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It is easy to imagine the rise of ‘no religion’ being driven by personal crises of faith in which adults become disillusioned and abandon their religion, but in fact the rise of ‘no religion’ and the decline of ‘Christian’ have much more to do with transmission from parents to children than with adult (de)conversions.

Adults do sometimes change their minds and switch from identifying with a religion to identifying with no religion, or the other way round, but the more important story has to do with children. The massive cultural shift from Christian to non-religious Britain has come about largely because of children ceasing to follow the religious commitments of their parents. Analysis of the British Social Attitudes survey, which asks a question about religion of upbringing, reveals that children brought up Christian have a 45 per cent chance of ending up as ‘nones’, whereas those brought up ‘no religion’ have a 95 per cent probability of retaining that identification.

One thing they reveal clearly is that nones are not straightforwardly secular. Certainly, nones reject religious labels—but they reject secular ones as well. If we take ‘secular’ in a strong sense to mean hostile to public religion (e.g. faith schools) and religious belief, surprisingly few nones are sympathetic. I created a ‘Dawkins indicator’ in tribute to the great atheist Richard Dawkins by assembling a basket of different indicators, including atheism and hostility to faith schools. Only 13 per cent of nones are secular in this strong sense—which amounts to under 5 per cent of the population.

So the growth of ‘no religion’ cannot be conflated with the growth of the secularism championed by the ‘new atheists’. Indeed, atheism has not been growing anything like as fast as ‘no religion’, and atheism does not share the youthful age profile of ‘no religion’.9 In fact, only a minority of nones (41.5 per cent) are convinced atheists, as Table 3 shows. I asked about belief in God/a higher power on a sliding scale, allowing for shades of belief rather than a simple ‘yes or no’ answer. Unsurprisingly, nones are less likely to believe than ‘somes’ (those who identify with a religion), but the contrast is not black and white.

The largest bloc of nones is made up of maybes, doubters and don’t knows, plus 5.5 per cent who definitely believe in God. As to what kind of God they believe in, less than a quarter of the nones who think there is a God adhere to the traditional idea of a personal ‘God’, with the rest believing in a spirit, life-force, energy, or simply ‘something there’. So the nones are not the phalanx of doughty secularists which some versions of secularisation theory expected, but they are certainly more sceptical about the existence of God than those who identify as religious—and that scepticism is growing with each generation.

Linda Woodhead

Journal of the British Academy, 4, 245–61.  Posted 8 December 2016. © The British Academy 2016