Religiosity has rapidly declined in some parts of the world over just a handful of decades. Within a few short generations, societies that were typified by devout belief for centuries-to-millennia have exhibited increased levels of religious disbelief.
For example, consider recent research from the Pew Research Centre, which quizzed some 80,000 people in 36 countries. In half the countries surveyed, more than 20 per cent of people questioned said they had severed ties with religion. In Australia, approximately 28 per cent claimed to have “disaffiliated”, that is, were raised in a religion but have now disconnected from it. In Australia’s 2021 Census, 38.9 per cent reported having “no religion”, an increase from 30.1 per cent in 2016.
However, there is considerable cross-cultural variation, with some countries showing very low levels of religious disaffiliation, including Indonesia, Israel, Bangladesh and Tunisia where disaffiliation was one per cent or less.
Despite the rapid secularisation in many countries, says Dr Ross, it has been argued that religion still has an impact on people’s psychology.
“Notably, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term ‘belief in belief’ to refer to cases where people see religious belief as a good thing even if they don’t believe themselves,” he says.
In the new study ‘Belief in Belief:Even atheists in secular countries show intuitive preferences favouring religious belief’, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the research team treated Dennett’s proposed belief in belief as a hypothesis to be tested. They canvassed the relatively nonreligious societies of Canada, China, The Czech Republic, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and Vietnam, and found evidence that people do, in fact, appear to intuitively favour religious belief over atheism.
Secular secrets
“Although explicit religious belief has rapidly declined in these countries, we found evidence that traces of belief in belief persist. These results speak to the complex psychological and cultural dynamics of secularisation,” Dr Ross says.
Why did humans become religious in the first place? Possibly, says Dr Ross, because religion played a key role in cultural evolutionary processes which facilitated the expansion of prosocial behaviour - acts such as caring, sharing, helping, donating, comforting, cooperating and volunteering, intended to benefit others, often at a cost to oneself.
“It has been argued that religion maintains cooperation because the religiously devout believe that God is watching them and fear supernatural punishment if they don’t follow God’s rules.
“But religions’ cooperative successes may have indirectly led to their downfall. Religions built large, cooperative societies that in turn created large institutions to cement even greater degrees of cooperation.
“As societies come to experience greater degrees of existential security – health, wealth, prosperity, education and the like – it seems that people are less motivated by religion.”
Seeing is believing
Then there is the “cultural lag”. Religions have exerted powerful influences for long stretches of cultural evolutionary time, and religious norms and institutions are immensely potent even in countries that have recently secularised. Citizens in these countries may attend religious services less often (or not at all) but their societies are often suffused with the legacies of their religious traditions.
Says Dr Ross, “People might no longer explicitly equate morality with religion, but the cultural conflation of these concepts over time may have lingering effects on people’s intuitions. Hence, belief in belief.”
But what is meant by “intuitive preferences for religion”?
People who identify as lapsed Catholics provide an interesting example of the complexity of the relationships between belief and identity, particularly in the Australian context.
Consider an atheist, explains Dr Ross, who, when asked directly, indicates that they believe atheists are just as moral as religious people, but when asked indirectly provide responses that suggest otherwise.
“Such an individual appears to be showing an intuitive preference for religion that conflicts with their explicit belief. For example, an earlier paper titled ‘Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists’, by two of my current co-authors, suggested that many people, including atheists, view extreme moral violations as representative of atheists.”
As for the scientific question of whether religion actually makes people moral, the relationship between religion and morality appears to be complex, and it seems that some features of religion might promote some aspects of morality in some contexts, while other features of religion might supress some aspects of morality in other contexts. In sum, no simple answers.
Losing my religion
Where do we position those who have “lapsed” from the religious tradition that they were raised in, in terms of belief? Those “lapsed Catholics”, for example, who seek religion-based community ties, love going to church for the joy of singing, and send their children to Catholic schools.
Says Dr Ross, “People who identify as lapsed Catholics provide an interesting example of the complexity of the relationships between belief and identity, particularly in the Australian context.
“Despite increased secularisation in Australia, enrolment in Catholic schools has remained steady. There could be several reasons for this. Parents might simply feel that Catholic schools offer a better education than secular public schools," Dr Ross says.
"However, some parents might be lapsed Catholics who no longer believe in God at all but who might think religion is good for people, including their own children; that is, through their decisions about educating their children they are showing themselves to have a belief in belief."
In his 2024 book Disbelief: The origins of atheism in a religious species, Will M. Gervais, one of Dr Ross’s co-authors, makes a strong case that human psychology and history cannot be understood without careful attention being paid to religion.
“Dr Gervais argues that religion doesn’t only play a key role in shaping the beliefs of believers, but the beliefs of disbelievers, too."
Dr Robert Ross is a Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and a member of the Ethics and Agency Research Centre.
