Understanding Unbelief

Understanding Unbelief (UU) was a £2.3m research programme investigating the nature and diversity of religious ‘unbelief’ as a global and multifaceted phenomenon. It ran between 2017 and 2021 at the University of Kent, led by Dr. Lois Lee in collaboration with Professor Stephen Bullivant (St Mary’s University Twickenham), Dr. Miguel Farias (Coventry University) and Dr. Jonathan Lanman (Queens University Belfast). It was enabled by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation (#60624).

Our research has been shared around the world, including the Cultures of Unbelief conference held in Rome in May 2019. Cultures of Unbelief was run in partnership with the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first ever academic conference examining religious ‘unbelief’ as well as the 10th anniversary of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network’s first conference at the University of Oxford.

UU implemented the first major interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research programme ‘mapping’ atheism, agnosticism and other forms of ‘non-believing’ around the world.

It used grant funding to generate multidisciplinary research into diverse forms of unbelief across demographic groups and cultural settings, funding 20 affiliated projects.

We also undertook core interdisciplinary research working across these forms, groups, and settings to build a more integrated understanding of unbelief in a central research project called Understanding Unbelief: Across Disciplines, Across Cultures (ADAC). ADAC involved 180 in-depth interviews and large-scale surveys across 6 countries: Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, UK and US.

We also funded a number of outreach projects led by creatives, curators and content makers aimed at building public engagement with questions and issues around non-belief.

Together, this work spanned 25 countries, produced some 300 outputs and counting, and provided the first scientifically coherent account of ‘unbelief’ and what it means to be an ‘unbeliever’. Understanding Unbelief has transformed what we know about atheism, and how academics and wider publics engage with it. The advances it has initiated have led to a new major research programme, Explaining Atheism (JTF, 2022-2024), which builds on UU findings to explore new and equally significant questions about the many different ‘atheisms’ that Understanding Unbelief has charted.