By Catherine Pepinster
Britain is entering its first atheist age and now has more atheists than theists, according to the academics behind a global study on lack of belief in God.
And they say that the common notion that atheists, unlike believers, lack a sense of meaning in life and are without values and morality is incorrect. The idea of the “purposeless unbeliever” is a myth, they say.
But their claim about atheists outnumbering believers in God in Britain may prove controversial.
At a talk at London’s Conway Hall on Tuesday, held to mark publication of the interim results of the three-year study, Exploring Atheism, Dr Lois Lee highlighted figures compiled from British Social Attitudes Surveys.
They showed that 41.8 per cent of people said they believed in God in 2008, dropping to 37.4 per cent in 2018. In 2008, 35.2 per cent said they did not believe in God, which rose to 42.9 per cent in 2018.
Meanwhile figures from the Census of England and Wales, showed that 22.2 per cent of people said they had no religion in 2011, rising to 37.2 per cent in 2021, so still substantially outnumbered by people who belong to different religions.
The disparity, Dr Lee says, can be explained because many people who are atheist do not admit to it in surveys, and the academic team had taken that into consideration when making their claim regarding the first atheist age.
There had been “a tug of war”, she told the Conway Hall audience, with some academics in sociology and elsewhere claiming that one in six people who say they are not religious actually still believe in God.
The smaller numbers of people in the census saying they have no religion, she said, had been shown by academics to be because of its place in the questions. “In the census the question about religion comes immediately after the question about your national identity. In the census data we’re getting a sense of what people think it means to be British and in that case it leads them to prioritise their Christian identity.”
But in the Social Attitudes Survey, she said, “questions about religion and belief don’t have this kind of primer”.
What was important, said Dr Lee, was “taking seriously that there are large numbers of people in this country who have no belief in God and some of the conversations around non-religion have devalued that. We have a huge number of atheists and it’s worth having this conversation.”
Dr Aiyana Willard, a psychologist from Brunel University who also worked on Exploring Atheism, said: “There’s a lot of people who will claim to be Christian, but say they don’t believe in God. There are people who like being part of a church but don’t believe in God.”
This cultural religion, Dr Willard said, was particularly evident in countries such as Ireland and Poland with strong Roman Catholic identities.
The Exploring Atheism team also included the principal investigator, Professor Jonathan Lanman from Queen’s University, Belfast; Dr Connair Russell from Queen’s; Professor Stephen Bullivant from St Mary’s University, Twickenham; and Dr Miguel Farias from Coventry University. It was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Dr Willard told the Conway Hall audience that there was one outstanding reason why people do not believe in God — if it is absent from their education.
The Exploring Atheism team carried out two surveys to find out what was behind lack of belief in God. “Not learning to be religious is what counts,” she said, while common explanations for why people believe in God or not, such as intelligence, fear of death, or need for structure, did not live up to empirical scrutiny.
Those who did not see their parents participate in religion, or were not taught about religion, tended to be atheist. If this non-religious socialisation included your parents mocking or disparaging religion, it also meant a child would grow up to be more anti-religious.
However, despite the growth in atheism in Britain and elsewhere in the world, being a non-believer is still viewed negatively, according to Dr Will Gervais, author of the newly published Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species. Even people who are not religiously strong, he said, seem to think having more atheists is a problem. “So, with surveys, people may be reluctant to admit they are atheists,” he told the audience.
One benefit of religion, the audience was told, was the ritual surrounding major rites of passage in life, such as dying. The actress and comedian Cariad Lloyd, who presents the Griefcast podcast about the experience of grief and death, and was part of the panel, said restrictions in the pandemic had brought home to her the importance of funeral rituals. “People were in agony when they could not be with the people they loved,” she said.
This was one of the benefits of religion, according to Chine McDonald, director of the Theos think tank, who was also on the Conway Hall panel. She said: “Religion has had hundreds of years to come up with rituals to deal with the major moments of life.”
While other members of the panel had talked about atheism still being perceived as bad, Ms McDonald said her experience was that nowadays “people think religion is weird”.
