New research shows God-believing ‘nones’ align more closely with religious Americans

Religious nones who believe in God are far more likely than other nones to hold conservative views

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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Philip Schwadel is a leading researcher on the growing population of religious "nones."

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Credit: Craig Chandler, University Communication and Marketing

Nearly one in three Americans now identify as religious “nones,” and new research from University of Nebraska–Lincoln sociologist Philip Schwadel suggests that this fast‑growing group is far more ideologically diverse than commonly assumed.

In a new study, published in Sociology of Religion, Schwadel found that religious nones who believe in God are far more likely than other nones to have similar policy preferences to their religiously affiliated counterparts. Nones — or those who identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular — have grown from approximately 16% of the population in 2007 to 28% according to the most recent data from the Pew Research Center.

Using data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States, Schwadel examined 16 measures ranging from attitudes on capital punishment to government spending and political intolerance. God-believing nones are more likely to support school prayer, the death penalty and making pornography illegal, while opposing abortion. They are less likely than other nones to support increased spending on welfare, scientific research, education or to protect the environment.

These findings build on Schwadel’s previous work documenting the growing diversity among the religiously unaffiliated. While Americans increasingly disaffiliate from religion, many still assume the nones represent a single ideological bloc. Schwadel’s new research points out that isn’t true.

“We tend to think of these people as all atheists,” Schwadel, Happold Professor of Sociology, said. “I see in popular discourse, people often conflate the non-religious with atheists, but very few of them are atheists. The biggest takeaway is that we treat these people as one group, but as 28% or so of Americans, they have tremendous diversity.”

Schwadel said the conservatism he found among God-believing religious nones compared to other nones was somewhat surprising.

“I did expect God-believing nones to be different from the other nones, the atheists and agnostics,” he said. “I did not expect it to be this different. I did not expect that in many cases, they are just as conservative on a lot of these issues as religious affiliates who believe in God. Nones who believe in God look more like religious Americans than they do other nones. Many of these people, as this article shows, support the death penalty, oppose abortion, support school prayer.”

And God-believing religious nones are a large subsection. Schwadel noted that among the religiously unaffiliated, 35% believe in God, 28% believe in a higher power, 21% are agnostic and 16% are atheists.

That God-believing nones are growing could have political implications, Schwadel said, and he is exploring the religious language politicians use in future research.

“I think there's a clear implication for Republican politicians,” he said. “I do think that they can appeal to some of these nones who believe in God or even believe in a higher power, whose policy perspectives align with the Republican Party, if they tone down a little bit of the Christian-specific language.”

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Journal

Sociology of Religion

DOI

10.1093/socrel/sraf037 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The Social and Political Perspectives of Believing and Non-Believing Religious Nones

America's nonreligious are a growing, diverse phenomenon. They really don't like organized religion

Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy “the beauty of the morning on the beach,” he recalled. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church.”

Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.

“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals, harming “innocent human beings,” in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.

As Dulak rejects being part of a religious flock, he has plenty of company. He is a “none” — no, not that kind of nun. The kind that checks “none” when pollsters ask “What’s your religion?”

The decades-long rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. The nones are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it.

In U.S. religion today, “the most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious,” said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of “The Nones,” a book on the phenomenon.

The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.

So who are they?

They’re the atheists, the agnostics, the “nothing in particular.” Many are “spiritual but not religious,” and some are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.

While the nones’ diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:

They. Really. Don’t. Like. Organized. Religion.

Nor its leaders. Nor its politics and social stances. That’s according to a large majority of nones in the AP-NORC survey.

But they’re not just a statistic. They’re real people with unique relationships to belief and nonbelief, and the meaning of life.

They’re secular homeschoolers in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Pittsburghers working to overcome addiction. They’re a mandolin maker in a small Missouri River town, a former evangelical disillusioned with that particular strain of American Christianity. They’re college students who found their childhood churches unpersuasive or unwelcoming.

Church “was not very good for me,” said Emma Komoroski, a University of Missouri freshman who left her childhood Catholic religion in her mid-teens. “I’m a lesbian. So that was kind of like, oh, I didn’t really fit, and people don’t like me.”

The nones also are people like Alric Jones, who cite bad experiences with organized religion that ranged from the intolerant churches of his hometown to the ministry that kept soliciting money from his devout late wife — even after Jones lost his job and income after an injury.

“If it was such a Christian organization, and she was unable to send money, they should have come to us and said, 'Is there something we can do to help you?'” said Jones, 71, of central Michigan. “They kept sending us letters saying, ‘Why aren’t you sending us money?’”

Related video: America's nonreligious have become a growing phenomenon (The Associated Press)  Duration 6:35  View on Watch

Jones does believe in God and in treating others equally. "That’s my spirituality if you want to call it that.”

About 1 in 6 U.S. adults, including Jones and Dulak, is a “nothing in particular.” There are as many of them as atheists and agnostics combined (7% each).

Many embrace a range of spiritual beliefs — from God, prayer and heaven to karma, reincarnation, astrology or energy in crystals.

“They are definitely not as turned off to religion as atheists and agnostics are,” Burge said. “They practice their own type of spirituality, many of them.”

Dulak still draws inspiration from nature, and from making mandolins in the workshop next to his home.

“It feels spiritually good,” Dulak said. “It’s not a religion.”

Burge said the nones are rising as the Christian population declines, particularly the “mainline” or moderate to liberal Protestants.

The statistics show the nones are well-represented in every age group, but especially among young adults. About four in 10 of those under 30 are nones — nearly as many as say they’re Christians.

The trend was evident in interviews on the University of Missouri campus. Several students said they didn’t identify with a religion.

Mia Vogel said she likes “the foundations of a lot of religions — just love everybody, accept everybody.” But she considers herself more spiritual.

“I’m pretty into astrology. I’ve got my crystals charging up in my window right now,” she said. “Honestly, I’ll bet half of it is a total placebo. But I just like the idea that things in life can be explained by greater forces.”

One movement that exemplifies the “spiritual but not religious” ethos is the Twelve Step sobriety program, pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and adopted by other recovery groups. Participants turn to a “power greater than ourselves” — the God of each person’s own understanding — but they don’t share any creed.

“If you look at the religions, they have been wracked by scandals, it doesn’t matter the denomination,” said the Rev. Jay Geisler, an Episcopal priest who is spiritual advisor at the Pittsburgh Recovery Center, an addiction treatment site.

In contrast, “there’s actually a spiritual revival in the basement of many of the churches,” where recovery groups often meet, he said.

“Nobody’s fighting in those rooms, they’re not saying, ‘You’re wrong about God,’” Geisler said. The focus is on “how your life is changed.”

Scholars worry that, as people pull away from congregations and other social groups, they are losing sources of communal support.

But nones said in interviews they were happy to leave religion behind, particularly in toxic situations, and find community elsewhere.

Marjorie Logman, 75, of Aurora, Illinois, now finds community among other residents in her multigenerational apartment complex, and in her advocacy for nursing home residents. She doesn’t miss the evangelical circles she was long active in.

“The farther away I get, the freer I feel,” she said.

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AP journalists Linley Sanders, Emily Swanson and Jessie Wardarski contributed.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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The poll of 1,680 adults was conducted May 11-15 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

Peter Smith, The Associated Press

Nonreligious Americans might not be as spiritual as we thought

 Opinion

Nonreligious Americans might not be as spiritual as we thought

(RNS) — Our research shows that nonreligious Americans report being significantly less spiritual than people who identify with established traditions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam.

(Photo by Helena Lopes/Pexels/Creative Commons)

Ryan Burge and Tony Jones

October 2, 2025

(RNS) — When French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 19th century, he was struck by how religious Americans were. He linked that religiosity with the success of our young democracy, observing that “religion is the first of the political institutions in that country,” for “it facilitates the use of liberty.” Religion, he argued, provided a moral foundation – a lingua franca – that allowed liberty to flourish.

Two centuries after de Tocqueville’s visit, the American experiment has entered a new chapter. The biggest story in American religion in the last three decades is the increasing number of Americans who report they have no religious affiliation, commonly called “nones.” According to the General Social Survey, nones made up 5% of the country in 1991. By 2022, they comprised nearly one-third of the adult population. Over the same period, the share of people who said they never attend religious services rose from 12% to 33%. We are just beginning to see how these changes will affect our democracy.

In the wake of this seismic shift in the religious landscape, countless commentators have argued that many nones are replacing traditional practices like church attendance and prayer with spiritual alternatives such as yoga, meditation, astrology or even spin classes. The implication is that while 100 million Americans have abandoned organized religion, they are still people of faith, so de Tocqueville’s thesis still holds.

But in spite of the ubiquity of the phrase, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” our research has found that most American nones have not replaced religion with alternative spiritual practices. Through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, we conducted a survey of over 12,000 Americans who identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular to determine just how spiritual they are and what types of spiritual activities they engage in.

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RELATED: Americans may be going to church less, but most are still open to religion, spirituality

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We found nonreligious Americans report being significantly less spiritual than people who identify with established traditions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam. Among religious respondents, 62% said spirituality was “very important” to them compared with only 24% of nones. In contrast, 27% of the nonreligious said spirituality was “not at all important,” while just 4% of religious respondents said the same. In short, the religious are far more likely to report a deep well of spirituality than the nones.

That point was reinforced when we asked respondents to check boxes next to spiritual activities they engaged in over the prior month. Whether it be yoga, meditation, astrology, crystals or saging their home, we found no instance where nones were more likely to engage in an alternative spiritual practice than the religious control group in our sample. In fact, we found that 55% of nonreligious respondents selected none of eight possible spiritual activities. That’s a huge group of nones – over 50 million Americans – who don’t have a regular spiritual practice of any sort, our research shows.

Our data shows that 27% of nones said they practiced meditation in the last few weeks, and 15% had done yoga or astrology during the same time period. And the survey data reveals that while a lot of attention has been paid to alternative practices like using crystals and ingesting psychedelics for enlightenment, real engagement in those areas is actually rare: Less than 10% of nones engaged in either of those practices.

The conclusion that emerges from our survey is that a growing number of Americans who have walked away from churches, mosques and synagogues have not used their newfound freedom from religion to seek out new spiritual practices. In essence, they have traded religion for nothing at all.

But they don’t seem to be worse for it. For many religious Americans, there is a deeply held conviction that those who are neither religious nor spiritual must be living unsatisfied, meaningless lives. But our survey data strongly challenges that assumption. Among Protestants, 48% report being very satisfied with life — only slightly higher than the 46% among respondents who expressed no inclination toward religion or spirituality.

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RELATED: Patricia Crowther, pioneering Wiccan priestess, is dead at 97

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These results challenge assumptions about the future of American religious institutions. If nearly half of the nonreligious report high life satisfaction, the belief that faith is the only path to fulfillment becomes harder to defend. This raises difficult questions for religious leaders and believers. Tens of millions of Americans center their entire worldview on the conviction that an encounter with the divine gives life meaning and purpose. But when these true believers try to convince their friends and neighbors to join them in this way of thinking, they are met with little more than a shrug of the shoulders.

But this seismic shift in American life will change our democracy. Our research reveals a philosophical divide between people for whom faith is at the very heart of life and those who hardly think about it at all. And as Americans no longer share the lingua franca of religion — a widely held set of beliefs and a common language to articulate them — it becomes incumbent on our political and cultural leaders to find other areas of commonality to stabilize our democracy and reinforce our liberty before we sink further into polarization.

(Ryan Burge is a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University and author, most recently, of “The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future.” Tony Jones, a theologian and outdoorsman, is the author of “The God of Wild Places.” They co-direct the Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America Project. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Non-religious are hardline, easygoing or spiritual, says UK thinktank

Theos study comes as new census data expected to show increase in those describing themselves as non-religious

The state funeral for Queen Elizabeth II took place at Westminster Abbey

 at a time when increasing numbers of people are describing themselves as non-religious. 

Photograph: Reuters

Harriet Sherwood

THE GUARDIAN
@harrietsherwood

Fri 23 Sep 2022 

People who are not religious tend to fall into three groups: hardline, easygoing, and those who are spiritual while rejecting organised faith, according to a study.

Its findings come ahead of new census data on religious identity due this autumn, which is expected to show a further jump in the proportion of the population that describe themselves as non-religious.

Census results for Northern Ireland published this week showed an 80% increase in the number of people identifying as non-religious – a growth in the share of the population from 10% to 17%.

Data from the England and Wales 2021 census, due before the end of the year, are expected to see the proportion of non-religious people rising to more than a third of the population. In the 2001 census, the first time a question on religion was asked, 15% of people ticked the box for non-religion; in 2011, it was 24%.

But opinion polls suggest an even higher proportion of people are non-religious. The 2018 British Social Attitudes survey found 53% of respondents described themselves as non-religious. A survey of more than 5,000 people commissioned earlier this year by the Christian thinktank Theos produced the same figure.

In a forthcoming report, The Religion of ‘Nones’, Theos has examined the attitudes of non-religious people (termed “nones”, as in “none of the above” when questioned about religious identity).

It found that only about half (51%) of those who identify as non-religious said they do not believe in God, and a fifth (20%) said they definitely or probably believe in life after death. Almost one in six (17%) believe in the power of prayer.

There were three, broadly equal-sized clusters among the nones. “Campaigning nones” are hostile to religion, said Nick Spencer, senior fellow at Theos, who co-authored the report with Hannah Waite. “Their none-ness is part of their identity. Religion isn’t something you simply don’t belong to, it’s something you campaign against.”

The second sub-group, “spiritual nones”, were less atheistic and more spiritually open, said Spencer. “They’re saying: ‘I don’t belong to a religion, but I believe stuff and often I do stuff that’s indistinguishable from the kind of stuff that religious people do. It’s just that I don’t want to wear that particular label, I don’t want to belong to a particular institution.’ It’s a more bespoke form of spirituality.”

The third cluster, “tolerant nones”, were generally atheistic, but more accepting of religion than the first group. “They don’t see religion as evil, they’re a bit more live and let live,” said Spencer.

These were people who, on watching the Queen’s funeral earlier this week, “might have thought: ‘I don’t believe in this, but I do see the merit of marking great moments of state or indeed life with ceremony’.”

According to Theos’s research, women were more likely to be spiritual nones than men, and men were more likely to be campaigning nones than women. There was no marked gender imbalance among tolerant nones, but the age profile of this group was younger than other clusters.

The discrepancy between the percentage of people defining themselves as non-religious in Theos’s research and the expected census results could be attributed to a “pearly gates syndrome”, said Spencer.

“There’s a finality to the census that you don’t quite get with opinion polls – you can change your opinion, whereas the census is the census. When push comes to shove, people may be more inclined to have a religious identity.”

Linda Woodhead, head of the department of theology and religious studies at King’s College London, said this year’s census results would continue the trend of more people identifying as non-religious and fewer identifying as Christian.

“The churches have failed dramatically as moral authorities, with the abuse scandals being just the latest nail in that coffin,” she said in a lecture on the future of religion in Britain, organised by the Religion Media Centre.

“There is currently a free for all in the area of values leadership … The Queen did an excellent job of becoming a values leader of much greater stature than any Christian leader in the country.”

The Scottish census was conducted earlier this year, with data expected to be published in 2023.