Psychological Approaches to Leaving Religion

Why do some people leave the religion they were brought up in? Are there individual differences between believers and unbelievers? These are some of the questions that have sparked a recent interest in the cognitive, socio-cultural, and neurological study of the non-religious individual. This chapter will summarise and discuss some of these perspectives. We will use the terms “unbelief” and “unbelievers” as blanket terms to refer to atheists and others who perceive themselves as having no religious belief or affiliation. For the purposes of this chapter, unbelief is defined as an explicit absence or rejection of supernatural belief. There are, of course, different types of unbelievers; one only needs to recall that Socrates was sentenced to death for not believing in the Homeric gods, although he still believed in a metaphysical being that guided the universe. He was only an unbeliever to the culture he found himself in. This chapter focuses on those who do not believe in the existence of any god(s), but this does not mean that these individuals are devoid of other kinds of non-supernatural beliefs, or they may even, at least unconsciously, espouse some kinds of supernatural beliefs.