In this post, Egbert Ribberink, Peter Achterberg and Dick Houtman explore the problematic nature of measuring and differentiating atheism, non-religion and anti-religiosity and call for using existing large-scale surveys to understand said phenomena. From their recent research they detail the particular obstacles they overcame and elucidate how different questions on measuring non-belief produce much different answers.

 

 

 

 

In quantitative analysis, atheism is often used as a concept to describe those who state that they do not believe, when asked what they believe about God (for example Becker and de Wit) or those that indicate that they are not a member of a religious organization (for example Norris and Inglehart, p. 186). It seems as if researchers treat atheism as the ‘residual category’ in their study of religion. However, the recent debate on atheism, religious ‘nones’ and non-religiosity suggests that this sociological habit of categorizing non-believers and non-affiliates as atheists, does not do justice to the intricacies of the atheist identity (see Lee, Smith, Ribberink and Houtman, and LeDrew). There exists a great difference between say, an attender of an atheist gathering like the Sunday Assembly and a supporter of the American Atheists movement. Therefore, quantitatively oriented scholars should be very careful in their operationalization of the tolerant and almost spiritual kind of atheism on the one hand (better described as non-religious or a-religious; see Day and Lee for a discussion on these concepts), and the militant and provocative atheism on the other (better depicted as anti-religious).[i]

In our recent studies on non-religiosity and anti-religiosity in Western Europe, we discovered that operationalizing these differences is not so easy. We encountered three particular obstacles. First, the commonly used surveys for the study of religion, culture, and politics (for instance, EVS, ISSP) use different questions for measuring similar religious beliefs and attitudes. Second, they have very few items that lend themselves to distinguishing anti-religiosity from non-religiosity in general and religious indifference in particular. Third, there are a limited number of options for operationalizing different kinds of anti-religiosity, for example anti-Muslim sentiment. Now, researchers like us have two options: we could decide to dismiss datasets designed to measure religiosity as useless for understanding non-religiosity; or we could gloss over the differences and imagine that non-religiosity really is quite a straightforward matter. With this blog, we describe the way in which we overcame these pitfalls. We do not provide an exhaustive list of what can be achieved with these datasets on religiosity, but in discussing these three obstacles, we point to a number of important nuances to the data that analysts should attend to when quantitatively studying non-religiosity.

 

Different questions, different answers

 

In general, scholars of religion distinguish three different ways of measuring religiosity: practice, beliefs and affiliation. The same is true for non-religiosity. Looking at the most common measure of non-religiosity, namely non-belief, we find different outcomes, depending on which question is used.

 

	EVS 2 options	EVS 4 options	ISSP 6 options
Czech Republic	54%	32%	37%
Germany	49%	35%	24%
Norway	45%	18%	18%
Table 1. Percentage of non-believers per country for different measures (Source: EVS 2008 and ISSP 2008).

 

In the EVS, the most commonly used question is: ‘Do you believe in God?’ with the answer categories ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘don’t know’. Furthermore, the EVS contains an item that asks what statement comes closest to describing the respondents’ beliefs. The answers are ‘I don’t really think there is any sort of spirit, God or life force’, ‘I don’t really know what to think’, ‘there is some sort of spirit or life force’, and ‘there is a personal God’. These measures reveal huge differences in the percentage of non-believers in several European countries. For the Czech Republic, for example, comparing the first yes/no measure with the second four-option measure reveals 22% fewer non-believers (32% of total population instead of 54%) and comparing the same two measures for Norway reveals an even larger difference at 27% (see table 1). Including the ISSP, the picture varies even more. This survey also gives several answer options (six possible answers, ranging from ‘I don’t believe in God’ to ‘I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it’). Out of the 22 countries that appear in both surveys, 6 have larger differences than 5%, with Germany as an outlier with 11% fewer non-believers according to the ISSP-measure. For Norway results are similar, while for the Czech Republic the ISSP-measure reveals 5% more non-believers. Scholars of religiosity, spirituality, non-religiosity and secularity should be aware how each of these measures reveals a different number of non-believers living in each country.

 

Non-believers, religious ‘nones’ or non-attenders?

 

Looking at other measures of non-religiosity, namely religious affiliation and attendance rates, the differences between countries are even more striking, in particular for the Scandinavian countries (see Table 2).

 

	no belief	no affiliation	no attendance
Denmark	18%	14%	91%
Finland	11%	18%	92%
Norway	18%	16%	93%
Sweden	19%	29%	94%
Germany	24%	34%	84%
Netherlands	20%	41%	80%
Great Britain	14%	33%	72%
Table 2. Percentage of non-believers (6 categories), non-affiliates, and non-attenders (less than monthly) per country (Source: ISSP 2008).

 

Compared to other former Protestant countries, the Scandinavian countries boast low levels of non-affiliates and high levels of non-attendance. Students of non-religiosity (and media reportages quoting them) should be well aware of these differences and their underlying historical, cultural and political reasons (see Sherkat). In our studies we mostly use the attendance measure for determining country-level religiosity and non-religiosity, because this gives the best idea of people’s active, day-to-day religious practice. However, the reason for choosing one or the other measure should depend on the theoretical question at hand.

 

Non-religiosity and anti-religiosity in ISSP and EVS

 

Thus far we have discussed different ways of measuring non-religiosity. Choosing a proper measurement of anti-religiosity is even more difficult, because of the limited availability of answer categories in the different surveys. Anti-religiosity is an attitude of opposition towards religions and the religious. Several possible ways of measuring this attitude are found in the ISSP. For example, two items inquire into attitudes towards the influence of religious leaders on governmental decisions and peoples’ votes; and two items inquire into responses to statements about the intolerance of religious people and whether or not religion creates conflict. We used a combined scale of answers on these items in our 2013 article on anti-religiosity in Western Europe. One of the interesting findings of this article was that people with higher education were significantly more anti-religious when living in a religious country (and vice versa), whereas on average the level of anti-religiosity was lower in these countries (see figure 1, and article for further details).

Figure 1. Predicted anti-religiosity for lower educated and higher educated in contexts of low and high national church participation in 14 Western European countries, source: ISSP 2008.

 

Bruce (see p. 221) uses the same four questions, studying sympathy for religions in Britain in 1998 and 2008, but adds two more on tolerance of religious power and confidence in religious organizations. Alternatively, one could also include items that inquire into the possible dichotomy between science and faith, but we follow Greeley in his concern that these questions are biased and do not measure a general attitude of anti-religiosity but a very specific pro-science attitude.

The EVS has richer data on people’s attitudes towards cultural, political, economic and national issues, but has fewer options for operationalizing anti-religiosity. It contains two items that can be seen to measure respondents’ hostility towards religion, albeit indirectly. One item asks whether respondents consider themselves religious. The possible answers differentiate between religious, non-religious and ‘convinced atheist’. Although the term ‘atheist’ can mean many different things, it is clear in this case that respondents are led to view it as something distinct from non-religiosity. It can therefore be argued that respondents read the term ‘convinced atheist’ to mean ‘anti-religious’. The item that asks for people’s confidence in the church as an institution can also be seen as an expression of religious tolerance (or the opposite: intolerance). Its answer category is a 4-point scale, ranging from ‘a great deal’ to ‘none at all’. Taken together, an index for anti-religiosity can be created (see our article). Nevertheless, statistically, this two-item index is less robust than the 4 (or 6) item-index that can be made using the ISSP-data.

 

Anti-religiosity and anti-Muslim sentiment

 

The availability of cross-national survey-data is very important for quantitative research. As we have shown, the different options for operationalizing anti-religiosity as distinct from non-religiosity are quite limited. This is even more problematic, considering the perspectives on anti-religiosity that now remain underexposed. For example, current opposition by Pegida to Muslims in Germany seems to be a typical anti-religious expression, although it can also be seen as an expression of an anti-immigrant prejudice. These two attitudes are hard to differentiate, using ISSP or EVS datasets.  In the ISSP there is no question that deals with attitudes towards Muslims, while in the EVS, there is only one item that deals with it very indirectly. It is a so-called “social distance” question about which groups of people (among others homosexuals, drug addicts, large families and Muslims) respondents find undesirable as neighbors. In the literature, this crude, dichotomous measure is used (see Strabac and Listhaug), sometimes combined with anti-immigrant attitudes to create a more robust measure. For most Western European countries, this latter construction is legitimate, since almost all larger non-European immigrant minorities are Muslim (with the exception of Indian people in Great Britain). When people are asked to think of immigrants, they tend to think about Muslims, and several studies have shown that anti-Islamic sentiments are closely related to types of prejudice related to immigrants (see Spruyt and Elchardus), like ethnocentrism, cultural and economic xenophobia, and authoritarianism. However, opposition towards Muslims, mosques, wearing of veils or other Muslims practices can also argued to be something purely anti-religious and not related to anti-immigrant sentiments. Thus, to differentiate these attitudes from each other, more specific survey data is needed.

Finally, one of the most intriguing questions in relation to measuring anti-religiosity is to what degree the secularization (Bruce) of the West leads to religious indifference (Bagg) or to polarization and conflict over questions of public religiosity (Casanova). Thus far, this question has not been settled, perhaps also because indifference or apathy is hard to measure. We can only hope that apart from qualitative research (Lee) and experimental surveys (Scheitle and Ecklund), the larger surveys are also improved to the point that we can answer questions like these conclusively. In the meantime, we hope that the possibilities and nuances provided above, will help analysts of non-religiosity to make the most of present survey data.

[i] Note that we use the term ‘nonreligion’ in its conventional sense to indicate the general absence or irrelevance of religion, in contrast to the sense used by Lois Lee, Johannes Quack and others, which describes a meaningful relationship of difference with religion. Anti-religion is therefore distinguished from (rather than an example of) nonreligion in our work.

 

In the second instalment of the SSNB/NSRN methods blog, Tim Hutchings argues that the scope and significance of digital methodologies for the study of – and beyond – ‘nonreligion’ is much broader and more promising than is often perceived.

In some areas of the internet, the line between religion and nonreligion could not be clearer. Christians and Atheists battle through forums and video blogs, form rival groups on social media, and share satirical memes mocking one another’s failings and inconsistencies. This kind of skirmishing has been widely discussed; see, for example, Christopher Smith and Richard Cimino’s 2012 study of secularist activism in American blogs and YouTube videos, or Stephen Pihlaja’s 2014 analysis of the rhetoric of YouTube flame wars. Social media can play a crucial role in the “de-privatization” of anti-religious identities,[i] providing space for individuals to articulate their opposition to religion and its public influence.

Elsewhere online, the boundary between religion and nonreligion becomes much harder to trace. If we only pay attention to the most explicit forms of anti-religion, we risk missing some of the more subtle and interesting negotiations of what it actually means to be (or not to be) “religious”. We can also miss whole areas of activity in which the boundary doesn’t seem to mean very much at all. As Dusty Hoesly argues in a recent article in Secularism and Nonreligion, ‘religious, spiritual, secular, and nonreligious identities are not stable, unitary formations’, but performances, ‘discursive, relational constructions contingently articulated in particular locations at specific times for particular purposes’. Researchers interested in digital nonreligion need to look out for those performances, and to develop methodologies that are sensitive to their transient contexts and implications.

Hoesly is writing about weddings, but my own research applies that same insight to the study of death. Working with a team of colleagues at Stockholm University, I am exploring digital media as an “existential terrain”, a landscape in which users encounter and try to make meaning out of experiences of vulnerability.[ii] Our research includes case studies of end-of-life blogs, online support forums, harassment, gendered mourning cultures and the digital afterlife.

One of the key findings of research in the field of digital death studies has been that the bereaved talk to the dead online. Visit almost any memorial page on Facebook, and you’ll see this in action. Grieving friends and family members keep in touch with the dead by sending them messages, and these messages share a largely consistent vision of what happens after death. According to these messages, the dead live on in a world parallel to our own, close enough to hear us. They are often spoken of as angels, particularly if they died as children. Their world is still much like ours, full of vibrant social activity, music and parties. Crucially, that other world is accessible: we will all be reunited there when we die.

These kinds of cases point to ways in which the analytical boundary between religion and nonreligion is blurred in everyday life. The question is: is there anything religious about this mythology of a digitally connected heaven? And if so, how can we tell?

Only a few scholars have tried to analyse the religious aspects of the digital afterlife, and so far their responses have been divided. We can divide their arguments into three broad camps: the digital afterlife is unproblematically religious; it is transforming religion; or it is not religious at all.

We find the first and simplest approach in the work of HCI researchers Jed Brubaker and Janet Vertesi (2010), who see talking to the dead online as an inherently religious act, a “technospiritual practice”, because the idea that the dead live on in heaven is part of the Christian worldview. It is religious, because it shares the symbolic content of religion.

The second approach is rather more dramatic. According to Elizabeth Drescher, a researcher of spiritual practices among the “nones”, the mythology of the digital afterlife might actually change religion itself (2012). When a Christian dies, their friends continue to speak to them online, and Drescher sees this as something new: digital media have broken down the barriers between life and death and given rise to a new shared theology.[iii] The digital afterlife is still religious, but the content and practice of religion is changing.

The third approach is more dismissive. Christian theologian Erinn Staley (2014) argues that we should not take these practices literally. No one expects the dead of Facebook to talk back to them, so they can’t really be alive. Talking to the dead is not religious, because it is not motivated by the right kind of belief.

In the wider field of studies of death and nonreligion, we find plenty of grounds for caution about all three approaches. Abby Day found in her interviews that ‘even atheists sense ghosts’, but refuses to categorise their experiences as “religious” (2011). Instead, she argues, we should see their stories of ghostly experiences as ‘a performative strategy’, an attempt to continue to belong in a social network. Her interviewees were ‘creating and sustaining’ their belief in a continuing relationship with the dead by ‘performing’ that belief through the telling of stories. Experiencing and communicating with the dead is not (necessarily) religious, because it is not (always) embedded in a worldview that connects the individual to gods and divinities. To put that another way, talking to the dead is motivated by belief, but belief itself is not religious. If so, then the theology of the digital afterlife is actually much less interesting than its performances and their social functions.

So where does this leave us?

Online, there is a vast landscape of activity revolving around death, grief, bereavement and memory, within which a consistent worldview and set of practices have emerged. This worldview shares certain themes and symbols with Christian ideas of heaven, but does not seem to be limited to (or universally shared within) Christian communities. Indeed, theologically there seem to be considerable divergences between this view of the afterlife and the historic and current mainstreams of Christian theology (see McDannell and Lang 1988). Researchers of digital death have tended to assume that any reference to heaven must be religious, or that religion involves a special kind of belief, but we are still waiting for nuanced studies of the boundary between religion and nonreligion in digital death.

In this area, as elsewhere, sensitivity to a broader domain of nonreligious identification and belief points to the possibility and potential of much more diverse – and therefore methodologically challenging – empirical studies. I will end this post with two calls to action.

First, we urgently need a much wider range of cross-cultural studies of death and grief online (as of other forms of religious/nonreligious existential experience), to balance the current wealth of case studies from the English-speaking (particularly North American) world.

Second, we must remember the insights proposed by Dusty Hoesly and Abby Day, and approach commitments to “religion”, “nonreligion” and “belief” as unstable and temporary performances, embedded in social contexts and articulated for specific purposes. Instead of studying the digital afterlife as a worldview borrowed from religion, it will be considerable more interesting to analyse the practices used to engage with the afterlife, paying attention to the social functions of ritual and the identities and relationships constructed by talk.

We know that atheists can sense ghosts – but what does it mean when they become angels?

Notes

[i] See Ribberink, Achterberg and Houtman (2013)

[ii] For another existential approach to death and nonreligion, see Lois Lee (2015), especially chapter 7.

[iii] For another transformationist view, see Tony Walter (2011)

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Tim Hutchings received his PhD in the sociology of religion from Durham University (2010). He is a sociologist and ethnographer of digital religion, and his research explores new digital forms of authority, community and ritual. He has conducted postdoctoral work at Umeå University (Sweden), The Open University and Durham University, and he has now joined the Institute for Media Studies at Stockholm University. His new research with the Existential Terrains project (et.ims.su.se) focuses on death, bereavement and digital media. His first monograph will be published later this year, and a full list of his publications can be found online at su-se.academia.edu/TimHutchings. Dr Hutchings is also the Editor of the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture (www.jrmdc.com).

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References

Brubaker, J. and Vertesi, J. (2010). Death and the social network. Paper presented at the CHI 2010 Workshop on “HCI at the End of Life: Understanding Death, Dying, and the Digital”, Atlanta, GA, USA. Available online at www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mikem/hcieol/subs/brubaker.pdf.

Day, A. (2011). Believing in belonging. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Drescher, E. (2012). Pixels perpetual shine: The mediation of illness, dying, and death in the digital age. CrossCurrents 62(2), 204-218. dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-3881.2012. 00230.x

Hoesly, D. (2015). “Need a minister? How about your brother?” The Universal Life Church between religion and non-religion. Secularism and Nonreligion 4(1), art.12.  doi.org/10.5334/snr.be

Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

McDannell, C. and Lang, B. (1988). Heaven: A History. Yale University Press: New Haven.

Pihlaja, S. (2014). Antagonism on YouTube: Metaphor in Online Discourse. Bloomsbury: London.

Ribberink, E., Achterberg, P. and Houtman, D. (2013). Deprivatization of disbelief? Non-religiosity and anti-religiosity in 14 western European countries. Politics and Religion 6(1), p.101-120. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1755048312000740.

Smith, C. and Cimino, R. (2012). Atheisms unbound: The role of new media in the formation of a secularist identity. Secularism and Nonreligion 1, 17-31. doi.org/10.5334/snr.ab

Staley, E. (2014). Messaging the dead: Social network sites and theologies of afterlife. In: Lewis, A. and Moreman, C. (eds.), Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age. Praeger: Santa Barbara. 9-22.

Walter, T. Hourizi, R., Moncur, W., and Pitsillides, S. (2011). Does the internet change how we die and mourn? An overview. Omega 64(4), 275-302. doi.org/10.2190/OM.64.4.a