Digging into Pew Research Center’s Latest Survey on Religious ‘Nones’ Around the World An interview with Pew Research Center's Senior Researcher, Jonathan Evans

What was the primary research question?

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand the religious and spiritual beliefs, practices and views of the growing number of people around the world who are religiously unaffiliated (meaning they say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion). A separate, recent Pew Research Center report found that the number of adults who are religiously unaffiliated (also called religious “nones”) has climbed rapidly in the recent past across North America, Europe, parts of Latin America and some countries in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia and South Korea. “Nones” are the world’s third-largest religious category, after Christians and Muslims.

We particularly wanted to look at the internal diversity among “nones.” In this study, for example, we looked at differences in the beliefs and practices of this group by gender.

The breadth of this survey allows us to shine a light on the complexity and differences among “nones” as a group — both within countries and across the countries studied.

How did the primary question shape survey design and country selection?

This report is part of an ongoing series of international surveys focused on religion that PewResearch Center conducts as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project. The project, which is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, is an effort by the Center to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the World.

Given that the global population of religiously unaffiliated people has continued to grow in recent years, we wanted to use this survey to look at “nones” across different regions and cultures. Indeed, we could analyze the beliefs and behaviors of “nones” in countries from all six inhabited continents.

Our study finds quite a bit of variance from country to country. It also reveals that religiously unaffiliated people aren’t necessarily devoid of religious beliefs and practices. In fact, many “nones” hold religious or spiritual beliefs and participate in religious or spiritual activities.

For example, in all 22 countries we examined in this report, about a fifth or more of “nones” believe in life after death. The shares of unaffiliated adults who say there is definitely or probably an afterlife range from 19% in Hungary to 65% in Peru. Many religiously unaffiliated adults also express belief in God. This includes solid majorities of “nones” in South Africa (77%) and several countries in Latin America, such as Brazil (92%), Colombia (86%) and Chile (69%). On the other hand, religiously unaffiliated adults in Europe and Australia are much less inclined to believe in God. Just 18% of “nones” in Australia, 10% in Sweden and 9% in Hungary are believers.

We also wanted to look at how many “nones” express a consistently secular outlook, saying they believe neither in God nor in an afterlife nor that there is “something spiritual beyond the natural world.” In Sweden, where 52% of adults are religiously unaffiliated, around half of “nones” (or 28% of the country’s total adult population) express nonbelief in all three of these measures. Other places where relatively large shares of adults are “nones” expressing such nonbelief are Australia (24%), the Netherlands (24%) and South Korea (23%).

Why publish detailed results for 22 of 36 countries?

While the report is based on surveys in 36 countries, we focused this analysis on the 22 countries where our surveys had large enough samples of religiously unaffiliated adults to break out and analyze their results separately. (Religious “nones” make up 5% or fewer of adults in the remaining 14 countries.)

The relatively large samples of religiously unaffiliated adults in the 22 countries enable us to dive deeply into the diverse attitudes, beliefs and practices across places representing an array of religious and cultural traditions – from Germany and Mexico to Singapore and South Africa.

How did you define “atheist,” “agnostic,” and “nothing in particular” to keep meanings consistent across languages? How were belief items tested for conceptual equivalence across cultures?

In our surveys, we generally rely on respondents’ self-identification when categorizing them into different religious groups. For example, in the United Kingdom, respondents are asked: “What is your current religion, if any? Are you Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in particular?” In every country surveyed, atheist, agnostic and “nothing in particular” were read aloud as answer options, and respondents who gave any of those three answers are considered religiously unaffiliated. (The religiously unaffiliated group also includes a handful of respondents who said they were “something else” in the initial question. When they provided more detail about their religious identity, their answers suggested they belonged in the religiously unaffiliated category and we categorized them accordingly.)

Cross-national studies like our “nones” study pose special challenges when it comes to ensuring the comparability of data across multiple languages, cultures and contexts. We work with local, reputable survey research organizations to collaborate on questionnaire design and survey administration. We also consult with linguistic and cultural experts to make the questionnaire as easy as possible to translate into other languages and to implement in other cultures so that we can compare findings across different countries. For each language we survey in, the survey questionnaire is translated by local teams, and then another translator from an independent agency reviews the translation. The translation is not considered final until both groups of translators are happy with it.

Which cross-national findings about beliefs among “nones” remain most robust?

In general, religiously unaffiliated people are less likely to hold spiritual beliefs, less likely to engage in religious practices, and more likely to take a skeptical view of religion’s impact on society than are Christians, Muslims and people who identify with other religions.

Still, sizable percentages of “nones” do hold some religious or spiritual beliefs. As I noted before, across the 22 countries analyzed in this report, about a fifth or more of religiously unaffiliated adults believe in life after death – including nearly two-thirds of “nones” in Peru.

Meanwhile, smaller shares tend to engage in the religious practices we asked about in this survey. For example, only about a fifth or fewer of “nones” say they light incense or candles for spiritual or religious reasons in most of the 22 countries.

Another important point to keep in mind is that in nearly all these countries, the largest subgroup of “nones” is people who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” rather than those who identify as atheist or agnostic. In the United States, for instance, 19% of adults identify religiously as “nothing in particular,” compared with 6% who are agnostic and 5% who are atheists.

Which demographic patterns among “nones” (age, gender, education) recur across countries?

In most of the 22 countries we analyzed, adults ages 18 to 39 are much more likely than older adults to identify as “nones.” For instance, 72% of Japanese adults under 40 say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” compared with 50% of older adults.

In general, adults with more education are somewhat more likely than those with less education to be religiously unaffiliated. For example, 28% of Argentine adults who have at least a secondary education are “nones,” compared with 18% of Argentines with less education.

And in nine of the countries analyzed, men are more inclined than women to say they have no religion. In the United Kingdom, for example, 51% of men are “nones,” compared with 40% of women.

When we look among religiously unaffiliated adults specifically, women generally are more likely than men to hold most of the religious and spiritual beliefs we asked about in the survey. This gender gap occurs in more than a dozen countries on the question of whether parts of nature can have spirits or spiritual energies. In Australia, for example, 60% of women who are “nones” believe this, compared with 31% of “nones” who are men.

Similarly, among “nones,” women typically are more likely than men to believe in reincarnation – defined in the survey as the belief that “people will be reborn in this world again and again.”

For instance, unaffiliated women in South Korea are about twice as likely as unaffiliated men to believe in reincarnation (36% vs. 16%).

However, unaffiliated women are more likely than unaffiliated men to believe in God in only four of the 15 countries with sufficient sample sizes to analyze differences by gender. And among Swedish “nones,” men are somewhat more likely than women to express belief (13% vs. 6%).

Within Pew Research Center’s nonadvocacy remit, what planned analyses should readers use in the future to deepen understanding of the unaffiliated?

Pew Research Center plans to continue studying “nones” around the world, including their demographic makeup by age, gender and education, and how their share of global and national populations is changing. In addition, we’re interested in how the views of “nones” may be changing – whether their beliefs, behaviors and attitudes on various issues are evolving and, if so, how. We hope to repeat some of our previous survey questions periodically to measure change over time.