Intolerance, mistreatment cited by those fleeing religion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/08/2024 (432 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this year, I surveyed people about why they attend religious services and reported the results in this column. (Community was the No. 1 reason.) But why do some people stop going, or not consider religion as an option at all? That was the question on the mind of Ryan Burge, an American political scientist and statistician who studies religion in the U.S.

Working with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Burge asked a random sample of 2,406 Americans who said they had no religious affiliation — the “nones” — when they left religion behind, and why.

In terms of when they left, Burge discovered that 52 per cent did so by their 18th birthday. Another quarter left by their 25th birthday, with the rest leaving after that. “If people leave religion, half do it as children, and three quarters are gone by their mid-twenties,” he said.

The reason given by most for leaving was religious hypocrisy, cited by 42 per cent of respondents. No. 2 was the idea that “religion doesn’t make sense,” at 35 per cent. In third place was religious bigotry at 31 per cent.

Other reasons cited by leavers was the harm caused by religion, the role of science and prejudice by some religious groups against LGBTTQ+ people.

Closer to home, two Canadian researchers conducted similar research to see what millennials who identify as spiritual but not religious think about religion.

In the study, titled Symbolic Pollution and Religious Change: The Religious Imaginary of Anglo-Canadian Spiritual but Not Religious Millennials, Galen Watts of the University of Waterloo and Sam Reimer of Crandall University found that religion produces largely negative associations for many younger Canadians.

The 50 millennials the two scholars interviewed gave four reasons for why religion holds no interest for them.

First, they see it as anti-modern. “It was common sense that ‘religion’ was a holdover of a primitive pre-modern past,” the authors said, noting that common terms invoked by interviewees about religion were anti-intellectual, cultish, ignorant and superstition.

The idea of religion also conjured up associations of “backwardness, ignorance, and hostility to intellectual inquiry that made it fundamentally antithetical to modern life,” the authors stated, adding “it was simply common sense among our informants that one could not be simultaneously ‘religious’ and ‘modern.’”

Second, they see it as conservative. It was also commonplace to hear that religion is at odds with social progress, the authors said, noting they heard people they interviewed describe religion as dogmatic, strict, inflexible and intolerant.

“The most visceral emotions were provoked when they spoke about the discrimination and hate they associated with religion,” the authors said.

Third, there was the impact of the American Christian right. During the interviews, “it was rare for our informants not to allude to the United States — specifically, to the American Christian Right,” the authors said, noting that many cited the blending of Christianity and conservative politics in that country.

Finally, the mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples by the Christian churches in the form of the residential school system was consistently invoked. “When this topic was raised, the emotional tenor of interviews almost unanimously turned somber, with the majority of non-Indigenous informants displaying feelings of shame and regret,” the authors said.

Reflecting on the study, Watts noted that, in the 1950s, most people would have seen religion positively. Today, “something has drastically changed. Among millennials and Gen Z, the word ‘religion’ tends to conjure up very different, largely negative, associations,” he said.

Canadians who are religious need to be aware of these associations, Watts said, adding that for many young people today religion “has a very bad brand. Many people who know nothing about any actual religions just have very negative associations with it. They think it is for stupid, backward, hypocritical, and oppressive people — not good people like them.”

This negative impression isn’t the only reason religion in Canada has declined, he said, “but it’s an important one.”

For Reimer, while religion as a whole “now carries negative connotations for many, but not all, Canadians,” it is not equal across all faith groups. Muslims and evangelical Christians experience the most negative bias in Canada, he said, with Islam associated with radicalization and violence by some while evangelicals are associated with the U.S. right.

And while the study focused on the negative perceptions of religion by younger Canadians, its findings go beyond them. “We think this discourse on religion is much bigger than spiritual but not religious millennials in Canada, as religion takes on a negative connotation for many,” he said.

Or, as one pastor quoted in the study put it, the effort to recruit new members to his church is an uphill battle because “religion has a bad rap.”

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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