Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (65 page)

Despite the many uncertainties, a lot is known about atheists, thanks in part to recent efforts to get a clearer picture worldwide. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the Pew Center surveys, the European Values Survey, and several others have brought that picture into much better focus. The snapshot of atheism around the world, which I discuss in this chapter, is possible in large part because of their work.

The next sections describe how hard it is to find, count, and otherwise learn about atheists — and what some determined people have found when they tried anyway.

Mapping religion and doubt: Atheists hiding in plain sight

Maps showing the different world religions are misleading and don’t accurately depict nonbelievers, let alone religions themselves. One color-coded map, titled “World Religions,” which is currently available for use in classrooms, charts the religious beliefs held in countries around the world — and each country earns exactly one color.

As a result, it looks like India has nothing but Hindus, which must come as a shock to the 200 million others there. The light blue of Christianity covers 80 percent of the globe, even though just 33 percent of the world’s population is actually Christian, and all of those blue countries are home to millions of people with dozens of other worldviews. Islam covers Northern Africa and the Middle East in solid green. China and Southeast Asia are all pink Buddhists. And tiny red Israel marks the only apparent Jews in the world while ignoring the one in four Israelis who aren’t Jewish. The indigenous religions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas are all invisible.

It’s all much too neat and clean.

The false perception this map creates really matters. To see why, do the same with gender. Use green for countries that are majority male and red for those that are majority female. The resulting solid red Earth gives the impression that no men live on the planet, which I’m almost sure isn’t true.

This kind of majority shorthand is a real problem for nonbelievers all over the globe. On this map they don’t seem to exist at all. In fact, one in six people on Earth today is a nonbeliever. But the numbers are just the beginning of the story. It’s also interesting to see how different all of those nonbelievers are from each other. A lot of that difference comes from their unique histories. In the next section, I mess up the neat colors of the map of world religions by introducing some fascinating national and regional characters in global disbelief.

Disbelieving differently around the world

From a country of atheist Lutherans to a province of atheist Catholics, here are some of the most interesting spots on the globe for religious disbelief.

Scandinavia

Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are three of the four least religious countries on Earth, but you wouldn’t know that on the surface. In fact, nearly 80 percent of Norwegians belong to the Lutheran Church of Norway, for example, but 72 percent say they don’t believe in God. Only 3 percent attend church more than monthly, and most don’t attend at all. Membership has more to do with cultural identity than belief.

Scandinavians tend not so much toward outright atheism as
apatheism,
meaning religion is just off the radar. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman says that when he asks a Swede, Norwegian, or Dane about their religious beliefs, they tend to look perplexed, like someone had asked for the karmic profile of their crown chakra. More than 80 percent said religion is unimportant in their daily lives. And by almost every measure, they’re the most ethical, orderly, nonviolent societies in the world. (Refer to
Chapter 15
for more on the ethical and orderly Scandinavians.)

Québec

Québec was historically the most religious of the Canadian provinces by a mile (sorry, I mean by 1.609 kilometers). The French permitted only Catholics to settle what was then called New France, so it isn’t surprising that as late as the 1960s, 83 percent of the population was still Catholic.

In the early 21st century, Québec is still about 83 percent Catholic — but it’s now the
least
religious province by a wide margin. It has the lowest regular church attendance of all provinces (10 percent) and the lowest percent of people who consider themselves religious at all (22 percent, compared to 36 percent for all Canada).

So how do you go from the most religious province to the least religious without losing any Catholics? It’s simple. Well no, it’s not — these things never are. But it’s
interesting.

Surrounded by English-speaking Protestants, French Canadians are eager to keep their unique identity — and “French” goes with “Catholic” in Canada even more than it does with “fries” in the United States. Yet educated Catholics are among the most likely of all religious identities to quit believing. But in Québec, you can’t throw off Catholicism without also throwing off your Frenchness.

So even as they’ve stopped believing, most Catholic Québécois have remained “cultural Catholics.” There’s no better proof of the change than a 2002 referendum to switch the provincial school system from Catholic to secular. The referendum passed easily and with very little fuss.