Cultural and Social Values Survey - Nonreligion in a Complex Future Project

What is the Cultural and Social Values Survey?

This survey was created in response to common understandings of nonreligion as an absence or a lack of something. That is, we know about what nonreligious people don’t do and don’t believe. But what do they do, and what do they believe? We think that there is a positive or substantial content to nonreligion – something that is more than just an absence. But we need the right research tools to measure it. This is what our survey was designed to achieve.

The survey was fielded by the polling firm Dynata in the fall of 2023 in all eight project countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Norway, the US, and the UK). The survey asked about people’s personal, cultural, and social values, including attitudes and behaviours on ethical questions, and orientations towards politics, science, law, education, and life’s meaning. The survey also examines people’s involvement with religion, spirituality, and their identification with nonreligious labels such as atheism, agnosticism, or humanism. We have collected a sample of about 1,000 responses in each of the countries.

What are we finding so far?

Analysis of the survey results are still underway, but some key themes are already emerging in recent publications.

New Considerations for Measuring Nonreligion

There are different ways to measure nonreligion, which often yield different estimates of nonreligious people in a given country. One article from the survey team – “Measuring Nonreligion as Absence: Testing Various Approaches” – explored this issue. We looked at religious affiliation, religious service attendance, belief in a monotheistic god, and self-reported religiosity as potential measures of nonreligion, and evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each. We found that using religious attendance returned the highest number of nonreligious people, while self-reported religiosity returned the lowest. This does not mean that one measure is better than another, but that scholars will need to justify the criteria they use to classify nonreligious people in future studies. When combining the different measures together, only a small minority of people would be classed as nonreligious using all criteria, indicating the messiness of (non)religiosity and how people often find themselves somewhere between the two poles of religious and nonreligious.

Naturalistic Understandings of the Soul

Another avenue of analysis has been beliefs about the soul and afterlife. Two articles – “A Disparity in Soul and Afterlife Beliefs: Exploring Cultural Perspectives and Predictors in Nordic Countries” and “Appropriating the ‘Soul’: Evolving Understandings in Canada and the United States” – showed that while majorities of unaffiliated people in North America and the Nordic countries believed in a soul, a much smaller percentage in these countries believed in an afterlife. This indicates that unaffiliated people may hold naturalistic or symbolic conceptions of the soul (that is, non-supernatural conceptions), and that believing in a soul does not necessarily imply holding other supernatural or spiritual beliefs.

Future Work

The survey data is rich and analysis is ongoing, with future directions including membership in secular movement groups, the impacts of migration on (non)religiosity, and the differences (if any) between people who left religion and those who were always nonreligious.

Who is involved?

This project is led by: Peter Beyer, Inger Furseth, Ryan Cragun

Working group members: Douglas Ezzy, María Eugenia Funes, Jacob Legault-Leclair, Iriana Sartor, Helena Manfrinato, Dana Gaudette, Al Hay, Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, Kati Tervo-Niemelä, Sivert Urstad, Hugo Rabbia

Results and Publications

Dana Gaudette, Ryan T. Cragun, and Lori G. Beaman, “Appropriating the ‘Soul’: Evolving Understandings in Canada and the United States,” Canadian Review of Sociology (2025)

Abstract

Noting a disconnect in the percentage of Canadians and Americans who believe in a soul (75.37% and 84%, respectively) versus those who believe in an afterlife (47.64% and 57.04%), we explore the variables that are correlated with soul belief to better understand how people from these two countries may be conceptualizing the soul. Based on quota samples of just over 1000 individuals from each country, we find that religiosity is not a consistent predictor of believing in a soul, that Christians are more likely to believe in a soul than are those from other religions and the nonreligious, and that holding other supernatural beliefs (e.g., reincarnation, miracles, etc.) increases the odds of believing in a soul. But we also find that there are individuals in both countries who hold no supernatural beliefs yet report believing in a soul, which suggests that what is meant by “soul” is not exclusively supernatural but rather that the term “soul” is evolving in light of changing and declining religiosity in both countries.

Ryan T. Cragun, Hugo H. Rabbia, Sivert Skålvoll Urstad, and Peter Beyer, “Measuring Nonreligion as Absence: Testing Various Approaches,” Secularism and Nonreligion (2025)

Abstract

We examine the strengths and weaknesses of different “absence measures” scholars use to classify individuals as religious or nonreligious. Drawing on a novel dataset with data from eight countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Norway, the UK, and the USA), we analyze how many people would be considered nonreligious based on four common measures: religious affiliation, religious service attendance, belief in a monotheistic god, and self-reported religiosity. We find that different measures lead to substantially different estimates of the number of nonreligious people in a country. The single measure that identifies the highest percentage of nonreligious people is never attending religious services, while the measure that identified the lowest percentage was those who report they are not at all religious. We also show that self-reported religiosity is a stronger predictor of attitudes toward religion than the other measures. Our findings suggest that scholars need to consider carefully the implications of using different measures of nonreligion, as this decision can have a meaningful impact on research findings.

Dana Gaudette, Ryan T. Cragun, and Sivert Skålvoll Urstad, “A Disparity in Soul and Afterlife Beliefs: Exploring Cultural Perspectives and Predictors in Nordic Countries,” Nordic Journal of Religion and Society (2025)

Abstract

Drawing on data from Norway and Finland, we explore three questions in this paper. First, do nonreligious individuals in these two countries report believing in a soul? Second, do those same individuals report believing in an afterlife? And third, what factors predict believing in a soul? We find that 65.2% of unaffiliated individuals in Norway and 58.3% of unaffiliated individuals in Finland report believing in a soul, but much smaller percentages – 24.7% and 24.1%, respectively – report believing in an afterlife. We find that religiosity and spirituality do not predict belief in a soul, but that believing in an afterlife, reincarnation, and universal energy do. This leads us to believe that many of the nonreligious individuals who report believing in a soul in these two countries likely do not believe in a supernatural soul but rather use the word “soul” in a naturalistic sense to describe one’s personality or individual identity.

Sivert Skålvoll Urstad (2025). Interviewed for “Et flertall i Norge tror vi har en sjel” [A majority in Norway believe we have a soul]. Forskning.no. February 13.

Dani Gaudette (2024). “The Soul in a Secular World: Investigating a Discrepancy in Beliefs.” Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network Blog, September 30.

This article analyzes findings from the NCF’s Cultural and Social Values Survey in Finland and Norway, and shows how, paradoxically, many people believe in souls, but not necessarily in an afterlife.

Members from the Cultural and Social Values Survey project presented early findings at the Association for the Sociology of Religion annual meeting in Montreal on August 10-11, 2024, in two panels.

The panel on “Beliefs and Lifestances of the Nonreligious” featured the following presentations: Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme (University of Waterloo) and Lauren Strumos (University of Ottawa), “Distinct Nonreligious Views on the Environment”; Kati Tervo-Niemelä (University of Eastern Finland), “ ‘I love the nature and I am ready to act’: Non religion, religion and nature activism”; Hugo H. Rabbia (National University of Córdoba) and Juan Marco Vaggione (National University of Córdoba), “Fuzzy classifications: (non-)religious identifications, practices and beliefs in Argentina”; and Dani Guadette (University of Tampa) and Ryan T. Cragun (University of Tampa), “A Disparity in Soul and Afterlife Beliefs: Exploring Cultural Perspectives and Predictors in Nordic Countries.”

The panel on “Nones: Growth, Change, and Enhanced Understandings” featured the following presentations: Gregory Smith (Pew Research), “An update on religious ‘nones’ in the U.S.”; Peter Beyer (University of Ottawa), “Nonreligion and Migration: Results from a Multinational NCF Survey”; Alastair Hay (Hay Research), “A ‘Worldviews Framework’: A Gateway to a Better Understanding of Religious ‘Nones’ in Canada?”; and Ryan Cragun, (University of Tampa), “Estimating Membership and Participation in Organized Secular Groups in Eight Countries.”