Background Reading
The following publications informed the development of the Explaining Atheism programme and are provided here as a reading list for students and others interested in the study of atheism and its causes.
Balazka, D., Houtman, D., & Lepri, B. (2021). How can big data shape the field of nonreligion studies? And why does it matter?. Patterns, 2(6), 100263.
Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2007). Atheists: A psychological profile. Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Ed. Martin Marty. Cambridge University Press.
Boyer, P. (2010). The Fracture of an Illusion: Science and the Dissolution of Religion. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Brown, A. (2014). Is the internet really killing religion in the USA? The Guardian. 8 April, 2014.
Brown, C.G. (2010). What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?. Journal of Religious History, 34(4), pp.468-479.
Bullivant, S. (2014). ‘I Call You (Facebook) Friends: New Media and the New Evangelization’, in Martin Lintner (ed.), God in Question: Religious Language and Secular Languages (Brixen: Verlag Weger, 2014), 461-73.
Bullivant, S., Farias, M., Lanman, J.A., and Lee, L. (2019). Understanding Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics Around the World: Interim Findings from 2019 Research in Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Twickenham: St Mary's University, Twickenham.
Campbell, H.A. (2017). Surveying theoretical approaches within digital religion studies. New Media & Society, 19(1), 15-24.
Cragun, R., McCaffree, K., Puga-Gonzalez, I., Wildman, W., & Shults, F. L. (2021). Religious exiting and social networks: computer simulations of religious/secular pluralism. Secularism and Nonreligion, 10(1).
Downey, A.B. (2014). Religious affiliation, education and Internet use. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.5534.
Dudley, R.L. (1978). Alienation from religion in adolescents from fundamentalist religious homes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 389-398.
Farias, M., van Mulukom, V., Kahane, G., Kreplin, U., Joyce, A., Soares, P., ... & Möttönen, R. (2017). Supernatural belief is not modulated by intuitive thinking style or cognitive inhibition. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1-8.
Fox, J. & Tabory, E. (2008). Contemporary evidence regarding the impact of state regulation of religion on religious participation and belief. Sociology of Religion, 245-271.
Gervais, W.M., & Najle, M.B. (2018). How many atheists are there?. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(1), 3-10.
Gervais, W.M., van Elk, M., Xygalatas, D., McKay, R.T., Aveyard, M., Buchtel, E.E., ... & Bulbulia, J. (2018). Analytic atheism: A cross-culturally weak and fickle phenomenon?. Judgment and Decision Making, 13(3), 268-274.
Guthrie, S.E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.
Henrich, J., Heine, S.J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
Hitchcock, C. (2018). Probabilistic Causation. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
Hunsberger, B.E., and Altemeyer, B. (2006). Atheists: A groundbreaking study of America’s nonbelievers. Prometheus Books.
Jacquet, P.O., Pazhoohi, F., Findling, C., Mell, H., Chevallier, C., & Baumard, N. (2021). Predictive modeling of religiosity, prosociality, and moralizing in 295,000 individuals from European and non-European populations. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1), 1-12.
Kay, A.C., Gaucher, D., Napier, J.L., Callan, M.J. and Laurin, K., (2008). God and the government: testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1), p.18.
Kelemen, D., & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition, 111(1), 138-143.
Lanman, J.A. (2009). A secular mind: towards a cognitive anthropology of Atheism (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, UK).
Lanman, J.A. (2012). On the Non-Evolution of Atheism and the Importance of Definitions and Data. Religion, Brain, and Behavior, 2: 76-78.
Lanman, J.A. (2016). A Cognitive Perspective Helps Make the Scientific Study of Atheism Possible. Nonreligion & Secularity Research Network blog.
Lanman, J.A. and Buhrmester, M.D. (2017). Religious actions speak louder than words: Exposure to credibility-enhancing displays predicts theism. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 7(1), pp.3-16.
LeDrew, S. (2016). The evolution of atheism: The politics of a modern movement. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.
Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lifshitz, M., van Elk, M., & Luhrmann, T.M. (2019). Absorption and spiritual experience: A review of evidence and potential mechanisms. Consciousness and Cognition, 73, 102760.
Lindeman, M., van Elk, M., Lipsanen, J., Marin, P., & Schjødt, U. (2019). Religious unbelief in three western European countries: Identifying and characterizing unbeliever types using latent class analysis. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 29(3), 184-203.
Luhrmann, T.M., Weisman, K., Aulino, F., Brahinsky, J.D., Dulin, J. C., Dzokoto, V.A., … & Smith, R.E. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(5).
McClure, P. (2016). Faith and Facebook in a Pluralistic Age: The Effects of Social Networking Sites on the Religious Beliefs of Emerging Adults. Sociological Perspectives, 59/4, 818-34.
McClure, P. (2017). Tinkering with Technology and Religion in the Digital Age: The Effects of Internet Use on Religious Belief, Behavior, and Belonging. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56 (3): 481-97.
Mocan, N., & Pogorelova, L. (2017). Compulsory schooling laws and formation of beliefs: Education, religion and superstition. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 142, 509-539.
Norenzayan, A., Gervais, W.M. and Trzesniewski, K.H., (2012). Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal God. PloS One, 7(5).
Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olson, D.V., Marshall, J., Jung, J.H., & Voas, D. (2020). Sacred Canopies or Religious Markets? The Effect of County‐Level Religious Diversity on Later Changes in Religious Involvement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 59(2), 227-246.
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J.A., Seli, P., Koehler, D.J., & Fugelsang, J.A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335-346.
Possamai-Inesedy, A., & Nixon, A. (Eds.). (2019). The digital social: religion and belief (Vol. 69). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Sheard, M. (2014). ‘Ninety-eight atheists: Atheism among the non-elite in twentieth century Britain’. Secularism and Nonreligion, 3 (6): 1-16.
Shariff, A.F., Cohen, A.B., & Norenzayan, A. (2008). The devil’s advocate: Secular arguments diminish both implicit and explicit religious belief. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(3-4), 417-423.
Smolkin, V. (2018). A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton University Press.
Sosis, R. (2009). The adaptationist-byproduct debate on the evolution of religion: Five misunderstandings of the adaptationist program. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3-4), pp.315-332.
Stolz, J. (2020). Secularization theories in the twenty-first century: Ideas, evidence, and problems. Presidential address. Social Compass, 67(2), 282-308.
Strhan, A. & Shillitoe, R. (2019). The Stickiness of Non-Religion? Intergenerational Transmission and the Formation of Non-Religious Identities in Childhood. Sociology, 53 (6): 1094-1110.
Taira, T. (2021). ‘The Internet and the Social Media Revolution’, in Michael Ruse and Stephen Bullivant (eds), The Cambridge History of Atheism (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Taves, A. (2013). Building blocks of sacralities. Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, pp.138-161.
Turner, J. (1985). Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Turpin, H. (2018). ‘Failing God? A Cognitive Anthropological Examination of the Relationship Between Catholic Scandals and Irish Secularisation’, unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Vitz, P.C. (2013). Faith of the fatherless: The psychology of atheism. Ignatius Press.
Waytz, A., Cacioppo, J. and Epley, N., (2010). Who sees human? The stability and importance of individual differences in anthropomorphism. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(3), pp.219-232.
Weinberger, A.B., Gallagher, N.M., Warren, Z.J., English, G.A., Moghaddam, F.M., & Green, A.E. (2020). Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan. Nature Communications, 11(1), 1-12.
Whitehouse, H. & Lanman, J.A. (2014). The ties that bind us: Ritual, fusion, and identification. Current Anthropology, 55(60): pp.674-695.
Willard, A.K., & Cingl, L. (2017). Testing theories of secularization and religious belief in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(5), 604-615.
Willard, A.K., Cingl, L., & Norenzayan, A. (2020). Cognitive biases and religious belief: A path model replication in the Czech Republic and Slovakia with a focus on anthropomorphism. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(1), 97-106.
Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J.A. (2013). The relation between intelligence and religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 325-354.
Zuckerman, P. (2011). Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zuckerman, P., Galen, L.W., & Pasquale, F.L. (2016). The nonreligious: Understanding secular people and societies. Oxford University Press.