The growth of atheism and agnosticism in three of Europe’s ethno-religious secularisation outliers
Co-Investigator
Dr. Will M. Gervais
Centre for Culture and Evolution
Brunel University London
Co-Investigator
Dr. Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
Institute of Sociology
Bialystok University
Start and end dates: 1 November 2022 – 30 June 2024
Award: £172,816
Understanding unbelief requires an assessment of the differing trajectories of secularisation in different cultural contexts — why have atheism and non-belief more rapidly stabilized in some countries than in others? With this in mind, we propose to examine atheism and agnosticism in three of Europe’s former ‘secularisation outliers’: Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Poland. In these countries, unusually high levels of religious belief and affiliation seemed to have been preserved against a broader backdrop of soaring European religious indifference (e.g. Voas 2009; Brown 2012). Understanding the dynamics underlying delayed secularisation in these countries is vital for developing and testing theories of secularism and non-belief, yet with few exceptions little available literature addresses the growth of atheism and agnosticism in three of Europe’s ethno-religious secularisation outliers, other than by merely noting that they are outliers (e.g. Taylor, 2007). Specifically, we aim to develop and test a theoretical model which posits that:
1) Prosperity and existential security generally lead to religious indifference and a decline in practice, which
2) eventually makes way for out-and-out atheism, as cultural learners no longer grow up witnessing potent credibility enhancing cues of faith, but that
3) exceptional rates of ethno-nationalism fused with religious identity in the secularisation outlier countries may have buoyed religious fervour and practice above rates expected by existential security alone, until
4) recent historical dynamics (e.g., EU membership, tensions generated between entrenched religious influence and liberalising populaces in all three, with supplementary factors such as Church scandals in Ireland or declining ethnoreligious outgroup threat in Northern Ireland) led to rapid disaffiliation and a general dissatisfaction with religiosity as core to national identity, which has led to rapid secularisation that is quickly eroding the outlier status of these places.
This model parsimoniously combines work linking existential security to secularisation and work identifying a lack of credibility enhancing displays as a key contributor to atheism (e.g. Henrich 2009; Norris & Inglehart 2011; Lanman 2012; Bullivant 2019), while offering a novel and consilient account for why these countries have appeared more religious than expected for decades (e.g. Martin, 1978), but are now rapidly losing their outlier status.
The trajectories of our three field sites over the past two decades indicate that they are ideal places to study this unwinding of ethno-national religiosity. Over the past twenty years, Ireland has secularised with unusual speed and much of the institutional influence of the Church has been extirpated in a series of public referenda (e.g. O’Toole 2021). In Poland, the conservative political entrenchment of Church power — occurring at the same time as the youngest generations have become irreligious — has led to a political backlash among young and urban demographics (Mishtal 2015), leading to the polarisation of society as exemplified by the world’s fastest growth in ‘convinced atheism’ when last measured in 2018 (WinGallup 2018). Finally, after over two decades of peace, Northern Irish tribal-religious identities appear to be softening, with recent surveys suggesting ‘no religion’ is now the fastest growing and second-largest demographic (Northern Ireland Life and Times 2020). At the same time, these societies differ in the salience of theocratic threat to nascent secular values, which are thought to be characterised cross-culturally by an orientation towards liberal individual choice norms over pronatalist traditionalism (Inglehart 2021). In Ireland, religious threat is receding (potentially leading to declines in strong atheism and a growth in religious indifference), in Poland it is growing (potentially leading to the opposite), and in Northern Ireland it appears to be experienced differently by the two main religious traditions (putatively leading to a bifurcation between strongly atheistic former Protestants and ‘culturally religious’ Catholic agnostics – Ganiel & Turpin 2017). These dynamics across sites offer unique opportunities to explore emerging nonreligious identities, while developing and testing broad theories of the emergence of agnosticism and atheism.
We will examine the transformations taking place in these societies with a mixed methods approach involving qualitative interviews with agnostics, atheists and nominally affiliated but religiously indifferent individuals in each society; analyses of existing survey data; and theoretically designed and methodologically refined nationally representative surveys. This methodological triangulation will allow us to gain new insight into the causal forces underlying the rapid emergence and spread of nontheistic worldviews under conditions of entrenched ethno-national religiosity often thought to retard the process of secularization (Martin, 1978). In particular, we hypothesise that agnosticism may be a strategy for retaining social bonds with more religious others — a sort of soft exit from religious belief and dogma that allows people to nonetheless preserve social identities — while atheism may be a symbol of one’s outright rejection of religious social and political influence. Strong atheism may therefore equally mark the rejection of compromise stances such as ‘tolerant’ agnosticism or culturally-religious ‘apatheism’ (Norenzayan & Gervais 2013) as much as of religion. This means that as well as looking at how nontheistic world views relate to the surrounding religious culture, we will also look at how distinct nontheistic worldviews and identities causally relate to one another — an unexplored dimension in current literature on secularisation and nontheism.
