselves as "spiritual" -- a label that tends to rankle committed atheists. (And atheists themselves debate the difference between "positive" atheism -- affirming there is no God -- and "negative" atheism, which holds that there is no evidence for God.)

    In addition, earlier studies tended to reinforce the notion that atheists could be as dogmatic as any Southern fundamentalist -- an impression that can certainly be bolstered by a visit to most any gathering of hard-core non-theists, or indeed by reading Hitchens and Dawkins et al. These earlier studies portrayed non-believers as largely well-educated and male (and white, though Galen does not break it down by race in this study), and with fewer social connections and a penchant for difficult relations with family members (as if that is a distinguishing characteristic) perhaps brought on by their countercultural choice.

    Galen's survey claims to dispel those stereotypes, but in fact the numbers don't necessarily do that. The new NRIS study actually shows that non-believers, especially true atheists, tend to be men with advanced degrees and a much higher socioeconomic ranking than most Americans. He found that female non-believers are far more likely to identify as "spiritual" than "atheist," and they are more likely to have a wider social circle than committed atheists, who tended to rank much lower on the scale of "agreeableness." (However, "spirituals reported lower satisfaction with their lives than those with other belief labels," Galen writes. So there.)

    Another problem is that Galen's survey drew exclusively from the membership of the Center for Inquiry and people they recommended; a "snowball sample" of self-selected non-believers who would likely be able to articulate their views and be more committed to them than the mass of unwashed unbelievers covered by the national Pew and ARIS surveys.

    In short, whatever their gains and their relative levels of happiness, committed unbelievers appear to have a lot more proselytizing to do.

    For one thing, those who call themselves atheist or agnostic still account for just 1.6 million Americans. Moreover, the Pew survey showed that while all the religious "switching" by Americans (more than half change religious labels during their lifetime) bolsters the unaffiliated category -- some one-quarter of those who switch drop off the religious radar altogether -- most of the unaffiliated are not convinced by arguments against religion. In addition, the unaffiliated -- the Nones -- actually have a worse retention rate than the old-time religions they dismiss.

    Worse still, a leading religious demographer, Eric Kaufmann of the University of London, predicts that the growth rate among the Nones should top out at about 17 percent between the years 2030 to 2040. According to the Association of Religion Data Archives, the Nones may be their own worst enemy in this regard because they have low fertility rates and thus trend older -- which Galen's study also confirms.

    So is atheism better than theism, or uncertainty? This seems to be an odd way to frame the argument, though it is in keeping with the trend in American religion and culture toward the therapeutic -- if it makes you feel good, it must be good. Odd that atheists are now approaching their preaching from the same angle. Indeed, looking at how well the prosperity preachers have done, they might do better to emphasize the relative wealth of their followers.

    Either way, the latest research will at the very least give both believers and non-believers more fodder for their ongoing arguments. And that should make both camps happier than anything else.



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    David Gibson

    David Gibson is an award-winning religion journalist, author, filmmaker, and a convert to Catholicism... more

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