3

Meet the Nonbelievers

Picture an atheist. If you’re like most Americans, you’re picturing a middle-aged white guy complaining angrily about religion. Even if you are an atheist yourself, one who is neither white nor a guy nor angry, you still might picture that, and think of yourself as an exception.

In fact, most atheists don’t fit this stereotype, just as most Christians are not like Fred Phelps or Pat Robertson. The previous chapter unpacked that religious stereotype. This chapter does the same for nonbelievers, introducing them as they much more commonly are. By the end of the chapter it should be less unthinkable that a nonbeliever could be in a loving and supportive marriage with a religious believer.

The opinions we form about other people, especially groups with whom we have little personal contact, are largely shaped by the “news paradox” I described in Chapter 1. Many people think of nonbelievers as hostile and unpleasant because they see atheists only when they are hostile and unpleasant. Conflict drives the news, so atheists are mostly in the news when they are fighting against a cross on public land or a prayer at a city council meeting. If the only time you see atheists is when they are angry about religion, it’s natural to think of atheists as cranky people who spend all of their time and energy opposing religion—and therefore as unlikely to marry a religious person.

Some nonbelievers fit that description perfectly, but most do not—something confirmed by recent research that we’ll get to shortly. And just as religious believers often overestimate the intolerance and scriptural literalism in their own ranks, it turns out nonbelievers do very much the same thing, taking the more extreme, angry, uncompromising public advocates of atheism to be representative of their own group—and as a result having a pretty low opinion of their own group.

A Crisis of Collective Self-Esteem

The groundbreaking Faith Matters Survey of 2006¹ provides terrific insight into attitudes between belief groups. Researchers Robert Putnam and David Campbell developed a “feeling thermometer” to measure how “warm” various religious perspectives feel toward each other. The results are fascinating. People of almost every perspective tend to have warm feelings toward Mainline Protestants and Jews, while almost every perspective is cool toward Muslims and Buddhists. Mormons like everybody else, but almost everybody else dislikes Mormons. Almost everyone likes Catholics more than Catholics like them back. And on it goes.

The survey also shows how the members of each group feel about their own group. Mormons have the highest self-image (a warmth rating of 87 out of 100), while those who identify as “not religious” have the lowest selfimage (59). In fact, the nonreligious rate themselves lower than either Jews or Mormons rate them—64 and 61, respectively.

It isn’t hard to guess the reason. Most nonbelievers don’t identify with the more combative and confrontational public face of religious disbelief. Like believers distancing themselves from religious intolerance, these nonbelievers often resent being lumped in with the more combative voices and want to distance themselves from them.

What they often fail to realize is that they, not the high-profile spokespeople, represent the norm for nonbelief. The nice guys, the coexisters, the average Joes and Josies are the vast majority of the nonreligious.

It was hard to confirm such a thing until recently. Although religious believers have been studied from every angle, nonbelievers as a distinct group have been mostly ignored by researchers. When they are included in survey categories, atheists and agnostics are usually lumped into a vast category called the “Nones”—those who when asked what their religion is say, “None.”

The “Nones” category is almost meaningless. A lot of people who claim no specific label—most, in fact—still hold many traditional religious beliefs. A good friend of mine believes in God, believes that salvation is attainable only through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, prays daily, and has painted Psalm texts scrolling around the border of her living room ceiling—but describes herself as nonreligious, and therefore counts as a “None.”

A belief category that includes both me and my praying, Psalmscrolling friend isn’t going to add much to our understanding of the texture and variety of actual nonbelief.

Fortunately, as the profile and number of nonbelievers have grown, researchers have begun to paint a more complete picture of that specific category. And it turns out that nonbelievers on average are less extreme and more diverse than almost anyone thought—even the nonbelievers themselves.

The Variety of Nonbelievers

After decades clinging to the fringes of the cultural tapestry, atheists and agnostics have swooned to see the “Nones” category that includes them growing by leaps and bounds—from 8% in 1990 to 19.6% in 2012.² One in five Americans claim no religious affiliation.

But Dr. Christopher Silver and Thomas Coleman, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, knew that a category lumping believers and nonbelievers together is a double-edged sword. It gives nonbelievers membership in the fastest-growing piece of the cultural pie, but it also makes it harder to say anything meaningful about nonbelief in America.

Talking about the “Nones” is a bit like talking about “African culture”—as if an Egyptian businesswoman, an Aka villager, and a South African footballer have any real commonality beyond their shared humanity and the continent on which they’re standing.

So Silver and Coleman created a study to drill down into religious disbelief in America, to get beyond both the cartoon of the angry atheist and the vague mush of the “Nones” to a better understanding of the true variety of nonbelievers. Their results provide one of the bright, gleaming keys to understanding why marriages between believers and nonbelievers so often succeed, as well as why they sometimes fail.

Silver and Coleman knew from their own experiences with atheists and agnostics that they are not all alike. Their 2013 study, which surveyed more than 1,100 nonbelievers, provided the best description to date of just how that variety plays out.

“The only thing all of our participants had in common was that they do not believe in a God,” said Silver. “It’s what they do or don’t do with that nonbelief—how it functions and exists in their lives—that ranges on an extremely wide spectrum.”³

In the end, Silver and Coleman identified six basic types of nonbelievers:⁴

1. The Academic

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

—Thomas Henry Huxley, agnostic biologist⁵

Intellectual activities like reading, discussion, and healthy debate are at the heart (or brain) of the Academic Atheist’s self-image. They prefer to associate with others who have the same intellectual approach to life, even if their opinions are different, as long as they are well informed. They often engage with others, both online and in person, around topics of mutual interest, including skepticism and freethought.

Academics made up 37.6% of the nonbelievers in the study—more than one in three.

2. The Activist

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.

—Susan B. Anthony, activist agnostic⁶

Activist Atheist/Agnostics aren’t content with simply holding a nonbelief position, and they don’t just want to explore ideas intellectually. They want to change the world. It’s not just atheist-related issues they’re interested in. They are engaged in the struggle for civil rights (including feminism and LGBT rights), environmental concerns, animal rights, and other prominent social issues. In the words of the researchers, Activist Atheist/Agnostics “are not idle; they effectuate their interests and beliefs.” They are often willing to ally themselves with other movements with whom they share a common interest.

Nearly one in four nonbelievers in the study (23%) were classified as the Activist type.

3. The Seeker-Agnostic

I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there’s something that put us all here—some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.

—American filmmaker Mark Romanek⁷

Seeker-Agnostics recognize that it’s hard to make confident statements about metaphysical beliefs. They see open-mindedness as a major virtue, recognize the limits of human knowledge and experience, and embrace uncertainty. They actively search for and respond to knowledge and evidence, and they don’t hold a firm ideological position. Instead, they tend to search for what the researchers called the “scientifically wondrous” and for “profound confirmation of life’s meaning.” They accept and welcome the diversity of others.

Some Seeker-Agnostics say they miss being a believer in some way, whether the social benefits, or the emotional ones, or the connection it gave them to friends and family. Some continue to identify as religious or spiritual, even though they do not believe in God.

Seeker-Agnostics made up 7.6% of the respondents—about 1 in 13.

4. The Anti-Theist

I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

—Christopher Hitchens, journalist⁸

When most people think of nonbelievers, they picture the Anti-Theist. The Anti-Theist doesn’t just disbelieve religious claims but is actively, diametrically, and categorically opposed to them and to the influence they have on the world. In the words of the researchers, the Anti-Theist “proactively and aggressively” asserts his or her view, challenging religious ideology as dangerous ignorance that harms human dignity and well-being, and tends to see individuals associated with religion as “backward and socially detrimental.” Some Anti-Theists are more assertive than others, but their opinions on religion are rarely a mystery to those around them. Many of the most prominent and well-known voices in modern atheism, including Christopher Hitchens, are best described as Anti-Theists.

Even though they are often seen as the “typical” atheist, Anti-Theists made up only 14.8% of the nonbelievers in the survey—one in seven.

5. The Non-Theist

[T]he rise of apatheism … should not be assumed to represent a lazy recumbency … Just the opposite: it is the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement.

—Jonathan Rauch, journalist⁹

What Silver and Coleman call the Non-Theist commonly goes by another name: the “apatheist,” or apathetic nonbeliever. This is someone who does not believe but also doesn’t care about religious belief, or orga nized atheism, or the raging debates between the two. As the researchers put it, “They simply do not believe, and in the same right, their absence of faith means the absence of anything religious in any form from their mental space.”

“Those who self-identified as our ‘Non-Theist’ typology could not care less about religion or their own atheism,” said Coleman. Compared to the Anti-Theist, they represent the opposite end of the spectrum of engagement. “For [the Non-Theists], apathy is the name of the game.”

This was the smallest group in the study—just 4.4%.

6. The Ritual Atheist/Agnostic

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. … [But] I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

—Alain de Botton, atheist philosopher¹⁰

The Ritual Atheist/Agnostic doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife but finds some rituals or other traditions, even those associated with religion, to be beautiful or useful. It might be something rooted in Eastern religions, like yoga or meditation, but just as often they find beauty and meaning in the traditions of their own culture or family. An atheist who was raised Anglican and still loves the incense and pageantry of the High Church liturgy, despite abandoning the beliefs behind them, is a Ritual Atheist.

Though sometimes thought of as “spiritual but not religious,” the Ritual Atheist/Agnostic is usually quick to clarify that he or she holds no supernatural or spiritual beliefs at all. Even if the rituals and teachings are found emotionally moving and meaningful, they are still seen as having an entirely natural, human point of origin.

Ritual Atheist/Agnostics comprised 12.5% of respondents—one in eight.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. After figuring out who was who and how many were of each type, Silver and Coleman ran the subjects through some well-known psychological tests:

→ The Ryff Scales, which measure things like autonomy, self-acceptance, the ability to establish quality ties with other people, and a sense of purpose

→ The Rokeach Dogmatism Scale, which measures the degree of a person’s closed-mindedness and inflexibility

→ The Multidimensional Anger Inventory, which measures such things as the subject’s frequency, duration, and magnitude of anger

→ The NEO (Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness) Inventory, which measures … well, I think you can sort that one out

They then compared the results to the six types and found some fascinating correlations:

→ Ritual Atheists scored highest in “positive relations with others”—and lowest in dogmatism.

→ Activists scored highest in “openness to experience”—and lowest in narcissism (self-centeredness).

→ Academics had the lowest anger score.¹¹

A nonbeliever with these qualities is more likely to make a successful marriage with a religious believer than one without these qualities.

When I asked Dr. Silver which of the nonbeliever types he thought would be most likely to do well in a secular/religious marriage, he didn’t hesitate to reply. “If we had to speculate on the very best-suited type, it would be the Ritual Atheist/Agnostic. This group even reports that they value some religious teachings and may even participate in some rituals themselves. If you are a Christian, you might find an extremely easy time getting along with the RAA; in fact they might be sitting next to you in church!”¹²

Not that RAAs are the only nonbelievers likely to succeed in such a marriage. Far from it. Four of the other five types also bring clear strengths and compatibilities to a match with a religious believer, including Academics (lowest in anger) and Activists (most open to experience).

But when it comes to qualities that would make an atheist much less marriageable to a religious partner, one type corners the market: the Anti-Theist. Anti-Theists scored lowest on positive relations with others, lowest on “agreeableness,” and highest in narcissism, dogmatism, and anger.

“It’s safe to say that they would not tend to get along well in a marriage or relationship with a religious believer,” says Silver. “But it’s important to note that this Anti-Theist group makes up less than 15% of our sample. In terms of building a harmonious mixed-belief relationship, the outlook improves significantly for the other 85%.”¹³

Just as with religious belief, the point of all this is not to pass judgment on any part of the spectrum of nonbelief—only to illustrate that the spectrum does exist and that it’s very wide. In fact, rather than demonize Anti-Theists, the researchers make the important point that “anger and relative dogmatism … may be proper psychological responses” when you consider the life experiences of a given Anti-Theist—especially when it comes to religion. Silver and Coleman said that many of the Anti-Theists in their study had recently deconverted from religious belief and were often still experiencing negative effects as a result, including high tension and conflict, up to and including the loss of relationships.

“If we take on the perspective of a recent deconvert from a conservative religious tradition to atheism,” said Coleman, “it may be easy to see how this small sub-segment is, and perhaps deserves to be, angry.”¹⁴

But most nonbelievers don’t have those issues. They haven’t had a painful separation from religion, or in some cases any separation at all, and they haven’t encountered other reasons to be especially angry at or about religion. “Our research showed over 85% of the nonbelievers sampled are more or less your ‘average Joe,’” said Silver. “When it comes to being angry, argumentative, and dogmatic, they fall right in line with current societal norms.”¹⁵

Silver concludes by noting that “there really is no ‘atheist identity.’ In the same way that religious people may or may not structure their lives around their belief in God, atheists may or may not structure their lives around not believing in God.”¹⁶ That doesn’t mean the less centrally focused people are not “really” religious or not “really” nonreligious. But they are less likely to encounter difficult hurdles in marrying across the belief gap than those whose identity is more tightly focused on the very element that defines that gap.

Now, About That Dogmatism …

Sometimes an atheist who’s loud and confident in his critiques of religion is accused of being “as dogmatic as any fundamentalist.” The atheist will sometimes counter that he can’t be dogmatic because atheism doesn’t have any dogmas.

Fortunately, “dogmatic” has an actual definition—even though neither of these people seems to know what it is.

Dogma is an idea or principle that is to be accepted without question. Dogmatism, then, is the idea that your opinions or beliefs can’t be questioned. To put it even more simply, it describes a person’s unwillingness to allow that he or she might be wrong. It has nothing to do with how loud or confident you are, and it doesn’t matter if the belief is formally inscribed somewhere or you’re the only one on earth who holds it. All that matters is your own willingness to say, no matter how confident you are, that you might be wrong.

A religious person can be dogmatic if he dismisses even the remotest possibility that he could be wrong. And an atheist can be dogmatic for precisely the same reason—if she allows her confident opinions to lapse over into rock-solid, immovable certainty.

For their pioneering study of atheists in America, Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger included a measure of dogmatic thinking called the DOG scale—20 statements that assess how rigidly a person’s opinions are held.¹⁷ Not just religious opinions—the DOG scale doesn’t even mention religion. It’s about opinions generally. Among the 20 statements are the following:

→ There are so many things we have not discovered yet, nobody should be absolutely certain his beliefs are right.

→ I am so sure I am right about the important things in life, there is no evidence that could convince me otherwise.

→ It is best to be open to all possibilities, and ready to re-evaluate all your beliefs.

→ The people who disagree with me may well turn out to be right.

→ People who disagree with me are just plain wrong, and often evil as well.

Respondents are asked to rate each statement on a scale from −4 (strongly disagree) to +4 (strongly agree). As you can see, some of the statements indicate a tendency to think dogmatically, whereas others indicate the opposite.

Someone without a dogmatic bone in her body would score 20 points, while someone who pins the dogmatic needle on every statement would register 180 points. A score of 100 would sit right on the fence. When the researchers gave the DOG scale test to a group of religious fundamentalists in Manitoba, for example, the average result was 126. That’s well into dogmatic territory, though it still doesn’t pin the needle.

And how did the American atheists in the study do?

Altemeyer and Hunsberger said they were “startled” when the atheists in the study came in at an average of 88. That’s still on the less-dogmatic side, but not by as much as you might think.

They then followed up with a more religion-specific question: “What would be required, what would have to happen, for you to believe in the ‘traditional’ God? … Are there conceivable events, or evidence, that would lead you to believe?”

Even an atheist who has spent a lifetime examining the existing evidence and concluding that God does not exist should be able to conceive of some new evidence that would convince him to change his mind. Almost exactly half of the respondents were able to come up with something that would do, whether “universal brotherhood” or the physical, visible appearance of a supernatural being before them, or “a clear, undisputable miracle.” These are nondogmatic answers. The respondents highly doubt any such thing will ever happen, but if it did, against all odds, they would change their minds.

But 51% of the respondents in the first round of the study, a group of atheists in California, said there was “absolutely nothing conceivable that could change their minds on the existence of the traditional God.”

The researchers were so surprised that they actually reworded the question for the next two groups they surveyed:

We found this level of closed-mindedness hard to believe, and suspected the wording of our question had not communicated our intention. So we reworked the item for the Alabama/Idaho sample, to make sure the informants knew we would take anything they would consider a test of the matter. Specifically, we inserted, “Is there absolutely nothing that could happen that would convince you? Or are there conceivable events—however unlikely or unprecedented—that would lead you to believe? What?” And 52% of the Alabama/Idaho atheists still said nothing would change their minds. Nothing.¹⁸

Even allowing that such events would be “unlikely or unprecedented,” more than half still said no evidence would be enough. If God himself appeared before them every day for a year and performed an incontrovertible miracle—suspending the laws of physics, let’s say, or causing the Cubs to win the World Series—they would remain unconvinced.

Now that’s dogmatic!

When the researchers inverted the question for that group of fundamentalists in Manitoba, asking what would have to happen to make them disbelieve in the traditional God, every last one of them, 100%, said nothing imaginable could do this. But that’s not too surprising—it is harder to prove a negative than a positive claim. The atheists should certainly be able to think of something that would suffice.

Altemeyer and Hunsberger offered a few guesses about why so many of the atheists in their sample would have such a high dogmatic score. Maybe the careful examination of beliefs most atheists undertake during their “deconversion” make them especially confident. Or maybe it’s a reaction to the suffering and marginalization many atheists endure in majority-religious cultures. But I think they missed the most likely explanation of all:

They polled only members of organized atheist groups.

Take it from a 15-year member of organized atheist groups—we’re not typical, even among atheists. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. The tiny fraction of nonbelievers (about 1%) who are sufficiently motivated by their worldview to gather with others who share that view will naturally tend to think more dogmatically than the 99% of atheists who are not affiliated with atheist groups.

Social scientists know that gathering with the like-minded can do some funny things to your opinions. As Cass Sunstein describes in Going to Extremes, those who surround themselves with others who hold the same opinions—social, political, religious, artistic, whatever—are more likely to hold those positions inflexibly and dogmatically, and to move toward the more extreme versions of the opinions they share.¹⁹ Obviously that’s not the case for everyone in these atheist groups, because nearly half gave nondogmatic responses. But it’s reasonable to assume that the general population of atheists would have a lower DOG score, just as the general population of the religious do. The Silver/Coleman typology seems to confirm that. They sampled a much broader cross section of the population, and all but the Anti-Theists had fairly low levels of dogmatic thinking.

Again, that bodes very well for the mix.

The Flipside of an Oxymoron: Atheists Who Believe in “God”

Atheists who cheered the idea of Catholic nonbelievers in the last chapter are now invited to consider the even stranger flipside: atheist believers. In the 2007 Pew Forum Religious Landscape survey, 21% of Americans calling themselves atheists say they also believe in the existence of God or a universal spirit.²⁰ This seems even less possible than the Catholic nonbeliever. “Catholic” can be defined as a cultural label, after all, but the word atheist translates literally to “without god.”

But no matter how much I’d like to insist that a given word means X, forever and always, language is slippery and variable. I could insist that a Unitar ian Universalist has to believe in one non-Trinitarian God (“Unitarian”) and that everyone goes to heaven (“Universalist”) because that’s what those words mean. But this would deny the fact that many or even most Unitarian Universalists today don’t believe in God or heaven at all—and all the dictionary waving in the world can’t convince them that they do.

Clearly the believing atheists in the Pew study have a different understanding of the word atheist than I do. But on closer examination, it makes a bit more sense. About three-fourths of those atheists say they believe in a “universal spirit,” something that isn’t necessarily the same as a god. That’s why “God” is in quotes in the heading to this section.

But it doesn’t explain everything. Even when you eliminate those universal spiritists, you’re still left with 6% of atheists saying they believe in a personal god. I don’t understand this myself, but you’ll notice they didn’t ask for my permission, and they don’t need it. No matter how a Godbelieving atheist violates my own sense of the possible, there they are, blurring the neat categorical boundaries with their messy reality.

Neat and clean categories make it easier to talk, but sometimes they can make it harder to understand what’s really going on. It’s much better to pay attention to the full spectrum of belief and disbelief than to force people into boxes that may not reflect where they really are—especially in a book like this one.

The Bottom Line: Seeing Nonbelievers More Clearly

The common assumption about the secular/religious marriage is that it’s a bad idea, a crossing of the streams that’s going to end badly. But just as the real picture of religious believers is encouraging for the mix, the more you understand the wide variety of nonbelievers, the more you see why they often form successful marriages with believers.

If most nonbelievers think that religion poisons everything it touches and that all religious believers are deluded fools, marriage between believers and nonbelievers would be a bad idea. But if most nonbelievers have a more nuanced opinion of religion and religious believers—feeling that some religious expressions are better than others; that at least some religious beliefs are respectable, even if they disagree with them; that you can be both religious and intelligent; that there might be beauty and utility in some religious traditions and rituals; and (perhaps most important of all) that they could conceivably be wrong in their own conclusions—then the conditions are present for a successful relationship between religious and nonreligious partners, especially when the religious partner shows the same promising, tolerant signs.

→ → →

Let’s be clear: Some mixed-belief marriages can be or can become unmitigated disasters. In fact, you are going to meet a number of couples in Part Two who simply could not make their marriages work, often for the reasons described in the next chapter. A mixed-belief marriage will probably require extensive work and communication to succeed—just as any marriage would—and that is the point. Contrary to the naysayers’ assertions, mixedbelief marriages have just as much chance of succeeding as any other union between two independent people. And that is cause for celebration.