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(ANALYSIS) I’ve got some pretty fun data to work with today — it’s got a great name: “The Many-Analysts Religion Project,” and it asks a battery of religion questions from folks in 25 countries around the world. Although it was fielded in 2019, it was just added to the Association of Religion Data Archives (the ARDA) in the last couple of weeks.
After exploring the codebook and noticing the range of unique questions on religious practice, I knew I had to dig deeper. There’s a solid mix of countries — places like Turkey, Israel, Morocco, India, China, Canada, Brazil and the United States. And the survey asks a bunch of nuanced questions about religion beyond the typical measures of religious attendance.
Let me start with this fun one — it asks people how they would describe themselves: atheist, not religious or a religious person. I especially like the fact that the survey makes a clear distinction between being atheist vs nonreligious. In their recent book, “Secular Surge,” Campbell, Layman and Green drive home the distinction between those groups.
Atheists and agnostics are considered secular folks; they don’t have a religious worldview. It’s been replaced with a framework based on logic, reason, and science. On the other hand, nonreligious people have shed the religious perspective but have not replaced it with anything else. Here’s how respondents in all 25 countries answered that question.