Atheism and Indifference

Ross Douthat, The New York Times September 30, 2010

Daniel Larison and Jamelle Bouie both have sharp posts analyzing the much-discussed Pew finding that atheists and agnostics (and Mormons and Jews) tend to score higher on tests of religious literacy than many self-described Catholics, evangelicals, and mainline Protestants. The only thing I’d add to their analysis is this: I wonder how the data would have looked if Pew had created a generic “nonbeliever” category and compared that group to Protestants and Catholics. Instead, they created two categories: Self-described atheists/agnostics, and people who described their religion as “nothing in particular.” The first group was 3 percent of the sample; the second group was a much larger 12 percent. And while the atheist/agnostics had the highest religious literacy, the larger “nothing in particular” camp was among the least literate overall.

This makes a great deal of sense. The very act of declaring yourself an “atheist,” after all, suggests a particularly high level of interest in religious detail and debate "” higher than many self-described Methodists or cradle Catholics who have a vague belief in God and show up at church on holidays, and also higher than the many nonbelievers who are merely indifferent to religion. Another way of putting it is that self-described atheists are the religious converts of the irreligious world. Like someone who leaps from Lutheranism to Catholicism, or Christianity to Islam, they’ve made an intellectual decision about their faith "” or the lack thereof, that is. And so it isn’t surprising that they’d be more knowledgeable about the subject than the much larger populations of part-time churchgoers and “nothing in particular” nonpractitioners alike.

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class” (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.

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Atheism and Indifference

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