Probing the non-believers
Religion itself leads some people to become
atheists, survey suggests
By Mirko Petricevic
(Originally published October 23, 2004)
Some San Francisco atheists observe a peculiar annual ritual.
On the summer solstice each year they carry Bibles to a city park and see who
can throw them the farthest.
"They brag about it," Bob Altemeyer told a crowd at Wilfrid Laurier University
last week.
Many in the Waterloo audience chuckled at the thought of it.
Others sat stone-faced.
U.S. atheists are a small but mighty bunch, Altemeyer, a University of Manitoba
psychology professor, told 200 people during a Psychology of Atheism and
Religion symposium.
Altemeyer conducted studies with Bruce Hunsberger, the late chairman of WLU's
psychology department, who often researched the sociology of religion and
prejudice.
Hunsberger died last year and the symposium was the first in a series of
memorial events at the university.
"Atheist organizations have had a profound impact upon American society,"
Altemeyer said. "Despite the fact that there are not very many of them and
they're usually very very tiny."
They have launched court actions to stop organized prayer in public schools and
are trying to have a reference to God struck from the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.
They're also trying to get the words "In God We Trust" deleted from U.S.
currency.
At the lecture, Altemeyer unveiled some findings from a 2002 study in which he
and Hunsberger surveyed atheists and religious fundamentalists to learn about
their religious history as well as levels of dogmatism, zealotry and prejudice.
The results are to be published in a book next year.
Altemeyer said he and Hunsberger were both raised in religious families, but
became agnostics later in life.
Of 332 atheists surveyed, 256 belonged to atheist clubs in the San Francisco Bay
area of California. Another 28 were members of clubs in Idaho and Alabama. The
rest, who were not necessarily members of any organized atheist groups, were
from Manitoba.
Altemeyer said he and Hunsberger tried to survey religious fundamentalists in
the United States as well, but couldn't find any groups that would agree to be
surveyed.
So instead, they surveyed parents of psychology students at the University of
Manitoba, noting those they judged to be the most atheist and those they judged
to be the most religiously fundamentalist.
Nearly all the fundamentalists were Christians. Two were Muslims.
"They aren't by any means representative of religious people in general,"
Altemeyer said. "These are extremely religious people."
Likewise, the American atheists surveyed were not representative of all atheists
in America.
Overall, the active American atheists in the study tended to be older men with
lots of education. Only about three per cent said they voted Republican.
RELIGIOUS ROOTS
By and large, the atheists surveyed by Altemeyer and Hunsberger were raised in
non-religious families. About 30 per cent had at least one parent who didn't
believe in God, Altemeyer said.
"Atheists spawn atheists."
But surprisingly, about 75 per cent said they had believed in God at one point
-- usually as children.
"They believed not just for a week or a day, but for years."
They didn't get this belief in God from their parents. They usually absorbed it
from the broader society, Altemeyer said.
Then when they became teenagers, they started questioning many of their beliefs.
When it came to figuring out if God exists, some asked for help from devout
relatives or religious
leaders.
"This, almost always according to the atheists, was responded to in a bad way,"
Altemeyer said. "The authorities said, 'If you don't believe, that's too bad.
You just have to believe.' "
But the budding non-believers were looking for more compelling answers.
The two most common factors for abandoning their faith were that the religion
itself convinced them the church's claims couldn't be true and that science was
taught them things they couldn't reconcile with religious teachings.
"They wanted really with all their might to believe, to continue to believe in
God . . . but they
just couldn't make themselves do it."
Altemeyer and Hunsberger wondered why the atheists would choose to become
atheists - a group that are vilified at times.
Altemeyer said he and Hunsberger thought that for those atheists raised with
religion, it was religion itself that planted seeds for future atheism.
If you are raised in a denomination which claims to be the true church,
Altemeyer said, it's difficult for a person to stay in the church if they don't
believe its teachings to be true.
"The love of the truth is put there, in part, by the religion itself," he said.
"It backfired."
DOGMATISM
Altemeyer and Hunsberger developed questions in an effort to measure how
dogmatic respondents were. If you're really dogmatic, nothing will change your
mind, Altemeyer said.
Those who are less dogmatic are more willing to alter their beliefs when
confronted with evidence.
To give an example, he noted results from a previous survey he conducted with
university psychology students.
When they were shown contradicting accounts of the Resurrection in the four
Gospels of the Bible, Altemeyer said, "the true believers who were highly
dogmatic said: 'I don't care what it says in the Bible, the Bible's completely
true. There are no inconsistencies there.' "
In Altemeyer's and Hunsberger's last survey, American atheists had relatively
high levels of dogmatism.
About half of the San Francisco atheists surveyed (51 per cent) said they
couldn't think of anything that could make them believe in God.
That surprised Altemeyer and Hunsberger, because they had perceived a low level
of dogmatism in atheists in their earlier research.
But the results are understandable.
"It's the true believers who are likely to become active. So when you sample
active atheists you're going to find a lot of dogmatism there."
By comparison, 100 per cent of the religious fundamentalists in the survey said
they couldn't think of anything that would shake their faith in the Lord.
ZEALOTRY
Altemeyer and Hunsberger also tried to measure the level of zealousness of those
surveyed.
They asked the atheists if they would attempt to steer, toward atheism, a
teenager who was questioning his or her faith in God.
Thirty-eight to 42 per cent of the U.S. atheists said they would.
But 88 per cent of religious Manitoba fundamentalists surveyed said they would
try to evangelize to an atheist teenager.
While the vast majority of atheists in the survey indicated they wanted their
children to make up their own minds about the existence of God, Altemeyer said,
94 per cent of the religious conservatives said they had tried to pass their
beliefs on to their children.
And while 84 per cent of the strong Christians surveyed said they would like to
see Christianity taught in public schools, less than one-third of the U.S.
atheists surveyed said they supported atheism being taught in school.
"They just don't have missionary zeal," Altemeyer said.
PREJUDICE
U.S. atheists in the survey indicated high levels of prejudice, especially
toward Christian fundamentalists.
"The atheists . . . dislike fundamentalists more than the fundamentalists
dislike atheists."
But the atheists didn't just dislike Christian fundamentalists who might have
historically made the atheists' lives difficult. They also strongly disliked
Jewish fundamentalists, who probably wouldn't have had much impact on their
lives.
But overall among the people surveyed, Altemeyer said, if a group was more
religious, it was also more dogmatic, more politically conservative and more
prejudiced against homosexuals and ethnic groups.
"These are usually not good things to be," he said.
"If it's true that high fundamentalists as a group seem to have more than their
share of prejudice, they ain't the only group like that."