Why Study Atheism?

Stephen Bullivant
St Marys University College, UK
[NB: The below is the text of an informal-ish, speculative talk given at the symposium
Atheism: The Contemporary Debate held at Florida State University, Tallahassee, on
Friday 6 December 2014. The symposiums purpose was to celebrate the launch of The
Oxford Handbook of Atheism.]
It is sometimes said of certain unsavoury types of young men, that those who talk
most about sex are those who are having the least of it. In very general terms, something
similar may be said of the scholarly study of atheism throughout (at least western) history.
In those ages when philosophers, theologians, historians, political theorists, students of law,
and others were most exercised by 'atheism', it is often near-impossible to establish that
there were any actual atheists. Pretty well every chapter in the Handbook, which deals with
a pre-Enlightenment period of western history, tells a similar tale on this score. Conversely,
the Handbook contains a great many chapters on contemporary atheism, most of which
focus largely on western Europe and North America - where there are significant numbers of
atheists of various stripes, and have been for some time. And yet in these chapters - from
disciplines as varied as sociology, psychology, musicology, literature, gender and sexuality
studies, religion and health studies, art criticism, and film studies - we meet the constant
(and, to be fair, fully justified) complaint that there has been comparatively little scholarly
engagement with the topic. Prima facie, it would seem that there is a converse relationship
between the amount (and significance) of atheism within a society, and the level of
academic interest in the subject.
Academic perversity, obscurantism, myopia, and sheer bloody-mindedness cannot indeed, must not ever - be discounted as an explanation here. But the amateur sociologist in
me, at least, likes to think there may be something more to it.
But the story does not end there. And I say this is as one of the very few people, in
the whole history of the universe, who has read or ever will read The Oxford Handbook of
Atheism cover to cover. For the very fact that this book exists, and is chock-full with so much
rich and detailed and sophisticated recent scholarship (not just the chapters themselves, but
the studies they synthesize and build upon, many of which were published in the last 5 years
or so), suggests that the tide is turning and that the multidisciplinary study of atheism is now
getting pretty solidly established. I genuinely don't think that a book of this scope and scale
would have been feasible even five years ago, let alone ten or twenty. Now that isn't to say
that there's not a great deal more work, especially in the social sciences, that needs to be

done, and in some cases is being done: the second edition of this is going to be amazing. But
we need to acknowledge the serious body of research that's already out there.
So my title this morning is 'Why Study Atheism?', and what I really mean by that is
'what are the underlying reasons and motivations for studying (or not studying) atheism?'.
Why was atheism a very popular subject of study in, say, early-modern Europe - treatise
after treatise was written on the topic! - in many cases centuries before historians have
been able to identify someone who really deserved the title? Conversely: why, for most of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when there were notable and rapidly growing
numbers of atheists, did social scientists in particular tend to ignore it (albeit, as we shall
see, with some notable exceptions)? And why, beginning in the twenty-first century, have
social scientists belatedly 'discovered' it - and with (if I may say so) such creditable, early
results?
In this short talk, I'm only really going to address the latter two questions in any
detail; and even then, what I'm going to say will be speculative and tentative. As to the first
question - the curious interest in atheism before there was an atheism to be interested in I'd like to make just one or two prefatory comments.
__________________________________
First of all, the idea, if not the precise word, of 'atheism' - defined throughout the
Handbook in the broad sense of 'an absence of belief in the existence of a God or gods'
(Bullivant 2013) - first appears in western medieval scholarship as a kind of way-out
'thought-experiment'. What if, St Anselm of Canterbury wondered in the eleventh century,
there was actually someone who didn't already believe that God exists? How might one
convince him that there was? There's no suggestion, I think, that Anselm is thinking here of
any real person (other than the proverbial 'fool' of Psalms 14 and 53): his unbeliever is
purely a 'theoretical construct' (Weltecke 2013: 171), like Descartes' 'evil deceiver', or
Robert Nozick's 'utility monster'. Two centuries later, Thomas Aquinas could also imagine
there being a proponent of the view 'that God does not exist' - indeed, he goes further than
Anselm in coming up with some arguments to support it (Davies 2013: 119-21). But again, to
the best of my knowledge, Thomas gives no indication that atheism is any sense a pressing,
contemporary concern.
Such was not the case, however, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: by this
time, atheism really was viewed as an urgent social issue, and atheists were widely
recognized as a significant, if malign, sector of society (Robichaud 2013). A 1603 petition to
King James I of England, asking that Catholics be granted free exercise of their religion,
notes that there are three types of Englishmen: Protestants, Catholics, and 'Atheists [...]
who live on brawls'. The French philosopher Mersenne, writing in 1623, estimated that
there were as many as 50 000 atheists living in Paris alone (Robichaud 2013: 179). Floods of
writings were devoted to the problem and its varied, and horrifying, implications (see
2

Spencer, forthcoming). Before long, imputations of atheism were as frequent in scholarly

debates, as imputations of Nazism are in today's online flamewars. Thus Alan Charles Kors,
discussing seventeenth-century France in the Handbook, comments on 'the almost
ubiquitous desire, in philosophi al pole i s, to po t a o e s oppo e ts a gu e ts as
leading inadvertently to atheism' (2013: 197). The irony here is that while there probably
weren't (m)any atheists towards the beginning of this extended 'moral (and intellectual)
panic' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the eighteenth century they were
coming out in growing numbers (Jean Meslier, the baron d'Holbach, Naigeon etc.). A
number of historians - with Kors notable among them (Buckley 1987, 2004; see also
McGrath 2004; Hyman 2010) - have argued in detail that these two facts are causally
related: that the intense scholarly (and popular) interest in, and fear of, atheism, and
specifically the obsession of French philosophers to demonstrate how the arguments of
each rival school lead ineluctably to unbelief, gave birth to precisely the phenomenon they
were so keen to root out. Now is not the time, this is not the place, and I am not the person,
to go into that topic in more detail. But note this: atheism was a major topic of scholarship
when it was viewed by Christian scholars as something unusual and intriguing intellectually,
and/or as something prominent and problematic morally, culturally, and socially irrespective of how many atheists there actually were, or were thought to be. Which brings
us neatly to our second question.
__________________________________
As mentioned above, the traditional neglect of atheism has been a familiar gripe of
psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists engaged with the topic. (I'm confining my
comments here to the social sciences, though similar things might be said about other
disciplines, albeit with some notable exceptions.) Writing in 1971, in the preface to his
landmark (and recently republished) book Toward a Sociology of Irreligion, Colin Campbell
observed: ' No tradition for the sociological study of irreligion as yet exists and this book has
been written in the hope that it will help to stimulate the development of just such a
tradition' ([1971] 2013: vii). Writing 34 years later, in 2005, the American sociologist William
Sims Bainbridge confirms that Campbell's hopes had not yet been realized:
We know surprisingly little about Atheism from a social-scientific perspective. One
would think that it would have been studied extensively in comparison with
eligiosit , ut this is ot the ase. [] s ste ati atte pts to u de sta d Atheis as
a social or psychological phenomenon, employing rigorous theory and quantitative
research methods, have been rare. (2005: 1)
This curious oversight undoubtedly has several explanations.1 Perhaps foremost,
though, is the fact that the great founders of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries - Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Sigmund
1

Much of the rest of this section borrows, at times verbatimly, from Bullivant and Lee 2013.

Freud - were themselves atheists, or at least 'religiously unmusical' in Weber's famous

phrase. Hence they (unlike Anselm, Thomas, or Mersenne) found theism, or religion more
broadly, to be unusual and problematic. Religion was the great explicandum, or 'thing to be
explained'. To put it more bluntly than did they: How could so many people believe in
something so absurd? However, in answering this question, and thereby establishing the
social-scientific study of religion, they failed to recognize that their own lack of belief might
itself be amenable to similar research. As Coli Ca p ell put it i 97 : it appea s that
irreligion was assumed to be self-explanatory; as the natural state of mature civilised men
[] it ha dl e ui ed a dis ussio , let alo e e pla atio [ 97 ]
: 9 . Moreover, this
proclivity might help explain at least some of the uninterest of subsequent generations of
social scientists too. Sociologists and anthropologists - and not, as one might think,
evolutionary biologists or physicists - who consistently rank as the most atheistic of all
academics (Stark and Finke 2000: 53-4; Bruce 2002: 110). Arguably, they also have an
understandable tendency to investigate things perceived as being strange or problematic
i.e., ot o e s own beliefs). The American sociologist Rodney Stark, for example, complains
that 'the space a religious group receives in journals is almost directly inverse to its size and
o e tio alit
999: 7 .
Conversely, it is salutary to consider some of the exceptions to our general rule of
social-scientific neglect in the twentieth century. Many (albeit not quite all) of these studies
arise from contexts where atheis itself as o side ed p o le ati . Telli gl , pe haps
the fi st A glopho e stud of the ps holog of atheis , Vette a d G ee s Pe so alit
and Group Factors in the Maki g of Atheists , as pu lished i a 9 issue of the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology. In its opening paragraphs, the American scholars range
atheists alo gside i gle Ta e s, Fu da e talists, [a d] Co
u ists as possessi g
[e] t e es of so ial, politi al a d eligious outlook Vette a d G ee 1932: 179).
Meanwhile, in France, the Catholic Church was taking seriously the declining levels of
religious practice and (orthodox) belief among the newly-industrialized working classes. It
commissioned a number of largescale, quantitative and qualitative studies to investigate
hat as idel ega ded as the spe ifi all social character not only of present unbelief,
but of its causes and its origins Co ga [1935] 1938: 14). The most famous of these was a
epo t, u de take
t o p iests i ea l 9 , de la i g u h of F a e to e a pays de
Mission , o a issio a te ito Godi a d Da iel [1943] 1949 . Catholi so ial s ie tists
interests in what they perceived to be anomalous and thus, of course, to be a conspicuous
explicandum continued into the fifties and sixties, in France and elsewhere. In at least
some instances, they are remarkably self-aware about this. Witness the Belgian Catholic
sociologist Theodore Steeman, for instance:
Evidently, the problem of Atheism is not a problem in its own right, but only in the
context of some notion of normalcy linked to the believing attitude. [...] The study of
atheism, therefore, presupposes that we treat the absence of God in the life of the
atheist as a conspicuous absence. (1965: 1)
4

Perhaps the most striking example of all this, however, came in the wake of the
Second Vatican Council's 1965 e uest fo a o e tho ough t eat e t of the auses a d
nature of contemporary atheism - a request motivated, of course, by its regarding atheism
to be one of the 'most serious matters of our time' (Gaudium et Spes 19). Accordingly, in
1969 the Vatican hosted an international, social-scientific conference entitled The Culture of
Unbelief. Attendance at the conference was not only strikingly high, with three thousand at
the first session (Martin 1970), but also strikingly high quality. Indeed, it was a veritable
'Who's Who' of leading sociologists at that time: Charles Glock, Robert Bellah, David Martin,
Bryan Wilson, Harvey Cox, Thomas Luckmann, Peter Berger, and many others (very few of
whom, incidentally, were themselves Catholic). On Berger s assess e t:
The first observation, obvious yet essential, is that the symposium had the character
of an historic occasion. I think it is fair to say that this was felt by most of the
participants. The feeling was reinforced by the rather amazing interest the
symposium attracted, not only within the ecclesiastical and scholarly Roman
ambience, but on the part of the mass media. [...] To my knowledge, this was the
first time that an international group of social scientists gathered to discuss this
particular subject. (Berger 1971: vii-viii)
Neither social scientists, nor atheism itself, were exactly 'new' phenomena by the late1960s. And yet, it took an avowedly religious organization (and, I dare say, the promise of a
free trip to Rome, with all-you-can-eat gelato thrown in) to encourage the former to look at
the latter in any kind of detail (see also Filsinger 1976). In light of our question - 'what are
the underlying reasons and motivations for studying (or not studying) atheism?' - that
strikes me, at least, to be quite revealing. At the very least, it supports our hypothesis that
atheism is typically a serious object of study for those to whom it is perceived as unusual or
problematic. And while that was not the case for such civilized, European, men-of-letters as
Marx, Weber, Durkheim or Freud, it was for Vetter and Green in 1930s America, and (even
less surprisingly) for the Catholic Church.
__________________________________
Yet that is neither the whole, nor the end of, the story. As 'a sociology of the
sociology of atheism', even of a tentative and speculative kind, the above is certainly overly
simplistic. Most obviously, it does not explain why the social-scientific study of atheism (and
related topics) should have suddenly invigorated itself over the past five or ten years. We
can now say that Colin Campbell's 1971 hope for a 'tradition for the sociological study of
irreligion' has, forty-odd years later, been firmly established. And furthermore, perhaps a
majority of those who are a part of it would self-identify as being, if not necessarily atheists,
then at least nonreligious. So what's going on now?
Two things, I think. Firstly, I think atheism and nonreligiosity-in-general have simply
become too large and obvious and significant and interesting features of the social and
5

cultural landscape, especially in Europe and North America, to continue to be ignored.

Secondly, I think that the growing self-awareness of atheists and nones themselves, as a
(loose) community or movement, has spurred the social scientists among them to take a
closer 'look in the mirror'.
As to the first point, perhaps five or so years ago, a fair few social scientists (and
others who, like myself, are 'soc-sci curious'), especially younger or 'emerging' scholars,
thought they'd hit upon this really important but almost wholly unexplored topic, that no
one else was working on... only to discover that, actually, quite a lot of other people had
already had the same idea. By the mid-2000s, a steady stream of significant studies began to
emerge, pretty well all independent of each other, but all typically opening with a sentence
bemoaning the lack of previous research. (Naturally, the more studies that appear making
that complaint, the less plausible it starts to seem.) This was around the same time, or
perhaps slight after, the emergence of the so-called New Atheism. This was and is a
remarkable and in many ways unexpected social, cultural, and intellectual phenomenon in
its own right (Bullivant 2010: 2012). (To give just one example: Richard Dawkins' The God
Delusion sold over two million copies, in English, in its first two years... more than double
what The Selfish Gene - the book that justly made him famous - managed in its first 30
years.) Unsurprisingly, the New Atheism was undeniably one of the catalysts to the
emerging social-scientific interest in the area: here was something that was clearly too
obvious, and too 'loud', not to be written about. But the New Atheism, in itself, isn't a
sufficient explanation, since much of the work that started to emerge at that time wasn't on
the New Atheism specifically, and in many cases had been begun well before it.
In fact, the New Atheism did not arise ex nihilo. It cannot really be understood apart
from a much broader and more diffuse 'flourishing' of atheism and nonreligiosity, probably
beginning in the nineties and rapidly accelerating in the noughties (not least after 9/11).
Recent scholarship points to a growing, looseknit movement - much of it centred online - of
which the New Atheism is but a single, and not necessarily representative, expression (e.g.,
Niose 2012; Cimino and Smith 2011; Smith and Cimino 2012). Add to this the growing
prominence of religious 'nones' in social surveys: nones grew from roughly 8% of the US
adult population in 1990 to around 20% today; in Britain around half of the population
identify as having 'no religion'; and so on. In short, atheism, secularity, nonreligion and
related topics were becoming harder and harder for social scientists to ignore (especially for
PhD candidates or recent postdocs searching for something 'new'). They were also, of
course, becoming much easier to study. Quite apart from the other factors suggested above,
would-be researchers have long been hampered by the difficulties of 'finding' atheists unlike, say, Christians or Jews or Muslims they do not tend to congregate at a given place,
same time each week; and the few who do join specifically atheist or secularist societies are,
by that very fact, very atypical. The more atheists there are (and though - unlike 'nones' the numbers of actual atheists are still pretty small, they are growing), the easier they are to
find and interview, and the more likely they are to turn up in largescale surveys in usable
6

numbers. The internet too - long a vibrant space for atheist discourse and communitybuilding - has opened up all kinds of possibilities for social research, only some of which
have yet been exploited.
My second point rests, I think, on far less firmer ground. I am not an atheist, and I
am not a (real) social scientist, so I hesitate to say too much about the inner motivations of
social scientists who are also atheists. But that said, a significant amount of recent
scholarship (focusing especially on the USA) has pointed to an increasing emphasis on what
one might call 'identity politics' among unbelievers: the importance of 'coming out' of the
atheist closet; the need for atheists and fellow travellers to stand together, and to be seen
to be doing so, at a national level - as, for example, at the 2012 Reason Rally in Washington
DC - and so on. Perfectly reasonably, much is made in this connection of the extent of antiatheist prejudice and discrimination, in various ways, in the United States. Against that
backdrop, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that at least some of the current crop of
researchers have themselves been influenced by this, developing a professional interest in
part out of a personal interest. After all, if atheists are a misunderstood and misrepresented
minority in American society - as they seem to be - who better to help set the record
straight than social-scientifically trained atheists themselves? At the very least, it's certainly
a fact that most of the very finest sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists of atheism
I know are themselves nonbelievers. (Of course, being social scientists, and hence fearing
even the hint of an appearance of 'normativity' like the plague, they don't tend to advertise
the fact.... but you can learn a lot on Facebook.)
__________________________________
I titled this paper 'Why Study Atheism?' really as a sort of pretext to muse, out loud,
on the history of scholarship on atheism. That's not a topic one gets the chance to talk
about very often (perhaps with good reason, as you're now no doubt thinking). But the
publication of the Handbook seems an opportune occasion to indulge in this kind of thing.
Earlier on, I made a few 'background' remarks about European scholars' keen
interest in atheism before there were any, or at least very many, atheists at all. My real
interest, though, has been in trying to understand two things: firstly, the social sciences'
traditional and much-remarked-upon neglect of atheism as a topic; and secondly, why all
changed, and so suddenly, within the past decade. Both puzzles, I think, ought to be
amenable to a sociological explanation: after all, social scientists are not themselves
immune to the kinds of subtle influences and processes they are so adept at discovering and
describing. Which is not to say, of course, that the tentative theories I've offered here are
the only possible ones.
In basic terms, my argument has been this: that atheism took so long to take off as
an object of serious, social-scientific study in large part due to the atheistic assumptions of
the disciplines' founding fathers - theism and/or religion is the thing in need of an
7

explanation, not their absence. These assumptions were, moreover, largely shared by their
twentieth-century heirs. Conversely, when one considers at least some of the main
exceptions to this trend - most obviously, the interest in unbelief shown by European
Catholic sociologists, and the Vatican's own institutional support for research in this area one often finds a set of counter-assumptions at play... that is, people who find atheism or
nonreligiosity to be problematic, and in need of an explanation. By the bye, I am not
suggesting that, in either case, these underlying assumptions necessarily led to research
that was itself biased - just that the underlying decisions guided what to research in the first
place.
However, I have also argued that the above appears no longer to be the case. As the
Handbook itself testifies, the social-scientific study of atheism is now a firmly established
subfield. When I first got interested in this area about seven or eight years, I was able to
read a clear majority of the previous century's sociological and psychological work published
in English. Now I'd have a job getting through everything published in the last month, let
alone in the past year. Furthermore, it is no longer the case that the Vatican is the main
sponsor of conferences on the subject. (Incidentally, I mentioned earlier that the Rome
'Culture of Unbelief' event was the world's first conference on the social-scientific study of
atheism. The second, so far as I know, occurred in Oxford in 2009, organized by the
Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network. The NSRN held another conference in London
in 2012, and is currently planning its third, in California, in November 2014.) I've made two
suggestions to try to explain these recent developments: firstly, the simple fact that the
topic has become too big and interesting to ignore (the elephant in the room became, if you
like, a steppe mammoth), and is perhaps also a bit easier to study. And secondly, the fact
that unbelieving social scientists (of which there are many, as we have seen) have started to
take an interest in the subject - perhaps, and this is the speculativest bit of what is already a
very speculative paper, influenced by the recent, well-documented growth in atheist selfawareness.
Ordinarily, I like to end my papers with some pithily apposite, subject-summarizing
witticism. But I couldn't think of one, and so I won't.

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