David Speed, University of New Brunswick
Keywords: volunteering, civic engagement, atheism, nonreligion, comparative religion, Canada
If I may don my Hat of Mild Hyperbole for a moment: one of the discussed virtues of religion is that it is steeped in prosociality. Give a gal or fella a religious text, and lo and behold they are out there making society a better place. In contrast, those folks who aren’t on the religion train are, perhaps, less motivated to make the world a better place. At least, this is the common refrain from clergy, pundits, politicians, and surprisingly, some researchers. There are several valid scientific studies that show the religious are more prosocial than the nonreligious. In particular, this has been studied extensively in the context of volunteerism, that is, donating your time to help others.
Now, as a somewhat skeptical person, I have always felt that religion as a driver of volunteerism was … well, a bit lazy. Yeah, a lot of religious citizens may volunteer their time and effort, but the proffered explanation seemed too neat. Last year, Penny Edgell and I investigated patterns of volunteering in Canadians, and how different atheists were in this regard. Fortunately, Statistics Canada collects tons of data on this topic and we were fortunate enough to be able to access it. Our questions were pretty simple: 1). Do the religious volunteer more than atheists? and 2). Why might religion be connected with volunteerism at all?
Science is all about mechanisms; what is the reason that X and Y are related? For example, it’s all well and good that Newton noticed the apple falling toward the ground, but his real contribution was in explaining the mechanism for this behaviour (i.e., gravity). In a similar vein, it’s all well and good that the religious may volunteer more, but why is this the case? Broadly speaking, there were two contenders to account for this relationship. While I describe these mechanisms as two separate entities, I will say up front that they are not an exhaustive or exclusive list of why religion and volunteering are connected.
The first mechanism to explain the relationship between religion and volunteering is that people who are religious are more prosocial by their very involvement in religion. To put it a bit reductively: once you accept tenets X, Y, and Z, you now want to be a more prosocial person. Let’s call this the inclination explanation; people who are religious want to behave in a prosocial manner. The second mechanism was that people who are religious have more opportunities to volunteer. Once you do activities A, B, and C, you find yourself inundated with chances to help out your fellow human. Again, to put it a bit reductively: once you join a religious organization there are opportunities galore to be more prosocial. Let’s call this the opportunity explanation.
Our study had a simple logic: if religion is associated with greater prosociality, then individuals who are super-duper-not-religious should report lower levels of volunteerism than people who are more religious. Atheists would be non-volunteers because they should, in theory, lack inclination and opportunity. But we wanted to know if it was specifically inclination or opportunity that drive volunteering. Fortunately, the data we had access to addressed prayer and religious attendance. Using this information, we reasoned that if it was inclination driving the relationship, then people who reported higher levels of prayer should volunteer more. Similarly, if opportunity was driving the relationship, then we would expect religious individuals who frequently attended religious services would volunteer more.
Our results were a mixture of the expected and unexpected. To our shock, in less complicated models, atheists out-volunteered most religious groups. In other words, the average atheist was more likely to volunteer than the average religious individual. However, this effect transformed slightly when we modelled prayer and religious attendance. The gist of our findings is that religious affiliation and religious behaviours influence volunteering behaviours together.
When we compared atheists who never pray to religious individuals who never pray, there were few differences between the groups. When we compared atheists who never pray to religious individuals who pray daily, there were also few differences between the groups. Recall that while prayer was our measure of the inclination explanation, private religious activity seemingly had little impact on volunteerism. When we compared atheists who never go to church to religious individuals who never go to church, atheists volunteered more than several groups. However, when we compared atheists who never go to church to religious individuals who go to church weekly, atheists are out-volunteered by several groups. Recall that religious attendance was our measure of the opportunity explanation, and it looks pretty reasonable as a mechanism. Basically, differences in volunteerism emerge when religious individuals report higher levels of religious social activities, not higher levels of religious non-social activities. As the youth say, opportunity explanation FTW.
But wait, there’s more! When we compared the amount of time spent volunteering once an individual reported volunteering, there weren’t a lot of differences between atheists and others. Once nonbelievers started volunteering, they ostensibly approached it with the same gusto as believers did. Finally, we teased apart what activities the religious were volunteering for, and then filtered out individuals who only volunteered in a religious context (and no other contexts). In this case, we found that the differences between atheists and non-atheists volunteering evaporated. So the religious do volunteer more than atheists, but they are volunteering in a narrow religious context.
Penny made the point that there are social activities that help to connect different elements of society (bridging social capital) and there are social activities that help to reinforce the group that an individual is a part of (bonding social capital). Congregants aren’t finishing Sunday service and sprinting to sign up for the PTA; they are finishing Sunday service and then volunteering at (presumably) their religious organization. Granted, religious organizations may do public outreach that benefit everyone, but it’s also possible that the people who benefit the most from religious people volunteering are other religious individuals.
The nonreligious have been maligned for their disinterest in prosociality. Given the results of our study, this seems pretty unfair. Atheists likely aren’t a part of an organization that calls for volunteers, which means that they are disadvantaged in partaking in altruistic behaviours. There needs to be a greater interest in interrogating how atheists see themselves as a part of society, because the status quo is in dire need of help.
Dr. David Speed (BA, Brock University, 2008; MASP, MUN, 2011; PhD, MUN, 2015) is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of Psychology. David’s specialization is in the topic of atheism and nonreligion and how they relate to health and well-being. To date, David has authored over a dozen studies addressing nonreligion, which included the largest study of Canadian atheists in the literature. David a co-editor of Secularism & Nonreligion, which is an academic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge of ‘the secular’. He teaches a variety of classes including graduate statistics, research methods, and is the coordinator of the Master’s of Applied Psychology, Research, and Evaluation program. When David isn’t researching, teaching, or groaning at the amount of administrative work he must perform, he enjoys spending time with his wife and three children.
NSRN Online 