Varieties of Nonreligious Experience: Expanding Understandings of Nonreligious Wellbeing

Abstract

Religious commitment has long been associated with health and happiness in the United States. However, despite a period of drastic decline in religious affiliation among Americans, much less is known about how nonreligious commitments promote wellbeing. We use novel measures that capture variation among the nonreligious to assess whether aspects of nonreligious experience might replicate religion's health-promoting features. We analyse how wellbeing among the nonreligious is impacted by nonreligious identity (e.g., atheist and agnostic), but also by nonreligious identity duration, involvement in nonreligious organisations and affective orientation to being nonreligious. Using a national survey of Americans (2020), we analyse how these different aspects of nonreligious identity and experience predict three measures of wellbeing: self-reported health, happiness, and life satisfaction. We find that the primary factor predicting wellbeing among the nonreligious is whether they experience their nonreligion as comforting or anxiety-producing (affective orientation), and our findings suggest that whether nonreligious people find comfort or anxiety in their nonreligion changes over time and is shaped by their participation in nonreligious organisations. We discuss the implications of our findings for scholarship on religion and wellbeing as well as for future research on variation in wellbeing among nonreligious Americans.