Researchers have recently begun to study individuals who are no longer religious. This group of formerly religious individuals—known as the religious dones—is growing in number, but little is known about those who deidentify from religion. Aaron T. McLaughlin, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Kelly Teahan, Don E. Davis, Kenneth G. Rice, and C. Nathan DeWall sought to fill that gap in knowledge through research; their results were recently published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Building on previous research (Van Tongeren et al., 2021), the authors conducted two studies to examine the religious dones’ motivations behind leaving religion and whether there are different types of religious dones.
First, in a pilot study, the authors queried self-identified religious dones about their reasons for leaving their religion. In response, each participant wrote a short personal essay, which was coded by the research team. Four primary themes emerged. About half of the sample (51.8%) reported leaving for intellectual reasons or because they outgrew their faith. Roughly a fifth of the sample (21.9%) reported religious trauma, such as the hypocrisy of the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Others (14.9%) reported leaving religion because of personal adversity, such as an inability to make sense of the tragic death of a child, or social reasons (11.4%), including a religious community’s being unwelcoming.
Then, in the primary study, the authors examined data from 643 dones, sampled from the United States, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands. Their goal was to identify different groups or types of religious dones on the basis of their religious beliefs (e.g., belief in God, commitment to religious beliefs), religious behaviors (e.g., frequency of engaging in religious behaviors, frequency of associating with religious individuals), and religious attitudes (e.g., attitudes toward religious individuals, attitudes toward religion in general). The authors also assessed distal variables, including positive and negative affect, anxiety, depression, sense of perceived meaning in life, prosocial behavior, self-control, implicit attitudes toward God, and emotions toward God.
Using a latent profile analysis, the authors identified two groups: discontinuing dones, who had largely ceased religious behaviors and held more negative attitudes toward religion, and still-practicing dones, who continued to engage in religious behaviors and held more positive attitudes toward religion. Crucially, this latter group reported significantly more negative affect, anxiety, depression, and negative emotions toward God and less positive affect, sense of meaning in life, and self-control than did members of the discontinuing group. Still practicing religion after having deidentified from religion is associated with poor mental health. To be sure, additional (longitudinal) data are needed to clarify whether practicing a faith one no longer identifies with is a strain on mental health and well-being or whether poor mental health may lead one to deidentify from religion.
These data offer a better understanding of religious dones. Many people leave religion for intellectual reasons or because of religious trauma. Yet some who deidentify from religion may linger, continuing to engage in religious behaviors despite no longer identifying as religious. Indeed, other work has identified a religious residue effect, whereby one’s religious psychology and behavior persist after deidentification (Van Tongeren et al., 2021).
The landscape of religion is changing. Future empirical work is needed to better understand the nature of this religious change. In particular, research on religious dones is critical for a more complete understanding of the psychology of religion and spirituality of all individuals—including the newly nonreligious.
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