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Goodbye Religion

View more insights in Arts and Humanities - Books - Social Sciences - Religion - Sociology - Culture and Society

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Ryan Cragun and Jesse Smith discusses why so many are leaving religion, and what that means for American society

Image courtesy of interviewee. August 22, 2024

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This video appears to be a transcription of an interview or discussion involving two authors, Ryan and Jesse, about their book, "Goodbye Religion." They address the motivations for writing the book, which stem from a long history of research on the decline of religion and the experiences of those who leave it. They highlight the lack of comprehensive literature on this topic and aim to provide a robust theoretical framework that explains the push and pull factors influencing individuals to exit organized religion.

Ryan describes the push factors as related to negative experiences with religious teachings, leaders, and community dynamics, while the pull factors include increased personal autonomy, modern worldviews, and generational shifts in attitudes toward religion. They use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews dating back over a decade and various surveys, to support their findings.

The authors argue against the narrative of catastrophic societal consequences due to secularization, indicating that those who leave religion lead normal lives and continue to engage in charitable activities, albeit outside of religious contexts. They stress that leaving religion is a common experience across diverse backgrounds and that the shift does not signal a moral decline.

In summary, their key message is that the decline of religion is not as alarming as some may believe, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of secularization and its implications for society. The discussion also emphasizes the need for future research to explore what non-religious individuals believe and how they navigate their lives.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Jesse and I have a long history of working in this area.

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Uh, we've done quite a bit of research on people

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who have left religion, the decline of religion,

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atheists, lot of different topics.

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But what we kind of came to understand in our conversations,

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'cause we have collaborated for years on different projects,

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is that there wasn't really one, like perfect,

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really good book describing people leaving religion.

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Uh, we ended up focusing on focusing on the US just

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because that's where our data are from.

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But, but we really wanted to kind of write the book.

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Uh, that might be a little pretentious,

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but we're trying to write the book right,

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about people leaving religion.

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And the other piece

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that I think is really important about this book is

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that it presents, I think,

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a pretty compelling theoretical framework

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for helping us understand why people are leaving.

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We'll probably get to that later, but it's the push

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and pull factors, which had kind of been in pieces

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around in the different literature,

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but it just hadn't been put together.

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And a book actually allows you to make those big, long,

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complicated arguments.

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So I think that was like the primary motivation

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for why we wanted to do this.

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Part of the motivation for this book,

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I think was our discontent with the general narrative,

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both in academia

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and in the public, about what the consequences

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of secularization are for society at large.

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Um, as Ryan just mentioned, we've both studied, a lot

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of non-religious people, over the years.

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Um, followed the data for a very long time.

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And, you know, the, the evidence, for the potential,

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you know, catastrophic consequences of,

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increased religious exiting.

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We just, we weren't, we weren't seeing that.

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So really part of the motivation too, I think was to kind

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of counter, this, this narrative

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with good data in a comprehensive way.

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This goes back more than a, a decade.

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Um, the interviews that we rely on,

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I think we have something like 120, interviews,

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for the book, and they go back more than a decade,

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which has actually proved to be pretty useful for us.

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Um, with respect to our argument,

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which we can talk about, later.

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But, you know, we've conducted, in-depth interviews.

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Ryan and I have both conducted,

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interviews for a long time.

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Hundreds of them, actually, not all of them made them,

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into this, book.

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But I'm primarily a, a field worker, an ethnographer.

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Uh, I do qualitative work, so, I've just, just

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what I do, I've been conducting

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interviews for a very long time.

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So this starts, you know, some

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of the data we draw from actually go all the way back

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to my dissertation research, where I, interviewed,

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atheists ba basically who organize.

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Um, and so we, we pulled data from there.

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And then, you know, as I, I switched gears and,

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and started, a job as a sociology professor.

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I continued that work

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and I just kept, exploring, you know, different groups

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of non-religious people and everything from their identities

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and their belief systems and their, their worldviews

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and the kind of the pressures

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that they face and those kinds of things.

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And, all of that, it, it, it struck us, when Ryan

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and I began collaborating that

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that would be very useful data,

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to explore this larger question of religious exiting, right?

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So we have people, it's not, it's not just, you know,

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atheists or any particular group

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of people from any organization.

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Uh, we pull data from, you know, myriad, groups,

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and we have a lot of different people

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from a lot of different backgrounds.

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The one thing they share in common is

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that they have all left, organized religion.

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So we, we had good qualitative

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or rich qualitative data set there to work with.

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Uh, and, and, and so that's what we did.

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And then of course, that is on the back

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of the quantitative data.

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I'll let, Ryan speak to

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The nice thing about, the, in the scene for kind

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of empirical data at this point is there are a lot

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of surveys that exist that we can use as kind

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of secondary data analysis.

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And we draw on a handful of 'em, actually.

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So it's not just one. Our primary source is the general

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social survey, which is, funded

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by the National Science Foundation out of Newark.

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Um, so we use that quite a bit,

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but we supplement that in different places.

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We use pew data, we use world,

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we use world value survey data.

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We use census data.

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Uh, so we're using a time use survey at one point.

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So we draw on a variety of different,

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quantitative data sets to supplement

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and kind of compliment actually the interview data.

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So it really is a mixed method study,

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and we, we think it's much stronger as a result

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because it's combining both approaches.

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So it has the strengths basically of both of those.

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Maybe also the weaknesses,

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but I'd like to think that it's just strengths, right?

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That they're complimenting each other quite well.

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So we lay this out as, similar to the arguments

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that are given for why people immigrate, right?

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So people leave countries

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because they're being pushed out for a variety of reasons,

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but they're also being pulled towards specific countries.

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So we ended up using a similar framework

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and thinking about why people are leaving religion, is

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that there are certain factors that are pushing them out

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of religion, and there are factors

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that are pulling them out of religion too.

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And I'll just list a kind of top level overview of these,

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and then maybe we can get into some of the details.

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And Jesse might fill in some of the details as well.

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But the, the factors that we argue

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that are pushing people out of religion are,

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are the moral teachings of religions, the doctrines,

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the policies, the political statements,

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and then often issues with religious leaders

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and other members of the religious community.

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So those are all things that are pushing people out.

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And we can, again, talk about details, the poll factors.

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A lot of people just have better things to do,

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with their time, which is kind of an interesting one.

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But it came up quite a bit in our,

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in our interview data in particular.

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Um, people like the autonomy that comes from not having,

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a religious affiliation.

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They also like a modern worldview.

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They like that they have the ability to kind

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of draw on modern ways of thinking.

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Um, and another factor

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that's a little bit complicated is generational change,

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which again, we could get into,

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but this is basically parents trying to, to

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transfer their religion onto their kids.

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And a combination of all of those other factors has made

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that much harder today.

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So we talk about all of those in, in great detail

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as the push and pull factors

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that are leading people out of religion.

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In addition to all of these specific questions about

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morality, hypocrisy, these kinds of, you know,

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push factors and the pull factors, autonomy,

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modern worldview that Ryan mentioned, we do overlay this,

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framework of generational change over time.

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And I think one strength of the book too is that we,

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we don't rely exclusively on the survey data

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to paint a picture of

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what this generational change looks like.

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We're actually able to integrate.

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We had really fascinating interviews, multi kind

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of generational interviews where people are talking about

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their, their parents

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and their grandparents and their children.

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Um, and we had some, some really good qualitative, data

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to kind of drive from the point about this lar this,

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this bigger, picture about the changes

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that are happening, over time that's driving, the,

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the, the rise of, of people leaving, religion.

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And we might address

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that here again in another, question.

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But we, we try

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to integrate those two things as well as we can.

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'cause there's this bigger picture of,

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the sociodemographic kinds of, changes, right?

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It used to be that, it was assumed a very kind

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of narrow slice of,

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of the citizenry were leaving religion turns out not

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to be true, right?

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Um, that that's actually not the case.

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Um, basically everyone right from, from every background is,

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is likely to, to leave religion at some point.

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We have seen declining confidence in a lot

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of institutions over time and time and declining membership.

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Uh, we could obviously reference Robert Putnam's famous book

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Bowling Alone, which kind of gets at this idea

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that people are increasingly like atomized in society,

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that they, because, you know, all

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of our entertainment basically comes to us at home.

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We can just sit at home and watch TV or get on the internet

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or play games, which has reduced civic engagement generally.

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That that's absolutely true.

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I don't think Jesse and I would argue that, the decline

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of religion is somehow special

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or unique, right there,

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there has been general decline in civic

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engagement in a lot of different ways.

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One of the things that the decline of

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religious engagement has actually done is

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transitioned people

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so they can actually focus their attention elsewhere.

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So one of the things that we argue in the book is there

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isn't a decline in charitable giving.

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Um, among the non-religious

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or people who have left religion, there isn't a,

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a decline in volunteering.

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There isn't a decline in a lot of those things.

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They're just not doing it in the context of religion.

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So they've shifted where their focus is.

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Uh, sure, generally like across society, it's declined,

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but it's not that people who have left religion are somehow

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just like dramatically disengaged versus

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people who are religious.

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It's actually kind of a wash.

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They just change their focus or penultimate chapters.

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We have a conclusion chapter, but our penultimate chapter

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actually tackles 10 of these big fears.

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And we could go through some of them in, in particular,

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but I'll just mention kind of some of the highlights.

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So, I mentioned one already,

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that there's like this concern

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that if people aren't religious,

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then they're gonna be less likely to donate to charities.

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Well, if you take out donations to religions,

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'cause religions aren't technically charities, right?

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They're religions.

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But if you take out those donations,

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we actually see no difference in giving

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to charitable organizations as long

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as you pull out the separate giving to religions.

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So that's not gonna decline.

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Volunteering's not gonna decline.

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There are claims that people

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who are religious are healthier.

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We see none of that in the empirical data, right?

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Almost all of the research that suggests

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that religious people are healthier, is based in the us.

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Uh, if you look outside the US you don't see this

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relationship even remotely the same.

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And when you do, even when you find it, a lot

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of studies don't find any relationship.

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The re the differences are marginal at best.

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They're insignificant. They're meaningless.

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So we don't see differences, excuse me, in health,

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in happiness, in wellbeing.

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Um, we do see one difference.

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So we can talk about that one difference,

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and that's in family size.

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Uh, people who have left religion

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or non-religious people have slightly fewer kids than

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religious people, that,

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that's like the one big difference that we see.

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But in terms of like moral behavior, in,

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in all these other ways that people are worried

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that like there's a cataclysmic collapse of society,

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we are not seeing any of that in the empirical data,

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either quantitative or qualitative.

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And we address a whole bunch of these in

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that penultimate chapter in the book.

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Probably the biggest takeaway is like,

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this is not a big deal.

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Like people leaving religion, it, it's not going

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to radically like reorganize society

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and society, societies are gonna collapse

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and it's gonna be calamitous and disastrous, right?

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Um, people who leave are pretty normal.

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One of the chapters that we talk about, we actually look at

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what do people do instead of spending time in church, right?

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So we have really good data on this,

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and it turns out they sleep in a little bit more.

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They, they, they go a little,

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they they do a little more shopping, right?

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They spend a little more time watching tv.

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It's like really boring.

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And I, I hate to pitch it that way, right?

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I wish I could be like, yeah, they're all like,

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getting high and like doing crazy things,

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but it turns out they're just living really

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ordinary lives, right?

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So that I, that's not like a really sexy sales

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pitch for the book, right?

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But at the end of the day, we're basically saying like,

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these are normal people doing normal things,

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and when religion declines,

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it's really not that big of a deal.

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I don't know. Did I, did I do okay there, Jesse?

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No, you did. We actually,

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we've talked about this a lot, right?

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Because every book needs a good, you know,

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especially in an academic book needs a good, you know, hook,

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something that is a little bit, you know, sexier

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and, you know, we've,

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we've had many conversations about this, whereas, you know,

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committed, social scientists, we, you know,

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we have to stick with the data.

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What what is actually being suggested here by, all

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of the data that we've looked at.

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And it's suggesting that Ryan, it's exactly right.

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It's not that it's not crazy, it's not dramatic, right?

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Um, both ardent secularists who are hoping

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for some secular utopia

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and, you know, devoutly religious people

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who think this will spell catastrophe,

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they're both wrong, right?

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Um, the, the truth here lies somewhere in the boring middle.

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Those who study the non-religious is trying to understand

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what they do believe, what they do,

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how they think about things instead of what they're not.

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So a lot of the research up to this point on people

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who have left religion is, is kind of framing them as like,

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well, they're not religious, right?

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So they don't go to church, they don't believe these things.

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They don't do those things.

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And so now we're trying to move into the area of like, okay,

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well, we know what they're not,

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but what are they, what do they believe?

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What do they do? How do they spend their time?

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What are their morals? What is their worldview?

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We're, we're really moving into that direction

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and I think it's actually a pretty promising

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and exciting new area of research.

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We need to continue to follow the trends, right?

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And to see actually where the,

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the data take us into the future.

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Uh, we make very modest, I'd say very,

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conservative projections about what the next,

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is it 30 years Ryan? Um,

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We, yeah, we project to 2040 To 2040, okay.

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Um, to, you know, so I think

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that's gonna be another piece of this, right?

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Just actually following through, right?

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Um, with the data, both, in terms of, you know,

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inter continuing to, you know, interview people

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who leave religion, but just following the numbers too,

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and, see how that tracks and see how, close

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or not that we, that we were.

00:00 - Jesse and I have a long history of working in this area. we've done quite a bit of research on people who have left religion, the decline of religion, atheists, lot of different topics. But what we kind of came to understand in our conversations, 'cause we have collaborated for years on different projects,

00:17 - is that there wasn't really one, like perfect, really good book describing people leaving religion. we ended up focusing on focusing on the US just because that's where our data are from. But, but we really wanted to kind of write the book. that might be a little pretentious, but we're trying to write the book right, about people leaving religion. And the other piece that I think is really important about this book is

00:42 - that it presents, I think, a pretty compelling theoretical framework for helping us understand why people are leaving. We'll probably get to that later, but it's the push and pull factors, which had kind of been in pieces around in the different literature, but it just hadn't been put together. And a book actually allows you to make those big, long, complicated arguments. So I think that was like the primary motivation

01:04 - for why we wanted to do this. Part of the motivation for this book, I think was our discontent with the general narrative, both in academia and in the public, about what the consequences of secularization are for society at large. as Ryan just mentioned, we've both studied, a lot of non-religious people, over the years. followed the data for a very long time. And, you know, the, the evidence, for the potential,

01:33 - you know, catastrophic consequences of, increased religious exiting. We just, we weren't, we weren't seeing that. So really part of the motivation too, I think was to kind of counter, this, this narrative with good data in a comprehensive way. This goes back more than a, a decade. the interviews that we rely on, I think we have something like 120, interviews, for the book, and they go back more than a decade,

01:56 - which has actually proved to be pretty useful for us. with respect to our argument, which we can talk about, later. But, you know, we've conducted, in-depth interviews. Ryan and I have both conducted, interviews for a long time. Hundreds of them, actually, not all of them made them, into this, book. But I'm primarily a, a field worker, an ethnographer. I do qualitative work, so, I've just, just

02:19 - what I do, I've been conducting interviews for a very long time. So this starts, you know, some of the data we draw from actually go all the way back to my dissertation research, where I, interviewed, atheists ba basically who organize. and so we, we pulled data from there. And then, you know, as I, I switched gears and, and started, a job as a sociology professor. I continued that work

02:44 - and I just kept, exploring, you know, different groups of non-religious people and everything from their identities and their belief systems and their, their worldviews and the kind of the pressures that they face and those kinds of things. And, all of that, it, it, it struck us, when Ryan and I began collaborating that that would be very useful data, to explore this larger question of religious exiting, right? So we have people, it's not, it's not just, you know,

03:11 - atheists or any particular group of people from any organization. we pull data from, you know, myriad, groups, and we have a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds. The one thing they share in common is that they have all left, organized religion. So we, we had good qualitative or rich qualitative data set there to work with. and, and, and so that's what we did.

03:33 - And then of course, that is on the back of the quantitative data. I'll let, Ryan speak to The nice thing about, the, in the scene for kind of empirical data at this point is there are a lot of surveys that exist that we can use as kind of secondary data analysis. And we draw on a handful of 'em, actually. So it's not just one. Our primary source is the general social survey, which is, funded

03:55 - by the National Science Foundation out of Newark. so we use that quite a bit, but we supplement that in different places. We use pew data, we use world, we use world value survey data. We use census data. so we're using a time use survey at one point. So we draw on a variety of different, quantitative data sets to supplement and kind of compliment actually the interview data.

04:15 - So it really is a mixed method study, and we, we think it's much stronger as a result because it's combining both approaches. So it has the strengths basically of both of those. Maybe also the weaknesses, but I'd like to think that it's just strengths, right? That they're complimenting each other quite well. So we lay this out as, similar to the arguments that are given for why people immigrate, right? So people leave countries

04:37 - because they're being pushed out for a variety of reasons, but they're also being pulled towards specific countries. So we ended up using a similar framework and thinking about why people are leaving religion, is that there are certain factors that are pushing them out of religion, and there are factors that are pulling them out of religion too. And I'll just list a kind of top level overview of these, and then maybe we can get into some of the details. And Jesse might fill in some of the details as well.

05:00 - But the, the factors that we argue that are pushing people out of religion are, are the moral teachings of religions, the doctrines, the policies, the political statements, and then often issues with religious leaders and other members of the religious community. So those are all things that are pushing people out. And we can, again, talk about details, the poll factors. A lot of people just have better things to do, with their time, which is kind of an interesting one.

05:23 - But it came up quite a bit in our, in our interview data in particular. people like the autonomy that comes from not having, a religious affiliation. They also like a modern worldview. They like that they have the ability to kind of draw on modern ways of thinking. and another factor that's a little bit complicated is generational change, which again, we could get into,

05:44 - but this is basically parents trying to, to transfer their religion onto their kids. And a combination of all of those other factors has made that much harder today. So we talk about all of those in, in great detail as the push and pull factors that are leading people out of religion. In addition to all of these specific questions about morality, hypocrisy, these kinds of, you know, push factors and the pull factors, autonomy,

06:10 - modern worldview that Ryan mentioned, we do overlay this, framework of generational change over time. And I think one strength of the book too is that we, we don't rely exclusively on the survey data to paint a picture of what this generational change looks like. We're actually able to integrate. We had really fascinating interviews, multi kind of generational interviews where people are talking about their, their parents

06:34 - and their grandparents and their children. and we had some, some really good qualitative, data to kind of drive from the point about this lar this, this bigger, picture about the changes that are happening, over time that's driving, the, the, the rise of, of people leaving, religion. And we might address that here again in another, question. But we, we try to integrate those two things as well as we can.

06:59 - 'cause there's this bigger picture of, the sociodemographic kinds of, changes, right? It used to be that, it was assumed a very kind of narrow slice of, of the citizenry were leaving religion turns out not to be true, right? that that's actually not the case. basically everyone right from, from every background is, is likely to, to leave religion at some point. We have seen declining confidence in a lot

07:26 - of institutions over time and time and declining membership. we could obviously reference Robert Putnam's famous book Bowling Alone, which kind of gets at this idea that people are increasingly like atomized in society, that they, because, you know, all of our entertainment basically comes to us at home. We can just sit at home and watch TV or get on the internet or play games, which has reduced civic engagement generally. That that's absolutely true. I don't think Jesse and I would argue that, the decline

07:53 - of religion is somehow special or unique, right there, there has been general decline in civic engagement in a lot of different ways. One of the things that the decline of religious engagement has actually done is transitioned people so they can actually focus their attention elsewhere. So one of the things that we argue in the book is there isn't a decline in charitable giving.

08:15 - among the non-religious or people who have left religion, there isn't a, a decline in volunteering. There isn't a decline in a lot of those things. They're just not doing it in the context of religion. So they've shifted where their focus is. sure, generally like across society, it's declined, but it's not that people who have left religion are somehow just like dramatically disengaged versus people who are religious.

08:37 - It's actually kind of a wash. They just change their focus or penultimate chapters. We have a conclusion chapter, but our penultimate chapter actually tackles 10 of these big fears. And we could go through some of them in, in particular, but I'll just mention kind of some of the highlights. So, I mentioned one already, that there's like this concern that if people aren't religious, then they're gonna be less likely to donate to charities.

08:57 - Well, if you take out donations to religions, 'cause religions aren't technically charities, right? They're religions. But if you take out those donations, we actually see no difference in giving to charitable organizations as long as you pull out the separate giving to religions. So that's not gonna decline. Volunteering's not gonna decline. There are claims that people

09:15 - who are religious are healthier. We see none of that in the empirical data, right? Almost all of the research that suggests that religious people are healthier, is based in the us. if you look outside the US you don't see this relationship even remotely the same. And when you do, even when you find it, a lot of studies don't find any relationship. The re the differences are marginal at best. They're insignificant. They're meaningless.

09:39 - So we don't see differences, excuse me, in health, in happiness, in wellbeing. we do see one difference. So we can talk about that one difference, and that's in family size. people who have left religion or non-religious people have slightly fewer kids than religious people, that, that's like the one big difference that we see. But in terms of like moral behavior, in,

10:00 - in all these other ways that people are worried that like there's a cataclysmic collapse of society, we are not seeing any of that in the empirical data, either quantitative or qualitative. And we address a whole bunch of these in that penultimate chapter in the book. Probably the biggest takeaway is like, this is not a big deal. Like people leaving religion, it, it's not going to radically like reorganize society

10:23 - and society, societies are gonna collapse and it's gonna be calamitous and disastrous, right? people who leave are pretty normal. One of the chapters that we talk about, we actually look at what do people do instead of spending time in church, right? So we have really good data on this, and it turns out they sleep in a little bit more. They, they, they go a little, they they do a little more shopping, right? They spend a little more time watching tv.

10:48 - It's like really boring. And I, I hate to pitch it that way, right? I wish I could be like, yeah, they're all like, getting high and like doing crazy things, but it turns out they're just living really ordinary lives, right? So that I, that's not like a really sexy sales pitch for the book, right? But at the end of the day, we're basically saying like, these are normal people doing normal things,

11:09 - and when religion declines, it's really not that big of a deal. I don't know. Did I, did I do okay there, Jesse? No, you did. We actually, we've talked about this a lot, right? Because every book needs a good, you know, especially in an academic book needs a good, you know, hook, something that is a little bit, you know, sexier and, you know, we've, we've had many conversations about this, whereas, you know,

11:30 - committed, social scientists, we, you know, we have to stick with the data. What what is actually being suggested here by, all of the data that we've looked at. And it's suggesting that Ryan, it's exactly right. It's not that it's not crazy, it's not dramatic, right? both ardent secularists who are hoping for some secular utopia and, you know, devoutly religious people who think this will spell catastrophe,

11:55 - they're both wrong, right? the, the truth here lies somewhere in the boring middle. Those who study the non-religious is trying to understand what they do believe, what they do, how they think about things instead of what they're not. So a lot of the research up to this point on people who have left religion is, is kind of framing them as like, well, they're not religious, right? So they don't go to church, they don't believe these things. They don't do those things.

12:21 - And so now we're trying to move into the area of like, okay, well, we know what they're not, but what are they, what do they believe? What do they do? How do they spend their time? What are their morals? What is their worldview? We're, we're really moving into that direction and I think it's actually a pretty promising and exciting new area of research. We need to continue to follow the trends, right? And to see actually where the,

12:43 - the data take us into the future. we make very modest, I'd say very, conservative projections about what the next, is it 30 years Ryan? We, yeah, we project to 2040 To 2040, okay. to, you know, so I think that's gonna be another piece of this, right? Just actually following through, right? with the data, both, in terms of, you know, inter continuing to, you know, interview people

13:07 - who leave religion, but just following the numbers too, and, see how that tracks and see how, close or not that we, that we were.

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