Norman Ralph

There has long been speculation as to what traits atheists share with each other. I have mentioned it several times in this blog, particularly when writing about branding and marketing. Whilst I have made some claims about the personal and political similarities between atheists, there has never been any real study on the personality of self identifying atheists. That is until now.

Professor Luke Galen, an associate professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, has just published a report on this very subject. He sampled over 5000 thousand people across the USA, Canada, UK and Australia who fitted into the general category of being irreligious. The report focussed on the self-labelling of the respondents as well as their socio-economic background and their main personality traits.

The results made for interesting, if not particularly surprising, reading. Some of the key findings of the study have been included below, but the full report can be found here.

The first major finding of the report was the differences between multiple and single labels, i.e. respondents were asked to choose all that apply from a list and then select one to best describe them. See fig.1 for the results.

Professor Galen summarised these findings thus:

Interesting distinctions appear when examining the difference
between an inclusive selection (which is to say, when
respondents were allowed to select more than one label) versus
when they were asked to set all others aside to choose the
most descriptive single label. For example, although 9 percent
of the sample chose “spiritual” among multiple labels,
when asked to pick a single self-identification, only 2 percent
chose “spiritual.” This large proportional reduction indicates
that far fewer chose spiritual as their sole label than were willing
to include it among other labels. The label “agnostic” was
similarly “jettisoned” by a relatively high proportion of individuals.
In fact, many respondents appear to use “agnostic”
and “atheist” interchangeably; among those who selected
“agnostic” as one of their multiple labels, they evenly split
between “atheist” and “agnostic” when choosing a sole identification
label. It therefore appears that “agnostic” is used
alongside other labels but frequently discarded when push
comes to shove. “Humanist” seems to be a popular secondary
label and contrasts in that regard to “atheist.” For example,
around two-thirds of self-described humanists also consider
themselves atheists; half of both atheists and agnostics also
consider themselves humanists. However, the “supplemental”
nature of humanism is evident in that, whereas two-thirds of
the sample included “humanist” among their multiple selfidentifications,
only a quarter chose that as their sole label.

I think Galen has hit the nail on the head when it comes to which labels people jettison when it boils down to selecting one label. It has long been my experience that if you push someone who is generally irreligious to give you a single term to describe their philosophy on life they will usually revert back to the atheist label. This conclusion, whilst never demonstrated in detail before this study, was actually the main reason why Leeds Atheist Society chose their name over the many others they could have gone for.

The socio-economic make up of the sample was also interesting with 41% having a masters degree or higher, nearly a third claiming to earn over $100,000 p.a. (circa £60,000 p.a. as of today’s exchange rate) and 74% being male. All three statistics are all higher than the equivalent statistics for religious followers. More interestingly, those that describe themselves as atheist also felt more actively involved in their philosophy than those that did not self-identify as atheists (bearing in mind that the sample was taken from readers of Free Inquiry and members of related bodies).

The final major finding of the study was the personality make up of the sample. The table above shows how the sample broke down based on a variety of psychological personality markers.

Galen concluded that:

[R]elative to the religious or churched segment of
the population, the nonreligious are distinguished both demographically
(more likely to be male, highly educated, never
married or cohabiting) and by their personality (more open to
new experience and intellectually oriented, less agreeable).
Although overall life satisfaction and social contact in our nonreligious
sample was equivalent to the religious comparison
group, the latter perceived a higher level of social support,
possibly provided by their religious organizations. Among our
large survey of the nonreligious, there was a range of philosophical
beliefs: respondents included self-labeled atheists,
agnostics, humanists, and spirituals. The label “atheist”
appears to be becoming more common among younger individuals,
suggesting that fewer nonreligious young people are
choosing more tentative labels relative to older cohorts.
Finally, in contrast to many general population studies that
lump together those who are confident in their nonbelief with
those who may be weakly religious, the present study allows
the ability to distinguish degrees of nonbelief, yielding interesting
results. Confident nonbelievers such as atheists were
more emotionally well-adjusted relative to tentative nonbelievers;
the latter, though, appear to place a greater emphasis on
being agreeable to, and trusting of, others. The present study
indicates that the common assumption of greater religiosity
relating to greater happiness and satisfaction is overly simplistic.
Many of the nonreligious, particularly those involved
with an increasingly visible movement or community characterized
by stronger varieties of nonbelief, are actually as welladjusted
and satisfied as the highly religious, with those
uncertain of their beliefs showing more distress.
More research remains to be done, for example regarding
the factors that differentiate individuals who are raised in a
religious context who remain religious versus those who
become nonreligious. Those with high openness to experience
and lower agreeableness may not be satisfied with “tradition”
and may seek out experiences that further reinforce irreligious
tendencies. A less agreeable, more individualistic style may
lead one to assert confidently a disbelief in socially required
spiritual platitudes, with a resulting trade-off between greater
emphasis on personal integrity but lower social acceptance.
Many nonreligious individuals with such personality traits likely
select life experiences throughout their educational and
social development that result in further skepticism and
increased certainty of nonbelief. These various pathways to
irreligion will become increasingly relevant as the nonreligious
continue to grow as a proportion of the population.

This report is an excellent starting point to really understanding the make up of the non-religious community at large. However, as Galen himself wrote, far more research needs to be done to really drill down into the psyche of the non-believer and only then can we gain full insight into what these people want and need from their involvement with organisations such as those I have mentioned before on this website.

I would be interested in seeing some research done on a younger demographic (the average age of the sample used above was over 50) as it is this groups (along with the over 80s surprisingly) that make up the largest group of politically and publicly active atheists. I would also like to see a better sample from the UK, as Galen only received around 2% of his respondents from here.

As always, your comments and thoughts are most welcome.

At Chris and Tom’s flat-warming party on Friday night I was involved in debating a variety of subjects centred on atheism and my recent post about branding and marketing a national organisation to represent atheists. One of the main criticisms that have arisen from my treatment of the subject is that by defining and then commercialising the atheist position then the outcome will be a form of religious atheism.

On mention of this I railed and started to form an argument against this outcome. It is almost universally accepted that a religious atheism is bad and should be guarded against completely. A view I have long shared. A religious atheism conjures up images of Dawkins/Darwin/Russell/”insert leading atheist figure here” worship, it implies a removal of rational thought and scepticism, and it makes most atheists fly into a long winded and well rehearsed defence of the irreligiousness of the atheist world view.

Why this instant defence though? What is it about combining religion and atheism that worries atheists? The debates I was involved in on Friday got me thinking quite deeply on this subject and I struggle to find a real and rational explanation.

My immediate reaction is to claim that the main features of religion, i.e. worship, ritual and faith, have no place in an atheist’s world view. I agree that the common themes of the Abrahamic religions and many of the Eastern religions are contrary to the scientific, rational approach of many atheists. However, religion is not defined by its practices. In fact, defining religion is an incredibly challenging and possibly fruitless task.

According to Clifford Geertz (pictured left), religion is merely a cultural system whilst a dictionary definition reads “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe.” Whilst there are a great many other definitions for religion, the fact that these definitions exist mean that religion is not dependent on faith in superhuman deities, miracles or any of the other elements that atheists abhor about the idea of religion. I would suggest that actually, the parts of religion that are common throughout all definitions, e.g. community, cultural identity, shared goals, common purpose are the exact qualities I alluded to in my article on a way of living as atheists and humanists.

Building on this premise it is logical to suggest that an atheist religion is not the oxymoron you would first assume and actually leads to a better understanding of what people find most attractive about the established religions. It is not a great leap to say that many people do not claim to be religious because they firmly believe in the ideology of their chosen religion but find that the religion offers the community support, cultural identity, shared goals and common purpose they require. Why can an atheist organisation not offer a similar service?

The downside to a religious atheism is that while it would probably attract new people there are a great many current atheists that would find the idea unpalatable. This is clearly a problem in a time when it is hard enough to unite atheists over an issue. The only way to clear this obstacle is to go back to the idea of building a brand. The need to clearly position an atheist religion in such a way as to maximise its impact on the general public whilst maintaining its current supporter base is clear and would require the most delicate handling. This is not an easy task and is likely the stumbling block that would prevent such a movement taking off. However, this should not be a deterrent. An atheist religion is not the bad idea that most atheists make out and perhaps should not be dismissed as readily as it currently is.

Since leaving university and stepping down from my positions with the AHS and Leeds Atheist Society I have had quite a bit of free time on my hands, much of which has been spent looking at new ways of developing a national identity for atheists.

I don’t know how many of you will have ever tried looking at how many different groups exist for atheists and the seemingly endless associated groups, humanists, secularists, brights, freethinkers, rationalists, sceptics etc, but there are a lot. Almost every conceivable name and wordplay related to atheism, humanism, secularism etc has been used and there is a group set up. However, the majority of these groups have relatively low numbers and small areas of influence. In fact with the exception of the British Humanist Association and National Secular Society, these groups receive little to no national attention.

I think this is a problem. I think it is perhaps a greater problem, however, that there is no unified group representing all non-religious people. Whilst it is true that no two atheists (and I will use atheist from now on as an umbrella term for anyone who describes themselves as non-religious) have the same desires, ambitions or even world views, they do tend to exhibit broadly similar political and ethical views. These views should be expressed to decision makers, politicians and commercial leaders. Atheists should have a national voice that should be listened to.

Having spent some time with the BHA I can report that they do sterling work in the name of humanism and the NSS, likewise for secularism but they don’t represent enough people. Their image is not attractive to young atheists, for example, and their membership demographics highlight this. There is a need for a unifying brand to be created and heavily marketed. The most difficult thing for atheists to grasp at the moment seems to be the need to start running an organised, national atheist centred organisation that represents everyone, regardless of the name they call themselves. Moreover, this organisation needs to be run like a business.

The more time I spend delving into local and regional groups, and even some of the larger national groups, is the feeling that they are not meant to be attracting new faces, finding new blood. What is more depressing is the fact that the large organisations do not have the resources or, seemingly, the desire to recruit and retain members.

In order to develop the kind of business, the kind of brand that I have alluded to above, requires a rethink of how atheist organisations should approach marketing, recruitment and ultimately their basic business model. People in today’s world are consumers. We consume everything. We should start appreciating this fact and begin to treat members and potential members like customers and potential customers respectively. If atheist organisations approached recruitment like a service brand approaches their customer base I believe they would be far more successful.

These organisations need to start marketing themselves not as a luxury, discretionary purchase such as a large screen TV or an expensive tailor made holiday, but an essential! Once you have started to change people’s minds about how essential their worldview is to their lives then you can start to turn your customers into fans. Brand loyalty is something that the religious organisations have built up and the strength of this loyalty is stronger than that of household names like Coca-Cola and Sky. Atheists should be aiming for that kind of loyalty.

This kind of loyalty can only be developed if atheists stop thinking of themselves as idealists and start thinking of themselves as offering a service, a product.

I have been involved in the atheist community for a little over four years now and I have often pondered the question on how atheists and humanists can actually convince other people that their worldview is just as fulfilling and worthwhile as any other, particularly the religious world views.

I first dabbled in an organised atheist society when I joined Leeds Atheist Society, the student society for atheists and associated free thinkers at the University of Leeds. Drawn by the prospect of heated debate and intellectual stimulation I quashed the feeling of unease that most atheists have at the back of their minds when considering any form of organisation for atheists. Within a few months I had converted to a believer in the necessity and usefulness of a society for atheists. This conversion enabled me to take on more and more responsibility within the organisation, delivering talks and lectures and after six months I was elected Secretary. This committee position meant that I now had to consider not only what I wanted from the society but how the society should develop and what it should provide for its members. This led me to first really think about the atheist brand and how best to sell the worldview that excludes a supreme being or beings, that excludes absolute morality and embraces rational, sceptical thought as its cornerstones.

The year I served as Secretary saw Leeds Atheist Society develop some tools with which to answer these questions, namely the One Life course aimed at non self-identifying atheists on how a secular world view could offer the same benefits and comfort as a religious one. The society itself also tried to start opening up its appeal to a wider audience by reducing the reliance on anti-religion themes and embracing a more educational feel to its meetings.

Whilst a lot was achieved, I felt more could be done to increase the appeal of the society to religious students as well as our traditional base, the atheists and agnostics. It was on this agenda that I ran for President in April 2008; as ever in a small society, the competition for committee places was low and I was elected unopposed to run the group.

The year I was in presidency saw a lot of changes to the attitudes and direction of the society. We introduced a second and third course, Perspective and Answers respectively. The former gave a soapbox to a different religious speaker each week to give a talk and explain their world view and then accept questions from the audience. The purpose of this course was to promote understanding of the world views that we are trying to compete with. The course was a resounding success and really helped develop our image on campus. Answers was a course designed to develop the debating and speaking skills of our members so that they had the ability to discuss their own world view with a sound understanding of what it was they actually believed.

The whole year had a very education theme to it, with many talks and debates on important moral and ethical issues as well as trying to define exactly what it meant to hold an atheist world view.

Through my work with Leeds Atheist Society, I got involved with setting up the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) and ended up serving as its president for seven unforgettable months. The AHS raised many questions around the idea of selling the atheist world view. One of our main aims was to promote and facilitate the formation of new societies across the UK.

Alongside the formal involvement with the atheist community which fired by interest in the idea of developing the atheist brand, I have had the pleasure of working with a number of other people that have also had a passion for the question. My friend and colleague at Leeds Atheist Society and the AHS, Chris Worfolk, is a keen believer in the idea of spreading the atheist and particularly the humanist world view through charitable work and direct action. Chris, through his foundation, has set up and continues to be heavily involved with the Humanist Action Group, Leeds Skeptics as well as serving as president of the Leeds Atheist Society whilst a student and sitting as a trustee of the AHS since his graduation. His article in the inaugural edition of Secular Future (the AHS’s quarterly newsletter) was the spark that ignited my desire to document my grappling with this topic.

Chris believes that the only way to develop the atheist and humanist brand is to compete directly with the religious brands. That means offering the rewards that can be found by being involved with those ideas. Humanist Action Group offers a range of charitable activities with its current focus being on feeding the homeless of Leeds and offering community services such as graffiti removal. Leeds Skeptics provides an environment for sceptical discussion and a number of social opportunities too.

Richard Parker, medical doctor and co-founder of Humanist Action Group, is another friend and colleague that believes quite strongly in community action to help sell the atheist and humanist world views. Richard considers that one of the best ways to build the brand is to make an impact on both the practical and political fronts. Richard’s has long considered how he can make the difference by being involved with local and national government.

Whilst community action and involvement are clearly practical ways to offer the physical rewards that religious charity offers its followers I am left feeling that there needs to be more effort made to compete with the spiritual and emotional needs of adherents to a secular world view.

Religion offers a number of benefits that atheists cannot compete with; eternal life, salvation, love, forgiveness, security and absolute truth being a few examples. Whilst academically an atheist or humanist can refute the philosophy of the examples, they cannot offer an alternative. It is no good for an atheist to say they eternal life is a fiction and that absolute truth is a myth if they cannot offer a suitable alternative. In many ways, belief in these ideals is like an addiction. The believers are unwilling to cold turkey; they do not want to just give up their warm, fuzzy feelings of comfort and easy answers. They need an alternative, they need something to help wean them off a religious world view that, most surveys say, their adherence to is cursory and towards the atheist or humanist one.

Many atheists will not agree with that conclusion as they feel that an atheist’s role is not to convert people to “atheism” and on the whole I agree with them. The issue here is that I am not advocating conversion but merely the recognition by the majority that their apparent world view does not actually explain how they see the world.

The biggest question of all is what can we use to replace those emotional and spiritual crutches outlined above? My gut instinct is the same now as it was during my time as officer of the Leeds Atheist Society, education. Educating people about what atheists thing and believe, what it means to be a humanist, how a life as a non-believer is richer and more rewarding that the alternative.

I would urge fellow atheists and humanists to accept this challenge and start teaching people what it is you believe, not what you don’t believe!

Below is an article I wrote for Secular Future, the newsletter/periodical of the AHS. I warn you that the content is contraversial and if it offends you, then i refer you to my ‘about‘ page.

I hope to bring you some more articles, some written by me and some not. Let me know what you think.

The article below is the unedited and unabridged version.

One of the most pervasive moral debates of the last fifty years has been whether it is possible to consume meat or animal products ethically or not. One of the main components of the debate is whether it is right to mass slaughter animals for human consumption on a commercial scale.

Whilst humans regard eating meat as a vital part of their diet, animals will need to be slaughtered to provide that meat. In today’s commercial environment, this slaughter comes in the form of the large scale abattoir which provides the cost effective production line style methods required to ensure affordable products for the end consumer. Whilst this is not necessarily an ethical position, it is certainly a practical one.

This commercialisation of the slaughter industry carries with it certain responsibilities. If we are going to consume meat, then we should do it with at least some regard to the animals we are eating. We have the power to ensure that animals reared for meat are treated to the highest possible standards in life and ultimately in death. Our responsibility as slaughterers of animals is to ensure that these standards are maintained throughout the various stages of the journey from farm to supermarket aisle. This responsibility has led us to develop certain policies and procedures with regards to how we can slaughter animals for human consumption.

These policies and procedures are designed to limit the suffering and pain of the animals as much as is humanly possible. The current law in England and Wales specifically states that it “…is an absolute offence to cause or permit an animal avoidable excitement, pain or suffering.” This law lays out in explicit detail how animals should be treated to ensure that there is no unavoidable excitement, pain or suffering. The only exception to this seemingly acceptable compromise is the fact that it specifically exempts animals slaughtered for religious reasons from the guidelines applied to the rest of the industry.

Animals slaughtered for consumption by Muslims or Jews, i.e. Halal and Kosher meat, does not have to be slaughtered using the strict guidelines laid down by the law. The main difference in the methods comes down to pre-stunning. This is the practice of knocking the animal unconscious by electric shock prior to being slaughtered. This method is considered by many to be the most humane way of mass slaughtering animals. In Britain, the Muslim and Jewish authorities deem this practice to be contrary to their traditions concerning the ritual slaughter of animals. This means that animals slaughtered for the religious market must be killed alive by the slitting of the throat and allowed to bleed to death.

The Farm Animals Welfare Council in their 2003 report on the slaughter practices in the UK concluded that all animals slaughtered for human consumption should be electrically pre-stunned and that the Halal and Kosher methods for the slaughter of animals caused unnecessary pain and suffering the animals in direct contravention of the main principle of the Welfare of Animals (Slaughter or Killing) Regulations 1995.

The religious slaughter industry is worth over a billion pounds and makes up one seventh of the total slaughter industry. In practice this means that thirteen per cent of the animals slaughtered in this country are subjected to unnecessary pain and suffering.

What is worse is that there are Muslim and Jewish authorities outside of the UK that have accepted that pre-stunning is essential in ensuring that animals do not suffer in excess. In countries such as New Zealand where there is no exemption from welfare laws for religious slaughter, the Muslim and Jewish leaders have devised ways of incorporating electrical pre-stunning into their ritual slaughter.

With an ever increasing trend for fast food outlets, takeaways and supermarkets stocking religiously slaughtered meat, the industry is going to continue to grow. This means that more and more of the meat we see in our shops will have come from animals that suffered excessively.

How does that affect you and me, the consumer? There is currently no law in the UK that requires meat products derived from animals slaughtered cruelly in religious slaughter houses to be labelled, or notice given to customers. This means that consumers are unaware of where their meat comes from and more importantly, whether the animal that provided it was subjected to the torture of religious slaughter.

Eating meat is an ethical question for us all. For those that choose not to eat meat, there is legal provision for the labelling of food that suitable for vegetarians. Consumers have a choice. For those that choose to eat meat, that choice does not exist.

There are two messages to take away from this debate. The first is that any food that is currently slaughtered outside of the spirit of the law must be labelled. The second is that the spirit of the law needs to be upheld by becoming the letter of the law. If it is an absolute offence to cause animals unnecessary excitement, pain or suffering, then let us ensure that it is an offence, under law, to cause that suffering regardless of your religious beliefs.

We do not protect other aspects of religious belief that do not conform to the spirit of our laws and human social advancement such as the stoning of adulterers and the murder of infidels. Why then do we protect the cruel abuse of the animals we eat?