Following the release of research by the Explaining Atheism Project, Theos responds to the assertion that we are living in the “first atheist age”. 03/10/2024
A research project led by Queens University, Belfast, has set out to explore why a growing number of people in the UK say that they don’t believe in God. The report, entitled ‘Explaining Atheism’, generated a fair bit of publicity with the idea that the UK is entering ‘the first atheist age.’
Like any quantitative research on religion and belief, it’s a challenging area, and the data uncovered by the project has not yet been released. Last week’s headlines focussed on assumptions based on converging data from the British Social Attitudes Survey and the World Values Survey. Definitions matter – and in this area they aren’t at all straightforward. To say that you don’t believe in God is not the same as saying that you don’t believe there is anything beyond the material world. And it isn’t the same as ticking the ‘no religion’ box on the census form either. The 2021 England and Wales Census recorded 37.2% of the population now identifying as having no religion, up from a quarter in 2011. The number of people identifying as Christian fell to a minority for the first time, at only 46.2% of the population. But there is no absolute majority for atheism. And if ever there was a question to which the answer “Don’t know” would be appropriate, belief in God must be that question. Belief in God and atheism are rarely simple or settled matters.
For this reason, the claim that “the UK is entering its first atheist age” needs some unpacking. The truth is, surely, that the religious culture and identity of the UK is far more nuanced and complex than a simple head–count of people who say they do or do not believe in the existence of God at a particular moment could ever show. We know, for example, that many people who would say that they don’t believe in God nevertheless believe in various supernatural phenomena. And there are people who hold fervently to a particular religion but don’t believe in a personal God. I for one feel like an atheist most days until I’ve had my first coffee!
Even if this is an age of atheism, how do we know that it is the first age? The data simply don’t exist to know how our distant ancestors would have completed their census forms. At a political level, the idea that a country goes through ages that are ‘owned’ by one belief system – any belief system – is unhelpful, and potentially dangerous.
The ‘Explaining Atheism’ report finds that people who are brought up in cultures and households where there is belief in God are more likely to become believers themselves. That’s not surprising. We would assume that the reverse is also true – that people are socialised into atheism if they find themselves in a family or a culture where that is the perceived norm.
It is also not surprising to read that “most atheists and agnostics endorse objective moral values, human dignity, and inherent rights”. That finding only invites a further conversation about what those values are and where those rights come from: a conversation that Theos has been helping to host for 20 years.
In our own research, Theos looked at the 53% of the population who identified themselves in the 2021 census as having “no religion”. We found a complex and nuanced picture, suggesting that atheism and being non–religious do not always go hand in hand. One can be non–religious without being an atheist, and vice versa. For example, only 51% of those who say they have no religion say that they definitely don’t believe in God. Just like any religious group, those who describe themselves as non–believing vary in their degrees of non–belief, and also in what kind of God they don’t believe in!
So whilst we recognise that the number of people in the UK who say that they don’t believe in God is rising, we don’t think this makes a good basis for policy or public understanding. Whatever ‘age’ we are living in, the human urge to look beyond ourselves to make meaning endures for both theists and atheists alike.
Chine McDonald was quoted in the Times and spoke on BBC Radio 4 Sunday unpacking the complexities of this claim.
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