Background Reading

The following publications informed the development of the Explaining Atheism programme and are provided here as a reading list for students and others interested in the study of atheism and its causes.

  • Balazka, D., Houtman, D., & Lepri, B. (2021). How can big data shape the field of nonreligion studies? And why does it matter?. Patterns, 2(6), 100263.

  • Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2007). Atheists: A psychological profile. Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Ed. Martin Marty. Cambridge University Press.

  • Boyer, P. (2010). The Fracture of an Illusion: Science and the Dissolution of Religion. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

  • Brown, A. (2014). Is the internet really killing religion in the USA? The Guardian. 8 April, 2014. 

  • Brown, C.G. (2010). What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?. Journal of Religious History, 34(4), pp.468-479.

  • Bullivant, S. (2014). ‘I Call You (Facebook) Friends: New Media and the New Evangelization’, in Martin Lintner (ed.), God in Question: Religious Language and Secular Languages (Brixen: Verlag Weger, 2014), 461-73.

  • Bullivant, S., Farias, M., Lanman, J.A., and Lee, L. (2019). Understanding Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics Around the World: Interim Findings from 2019 Research in Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Twickenham: St Mary's University, Twickenham.

  • Campbell, H.A. (2017). Surveying theoretical approaches within digital religion studies. New Media & Society, 19(1), 15-24.

  • Cragun, R., McCaffree, K., Puga-Gonzalez, I., Wildman, W., & Shults, F. L. (2021). Religious exiting and social networks: computer simulations of religious/secular pluralism. Secularism and Nonreligion, 10(1).

  • Downey, A.B. (2014). Religious affiliation, education and Internet use. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.5534.

  • Dudley, R.L. (1978). Alienation from religion in adolescents from fundamentalist religious homes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 389-398.

  • Farias, M., van Mulukom, V., Kahane, G., Kreplin, U., Joyce, A., Soares, P., ... & Möttönen, R. (2017). Supernatural belief is not modulated by intuitive thinking style or cognitive inhibition. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1-8.

  • Fox, J. & Tabory, E. (2008). Contemporary evidence regarding the impact of state regulation of religion on religious participation and belief. Sociology of Religion, 245-271.

  • Gervais, W.M., & Najle, M.B. (2018). How many atheists are there?. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(1), 3-10.

  • Gervais, W.M., van Elk, M., Xygalatas, D., McKay, R.T., Aveyard, M., Buchtel, E.E., ... & Bulbulia, J. (2018). Analytic atheism: A cross-culturally weak and fickle phenomenon?. Judgment and Decision Making, 13(3), 268-274. 

  • Guthrie, S.E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.

  • Henrich, J., Heine, S.J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

  • Hitchcock, C. (2018). Probabilistic Causation. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

  • Hunsberger, B.E., and Altemeyer, B. (2006). Atheists: A groundbreaking study of America’s nonbelievers. Prometheus Books.

  • Jacquet, P.O., Pazhoohi, F., Findling, C., Mell, H., Chevallier, C., & Baumard, N. (2021). Predictive modeling of religiosity, prosociality, and moralizing in 295,000 individuals from European and non-European populations. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1), 1-12.

  • Kay, A.C., Gaucher, D., Napier, J.L., Callan, M.J. and Laurin, K., (2008). God and the government: testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1), p.18.

  • Kelemen, D., & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition, 111(1), 138-143.

  • Lanman, J.A. (2009). A secular mind: towards a cognitive anthropology of Atheism (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, UK).

  • Lanman, J.A. (2012). On the Non-Evolution of Atheism and the Importance of Definitions and Data. Religion, Brain, and Behavior, 2: 76-78.

  • Lanman, J.A. (2016). A Cognitive Perspective Helps Make the Scientific Study of Atheism Possible. Nonreligion & Secularity Research Network blog.

  • Lanman, J.A. and Buhrmester, M.D. (2017). Religious actions speak louder than words: Exposure to credibility-enhancing displays predicts theism. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 7(1), pp.3-16.

  • LeDrew, S. (2016). The evolution of atheism: The politics of a modern movement. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

  • Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Lifshitz, M., van Elk, M., & Luhrmann, T.M. (2019). Absorption and spiritual experience: A review of evidence and potential mechanisms. Consciousness and Cognition, 73, 102760.

  • Lindeman, M., van Elk, M., Lipsanen, J., Marin, P., & Schjødt, U. (2019). Religious unbelief in three western European countries: Identifying and characterizing unbeliever types using latent class analysis. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 29(3), 184-203.

  • Luhrmann, T.M., Weisman, K., Aulino, F., Brahinsky, J.D., Dulin, J. C., Dzokoto, V.A., … & Smith, R.E. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(5).

  • McClure, P. (2016). Faith and Facebook in a Pluralistic Age: The Effects of Social Networking Sites on the Religious Beliefs of Emerging Adults. Sociological Perspectives, 59/4, 818-34.

  • McClure, P. (2017). Tinkering with Technology and Religion in the Digital Age: The Effects of Internet Use on Religious Belief, Behavior, and Belonging. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56 (3): 481-97.

  • Mocan, N., & Pogorelova, L. (2017). Compulsory schooling laws and formation of beliefs: Education, religion and superstition. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 142, 509-539.

  • Norenzayan, A., Gervais, W.M. and Trzesniewski, K.H., (2012). Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal God. PloS One, 7(5).

  • Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Olson, D.V., Marshall, J., Jung, J.H., & Voas, D. (2020). Sacred Canopies or Religious Markets? The Effect of County‐Level Religious Diversity on Later Changes in Religious Involvement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 59(2), 227-246.

  • Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J.A., Seli, P., Koehler, D.J., & Fugelsang, J.A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335-346.

  • Possamai-Inesedy, A., & Nixon, A. (Eds.). (2019). The digital social: religion and belief (Vol. 69). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

  • Sheard, M. (2014). ‘Ninety-eight atheists: Atheism among the non-elite in twentieth century Britain’. Secularism and Nonreligion, 3 (6): 1-16.

  • Shariff, A.F., Cohen, A.B., & Norenzayan, A. (2008). The devil’s advocate: Secular arguments diminish both implicit and explicit religious belief. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(3-4), 417-423.

  • Smolkin, V. (2018). A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton University Press.

  • Sosis, R. (2009). The adaptationist-byproduct debate on the evolution of religion: Five misunderstandings of the adaptationist program. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3-4), pp.315-332.

  • Stolz, J. (2020). Secularization theories in the twenty-first century: Ideas, evidence, and problems. Presidential address. Social Compass, 67(2), 282-308.

  • Strhan, A. & Shillitoe, R. (2019). The Stickiness of Non-Religion? Intergenerational Transmission and the Formation of Non-Religious Identities in Childhood. Sociology, 53 (6): 1094-1110.

  • Taira, T. (2021). ‘The Internet and the Social Media Revolution’, in Michael Ruse and Stephen Bullivant (eds), The Cambridge History of Atheism (New York: Cambridge University Press).

  • Taves, A. (2013). Building blocks of sacralities. Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, pp.138-161.

  • Turner, J. (1985). Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

  • Turpin, H. (2018). ‘Failing God? A Cognitive Anthropological Examination of the Relationship Between Catholic Scandals and Irish Secularisation’, unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and University of Aarhus, Denmark.

  • Vitz, P.C. (2013). Faith of the fatherless: The psychology of atheism. Ignatius Press.

  • Waytz, A., Cacioppo, J. and Epley, N., (2010). Who sees human? The stability and importance of individual differences in anthropomorphism. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(3), pp.219-232.

  • Weinberger, A.B., Gallagher, N.M., Warren, Z.J., English, G.A., Moghaddam, F.M., & Green, A.E. (2020). Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan. Nature Communications, 11(1), 1-12.

  • Whitehouse, H. & Lanman, J.A. (2014). The ties that bind us: Ritual, fusion, and identification. Current Anthropology, 55(60): pp.674-695.

  • Willard, A.K., & Cingl, L. (2017). Testing theories of secularization and religious belief in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(5), 604-615.

  • Willard, A.K., Cingl, L., & Norenzayan, A. (2020). Cognitive biases and religious belief: A path model replication in the Czech Republic and Slovakia with a focus on anthropomorphism. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(1), 97-106.

  • Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J.A. (2013). The relation between intelligence and religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 325-354.

  • Zuckerman, P. (2011). Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Zuckerman, P., Galen, L.W., & Pasquale, F.L. (2016). The nonreligious: Understanding secular people and societies. Oxford University Press.