The Anomaly That Deserves an Explanation
Something quietly unprecedented is happening in the political demography of the English-speaking world, and most commentators on both sides of the religion debate have failed to reckon with it seriously. The cohort of people who report no religious affiliation, the so-called “nones,” has been growing steadily for three decades. In the United States, it now constitutes roughly 28 percent of the adult population according to Pew Research data from 2023, a figure that would have seemed fantastical to sociologists writing in the 1980s. In the United Kingdom, the 2021 census recorded, for the first time in the history of that survey, a majority of respondents identifying as having no religion. Across Canada, Australia, and much of Western Europe, the pattern is consistent: religious disaffiliation is accelerating, and the trend shows no sign of reversing.
The secular left has, understandably, tended to regard this development with a measure of satisfaction. The assumption has long been that religious disaffiliation and progressive political values travel together, that the person who abandons the church on Sunday will eventually abandon conservative politics on Tuesday. For decades, the data broadly supported this assumption. The religiously unaffiliated leaned Democratic in American surveys, Labour or Liberal Democrat in British ones, and tended to support gender equality, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ recognition at higher rates than their churchgoing counterparts. The causal story seemed obvious: religion reinforces social conservatism, so leaving religion produces social liberalism.
But the data has become more complicated, and the comfortable assumption has started to fray. A significant and growing minority of the religiously unaffiliated now identifies as politically conservative or right-leaning. Surveys conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, Gallup, and YouGov in recent years have consistently found that somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of self-described political conservatives in the United States now claim no religious affiliation. The phenomenon is visible in European right-wing movements as well, where parties that once mobilised explicitly on Christian nationalist platforms have increasingly attracted voters who would describe themselves as secular but culturally European. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, and the Dutch PVV under Geert Wilders have all attracted substantial numbers of non-believing voters who nonetheless embrace a broadly conservative politics.
The question this demographic raises is not merely political but philosophical. What does it mean to be a non-religious conservative? Does the secular identity of these voters represent a genuine departure from supernaturalist thinking, a commitment to evidence and reason as the basis for political judgement? Or does it represent something rather different: a cultural Christianity shorn of its doctrinal content, retaining the tribal markers and social anxieties of religious conservatism while dispensing with the theology? And what does the existence of this cohort tell us about the relationship between atheism, as an intellectual position, and secularism, as a political one?
These are questions worth sitting with carefully, because the answers have significant consequences for how we understand the future of organised religion, the prospects for genuinely secular politics, and the meaning of irreligion itself.
1. Defining the Terrain: Nones, Atheists, and Agnostics Are Not the Same Thing
Before examining the politics, it is necessary to be precise about the category itself, because “no religious affiliation” is a much broader and less philosophically coherent designation than it might initially appear. When a survey respondent checks the box labelled “none” or “no religion,” they are not necessarily making any claim about the existence of gods, the validity of spiritual experience, or the truth of religious metaphysics. They are simply reporting that they do not currently belong to a religious organisation or identify with a religious tradition. The category encompasses committed atheists who have thought carefully about the question of theism and rejected it; agnostics who hold the question genuinely open; lapsed Catholics who still light candles at Christmas; people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”; and people who have never given the matter any sustained thought at all.
This matters enormously for our analysis, because the philosophical commitments of these sub-groups differ as radically as their politics. Atheism, properly understood, is the position that the evidence for the existence of gods is insufficient to justify belief. It is an epistemological stance, a conclusion reached through the application of reason and evidence to a specific class of claims. Agnosticism, in the tradition established by Thomas Huxley, who coined the term in 1869, is the position that the existence or non-existence of gods is not knowable, or at least not currently known. Both of these are intellectually serious positions that carry implications beyond the narrow question of theism: if you take evidence seriously in one domain, you are more likely to take it seriously in others.
But the “spiritual but not religious” category, which accounts for a very large proportion of the “none” cohort in American surveys, is something qualitatively different. Pew data from 2017 found that 27 percent of American adults described themselves in precisely those terms, and the proportion who held beliefs in astrology, psychics, reincarnation, or the efficacy of prayer was substantial. These are people who have disaffiliated from institutional religion without abandoning supernatural thinking. They have left the church but retained the ghost. Whether they deserve to be classified alongside sceptical atheists in any meaningful sense is a question that deserves more critical scrutiny than it typically receives.
The non-religious conservatives tend to cluster disproportionately in this vaguer, less philosophically committed region of the “none” spectrum. They are not, by and large, the people who have read Hume and concluded that the problem of evil is unanswerable. They are more likely to be people who have drifted away from church attendance without ever having found organised religion particularly compelling, who retain a diffuse respect for Christian civilisation as a cultural inheritance, and who find in conservative politics an expression of the same attachment to tradition, hierarchy, and national identity that religion once provided. Understanding this distinction is the key to understanding what the phenomenon of the non-religious conservative actually represents.
2. Cultural Christianity Without the Christ: The Sociology of Secular Conservatism
The sociologist Grace Davie identified decades ago a phenomenon she called “believing without belonging,” the tendency, particularly pronounced in Britain, for people to retain vague religious beliefs while abandoning institutional participation. What we are now witnessing among non-religious conservatives looks like the mirror image: belonging without believing, or more precisely, identifying with a civilisational tradition without subscribing to its metaphysical claims. The attachment is cultural rather than theological, aesthetic rather than doctrinal. It is Christianity understood as architecture, calendar, moral vocabulary, and ethnic heritage rather than as a set of propositions about an omnipotent deity and his salvific intentions toward humanity.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Voltaire, that fierce enemy of clerical power, nonetheless argued that religion was socially necessary to keep the masses orderly, famously remarking that he wanted his lawyer, tailor, and servants to believe in God, even if he himself did not. The French Enlightenment produced a tradition of secular conservatives who regarded Christianity as a useful fiction, a civilisational glue that held together communities which would otherwise fly apart. The philosopher Auguste Comte attempted to replace Christianity with a “Religion of Humanity,” preserving its ritual structure and emotional content while substituting scientific positivism for supernatural theology. The tradition of regarding religion as socially indispensable even when personally unbelievable runs deep in European conservative thought.
What is new is the scale of the phenomenon and its increasingly explicit political articulation. Figures like Douglas Murray, the British journalist and author of “The Strange Death of Europe,” represent this position with unusual directness. Murray describes himself as a “Christian atheist,” someone who does not believe in the theological claims of Christianity but regards Christian culture as the indispensable foundation of Western civilisation and therefore worth defending against what he characterises as the corrosive effects of mass immigration and cultural relativism. The position is not incoherent on its own terms, but it is worth examining carefully, because it involves a kind of intellectual dishonesty that its proponents rarely acknowledge.
If you believe that Christian theology is false, that there is no God, no resurrection, no divine law, and no transcendent moral order, then the moral and social claims that Christianity makes cannot be grounded in the authority that their original advocates attributed to them. You cannot simultaneously maintain that Christian sexual ethics represent the correct way to organise human intimate life and that the God who supposedly mandated those ethics does not exist. You cannot claim the authority of natural law while denying the nature-conferring God who, in the Thomistic tradition, is the source of that law’s binding force. The cultural conservative who has discarded the theology but retained the moral prescriptions is in the same position as someone who insists that a clock stopped at noon is telling the correct time without troubling to explain why we should trust it.
This intellectual instability is not merely an academic concern. It has practical political consequences, because it means that the secular conservative’s defence of traditional values cannot ultimately rely on the reasoning that generated those values. The argument collapses into nostalgia or aesthetics or ethnic identity, and that is precisely where we find much of the contemporary European right: not defending Christianity because it is true, but defending it because it is ours. The move from theology to identity is the defining intellectual gesture of the new secular nationalism, and it deserves to be named and criticised as the evasion it represents.
3. The Data in Detail: Who Are the Non-Religious Conservatives?
Demographic surveys allow us to sketch a reasonably clear portrait of this cohort, at least in the American context where the data is most detailed. According to PRRI’s 2022 American Values Survey, white non-Hispanic religiously unaffiliated Americans who identify as politically conservative or lean Republican are more likely than their liberal “none” counterparts to be male, older, and without a four-year college degree. They are concentrated disproportionately in rural and exurban areas, and they are more likely than either religious conservatives or secular liberals to express high levels of cultural anxiety about immigration, demographic change, and what surveys typically label “traditional values.”
What is particularly striking is that on the specific question of supernatural belief, many of these self-identified secular conservatives retain beliefs that would, under any rigorous definition, disqualify them from the label “atheist.” A substantial proportion of white non-religious conservatives in American surveys believe in some version of God or a higher power, pray occasionally, and report that religion is at least somewhat important to their lives despite their lack of formal affiliation. They have left organised religion, in many cases because of specific institutional failures, pastoral scandals, or simply the attrition of habit and social network, without having arrived at a philosophically worked-out rejection of theism.
In the British context, the picture is somewhat different, partly because British religious culture has been in a more advanced state of decline for longer. The British Social Attitudes survey has tracked a long secular drift that has produced, by now, a majority population of non-affiliates. But British secularism has always been characterised more by indifference than by conviction: most British people who do not attend church have not replaced religious belief with sceptical inquiry; they have simply stopped thinking about the question. The sociologist Steve Bruce has described British secularism as the product of religious indifference rather than anti-religious conviction, and the political distribution of British non-affiliates reflects this. The sizeable minority of British “nones” who vote Conservative or UKIP or Reform UK are not atheists in any philosophically meaningful sense; they are simply people for whom religion never played a significant organising role in their lives and who vote on the basis of economic or cultural concerns that have nothing to do with metaphysical commitments.
The European far-right presents yet another variation. Surveys of supporters of parties like the Front National in France, the AfD in Germany, and the Sweden Democrats consistently find higher rates of religious disaffiliation than among supporters of mainstream centre-right parties. Yet the ideology of these movements is saturated with religious cultural imagery, with appeals to Christian civilisation, to the heritage of the Crusades, to demographic replacement theories that frame immigration in explicitly eschatological terms. The voters may not attend mass, but their politics is organised around a quasi-religious conception of civilisational identity that borrows its emotional structure, its sense of sacred threat and holy mission, directly from religion. Religious thinking does not disappear when institutional religion declines; it migrates into other forms, and political nationalism is one of the most receptive vessels.
4. The Question of Values: Does Disaffiliation Change What People Actually Believe?
The central question for anyone concerned with the relationship between irreligion and enlightenment values is whether leaving religion actually changes the substantive moral and political beliefs that people hold, or whether it merely removes the institutional framework without disturbing the underlying dispositions. The answer, as the evidence accumulates, appears to be that it depends heavily on why and how someone leaves.
Sam Harris has argued, with characteristic bluntness, that religious moderation is not really a separate position from religious extremism: it is extremism with the embarrassing parts quietly omitted. The moderate religious believer, on this account, retains the epistemological habits of faith while declining to follow them to their logical conclusions, and is therefore intellectually incoherent even if practically less dangerous than the fundamentalist. A parallel argument applies to the non-religious conservative who retains the cultural and moral framework of Christianity without the theology: they are a moderate in a similar sense, someone who has retained the conclusions while abandoning the premises, and who is therefore incapable of providing a principled justification for the positions they hold.
The empirical evidence supports a distinction between what we might call “drift disaffiliation” and “conviction disaffiliation.” Those who leave religion because of sustained intellectual engagement with the arguments, because they have genuinely grappled with the question of evidence and found religious claims wanting, show substantially different patterns of subsequent belief and behaviour from those who simply drift away because church has become inconvenient, because their social network changed, or because a specific institutional scandal destroyed their trust in a particular denomination. The former group tends toward more consistently secular, evidence-based reasoning across domains. The latter group tends to retain the moral intuitions and social anxieties of the community they left, while losing the institutional accountability that, for all its failures, at least provided some structure for those intuitions.
This distinction has a direct bearing on the politics of non-religious conservatives. The available survey evidence suggests that their disaffiliation is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, of the “drift” variety rather than the “conviction” variety. They have not concluded, through careful reasoning, that theism is false and that the moral framework derived from it therefore requires reconstruction on secular foundations. They have simply stopped attending services, stopped identifying with a denomination, and retained whatever moral and political instincts they arrived at through their upbringing and social environment. In this sense, their “none” status tells us very little about their philosophical commitments and a great deal about their institutional loyalties, or rather, their absence of them.
Richard Dawkins has consistently emphasised that the question of whether someone identifies with a religious tradition is less important than the question of whether they apply critical thinking to the claims that tradition makes. Writing in “The God Delusion,” he notes that many people who nominally identify as Christian have beliefs that would be unrecognisable to any serious theologian, and conversely that many people who identify as having no religion retain cognitive habits that are functionally indistinguishable from religious thinking. The category of “none” is, in Dawkins’ sense, deeply uninformative about what actually matters: the quality of the epistemic habits someone brings to contested questions.
5. Atheism Is Not a Political Position, But It Has Political Implications
There is a temptation, particularly among secular progressives, to treat atheism as a package deal: if you reject God, you ought also to reject the conservative politics that religious institutions have historically underwritten. This temptation should be resisted, because it confuses a philosophical position with a political programme. Atheism, as an intellectual conclusion, does not by itself generate a specific political platform any more than the acceptance of evolutionary biology generates a specific view on taxation or immigration policy. It is possible, in principle, to be a sceptical, evidence-respecting atheist who nonetheless arrives at broadly conservative political conclusions through a different chain of reasoning.
Bertrand Russell, whose scepticism was as rigorous as any modern atheist could wish, held political views that ranged across the spectrum over the course of his long life, embracing pacifism, socialism, and at various points positions that would now be considered contentious from a progressive perspective. The philosopher Anthony Flew, perhaps the most distinguished atheist philosopher of the twentieth century before his late and unfortunate conversion to deism, held broadly libertarian political views that sat uneasily with the progressive politics that most of his secular colleagues endorsed. The mere fact of disbelief does not determine political allegiance, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.
What atheism does imply, however, is a certain approach to political reasoning. If you genuinely accept that claims must be supported by evidence, that authority is not self-validating, and that tradition is not sufficient justification for a practice or policy, then you are committed to applying those standards consistently across the full range of political questions. You cannot accept that supernatural revelation is an insufficient basis for political authority while simultaneously accepting that ethnic heritage, civilisational continuity, or national tradition provides an unquestionable basis for political decisions. The epistemological commitments of genuine scepticism are not domain-specific; they apply wherever claims are being made and conclusions are being drawn.
This is where the intellectual problem with the non-religious conservative becomes most acute. If their conservatism is grounded not in careful reasoning but in cultural inheritance, ethnic identity, or nostalgic attachment to a social order that once felt secure, then their political position is epistemologically no different from the religious conservatism they have nominally abandoned. They have replaced “because God commands it” with “because it is our heritage,” and neither formulation survives the application of the sceptical standards that genuine irreligion requires. The accident of birth that determines religious inheritance also determines cultural inheritance, and a truly consistent scepticism ought to be suspicious of both.
There is a further complication worth naming here. The tradition of conservative political thought, from Edmund Burke onward, has always included a strand that takes seriously the accumulated wisdom embedded in inherited institutions, that regards tradition not as mere prejudice but as the distilled experience of generations. This is a position that can be held and defended through secular reasoning without any appeal to supernatural authority. The question is whether the non-religious conservatives who populate the contemporary right are actually engaging with that tradition of thought, subjecting it to the critical examination it deserves, and arriving at conservative conclusions through genuine intellectual engagement. The available evidence suggests that most are not. The appeal to heritage and tradition in contemporary secular conservatism rarely involves the careful philosophical work that Burke or Michael Oakeshott performed; it is more often a rhetorical gesture toward an idealised past that was never quite as it is imagined.
6. The Weaponisation of Secularism: Anti-Islam and the Right’s New Secular Language
One of the more remarkable features of contemporary right-wing populism in Europe is its adoption of secular, even Enlightenment, language in the service of anti-Islamic politics. Geert Wilders frames his opposition to Islam not in Christian terms but in the language of liberal freedoms: free speech, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the separation of religion from public life. Marine Le Pen has made similar arguments, presenting French laïcité, the tradition of strict state secularism, as the cultural value that must be defended against Islamic encroachment. In this rhetorical move, secularism is not presented as a universal principle requiring consistent application to all religious traditions; it is deployed selectively against one religion, with Christianity enjoying a de facto exemption as the cultural background radiation of European civilisation.
This is a cynical appropriation of secular language that deserves to be identified and challenged directly. Genuine secularism, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, requires consistency: the principle that religious claims do not automatically deserve deference in the public square applies to all religious claims equally, including those of the Christian majority tradition. A secularism that defends freedom of speech and women’s rights against Islamic conservatism while simultaneously defending Christian sexual ethics and Catholic influence over state education is not secularism at all; it is majoritarianism dressed in secular clothing. The selective application of Enlightenment principles to a despised minority while exempting the dominant cultural tradition from the same scrutiny is precisely the kind of intellectual dishonesty that serious sceptical inquiry ought to expose and reject.
Christopher Hitchens engaged with this problem directly, and his position was uncompromising. He had no difficulty arguing that political Islam represented a genuine danger to Enlightenment values, but he was equally willing to make the same argument about Christian theocracy, Jewish fundamentalism, and Hindu nationalism. The principle was always consistent: religious claims, when they seek to override individual rights or determine public policy through divine authority rather than democratic deliberation, are illegitimate regardless of which tradition makes them. What Hitchens would have made of European right-wingers who invoke his critique of Islamic theology while defending Catholic influence over social policy is not difficult to imagine. He had a precise vocabulary for that kind of selective scepticism, and it was not complimentary.
The non-religious conservatives who have been attracted to this selective secular language are, in many cases, not motivated by a principled commitment to Enlightenment values at all. They are motivated by cultural anxiety, by the sense that the social world they grew up in is changing faster than they can accommodate, and by the search for an authoritative framework that will justify that anxiety without requiring them to engage seriously with its sources. Secularism has become, in this context, a tribal identity rather than a philosophical commitment, a badge of civilisational belonging that performs the same function that religious identity once performed. The question of whether the underlying beliefs are true, or whether the underlying reasoning is sound, has been set aside entirely.
The historian of secularism Charles Taylor, writing in “A Secular Age,” argued that the process of secularisation is far more complex than a simple narrative of enlightenment displacing superstition. Taylor’s account emphasises that what changes in a secular age is not merely the content of belief but the whole background framework against which belief and unbelief are experienced. One of the implications of his analysis is that secular identity can itself become a form of uncritical belonging, a way of locating oneself within a community and a tradition without submitting that belonging to genuine critical examination. The European right’s selective secularism is, in exactly this sense, a form of religious thinking operating under a secular label. The sacred object has changed; the cognitive structure has not.
7. What the Church Thinks: Institutional Religion’s Response to Secular Conservatism
The response of religious institutions to the growth of secular conservatism has been, in most cases, strategically ambivalent. On one hand, the traditional alliance between conservative politics and organised religion means that many religious leaders are reluctant to criticise political allies even when those allies have abandoned the theological commitments that supposedly justify the shared political positions. On the other hand, the existence of a large and growing cohort of non-religious people who broadly support conservative cultural and social policies creates both an opportunity and a threat for institutional religion.
The opportunity is obvious: if cultural Christianity retains political loyalty even without the theology, then the church’s social influence survives the loss of doctrinal allegiance. The threat is equally obvious: if people can obtain the cultural benefits of Christian civilisation without actually believing in or practising Christianity, then the incentive to maintain formal religious affiliation is greatly diminished. The secular conservative who votes to defend “Christian values” without attending church is, from the institutional perspective, a free-rider: someone who consumes the cultural product without contributing to its maintenance.
Some religious leaders have responded to this by doubling down on the theological content, insisting that genuine Christian conservatism requires genuine Christian belief and practice and that the secular conservative’s allegiance to Christian cultural heritage is fundamentally incoherent. This is, at least, an intellectually honest position. Others have taken the opposite approach, welcoming the secular conservative as a cultural ally and downplaying the theological requirements of membership in what they see as a broad civilisational coalition. This latter approach is strategically understandable but theologically troubling, because it effectively concedes that the truth claims of Christianity are less important than their cultural utility, which is a remarkable concession for an institution whose foundational claim is that it possesses divinely revealed truth.
The American evangelical movement has navigated this tension with particular awkwardness in the aftermath of the Trump years. The political alliance between evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party was always, from a theological perspective, an uncomfortable one, but it became acutely so when the party’s most energetic supporters included a growing cohort of non-religious, culturally alienated white voters whose attachment to evangelical social positions had more to do with tribal identity than theological conviction. The evangelical leadership found itself in the position of a proprietor whose brand had been adopted by people who had no interest in the original product and whose behaviour was actively damaging its reputation.
The longer-term consequence of this dynamic is worth considering carefully. When political conservatism no longer requires theological conservatism as its justification, the leverage that religious institutions exercise over conservative politicians is substantially reduced. A conservative politician who draws support from a coalition that is increasingly secular in its composition has less incentive to follow the policy preferences of religious institutions than one whose coalition is dependent on the organisational infrastructure and moral authority of the church. The secularisation of the conservative coalition may ultimately be more corrosive to religious political power than any number of progressive electoral victories, precisely because it operates from within the political tradition that religious institutions have historically counted as their own.
8. The Left’s Failure: Why Secular Politics Has Not Captured the Secular Voter
If the non-religious conservative represents, in part, a failure of the right to provide intellectually coherent secular alternatives to religious conservatism, the phenomenon also reflects a significant failure of the secular left to make its case to the full range of irreligious voters. The assumption that disaffiliation leads naturally to progressive politics has, as noted, been increasingly contradicted by the evidence. Understanding why requires an honest assessment of where secular, progressive politics has failed to connect with significant segments of the non-religious population.
Part of the explanation lies in class. The progressive secular left has become, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, increasingly associated with university-educated, metropolitan, professional-class voters. Its cultural vocabulary, its political priorities, and its social sensibilities reflect the concerns and experiences of a relatively narrow demographic. The working-class or lower-middle-class person who has drifted away from religion and who lives in a post-industrial town or rural community frequently finds that the secular left’s politics feel as alien to their experience as the religious right’s theology. The progressive movement has, in many cases, been more effective at making irreligious professionals feel at home than at speaking to the economic anxieties and cultural dislocations of working-class non-affiliates.
Part of the explanation also lies in what might be called the progressive movement’s own quasi-religious tendencies. The social commentator John McWhorter, himself a secular liberal, has argued that certain strands of progressive ideology have adopted the epistemological structure of religious faith: the unquestionable sacred texts, the ritual denunciations of heresy, the emphasis on correct performance of ideological commitment over the assessment of empirical outcomes. Whether or not one accepts McWhorter’s specific analysis, the broader observation has merit: movements that treat their own positions as beyond rational challenge, that respond to disagreement with accusations of moral failure rather than engagement with the substance of objections, are not operating in the tradition of sceptical, evidence-based reasoning. They are operating in the tradition of religious orthodoxy, and people who have left one orthodoxy are not always eager to join another.
The secular left has also, in some contexts, been insufficiently attentive to the legitimate concerns that have driven some non-religious voters toward conservatism. The anxieties about community, belonging, identity, and cultural continuity that religion once addressed do not disappear when religion retreats; they need to be met by something. Where secular progressivism has failed to offer a compelling account of community, solidarity, and shared meaning, conservative politics, even in its culturally Christian secular form, has stepped into the gap. This is not an argument for abandoning progressive values; it is an argument for taking seriously the human needs that religious communities once addressed and that political movements of all stripes have struggled to replace.
There is a related point about intellectual humility. The secular progressive who treats every non-religious conservative as a simple case of false consciousness, someone who has merely failed to draw the correct conclusions from their lack of belief, is making an error that mirrors the one they criticise in religious dogmatists. The honest answer to why some thoughtful, sceptical people arrive at broadly conservative political conclusions is that political questions are genuinely difficult, that the evidence bearing on them is frequently ambiguous, and that reasonable people applying similar epistemological standards can arrive at different positions. Acknowledging this complexity is not a concession to bad reasoning; it is a precondition for the kind of genuine persuasion that secular politics ought to aspire to.
9. What This Means for the Future of Organised Religion
The growth of non-religious conservatism has profound implications for the future trajectory of organised religion in Western societies, and they are not straightforwardly positive for religious institutions. The most immediate implication is that the political coalition that has sustained religious power in public life may be decoupling from the theological commitments that originally motivated it. If conservative politics can be sustained by a coalition that includes large numbers of culturally Christian but theologically indifferent or disbelieving voters, then the leverage that religious institutions exercise over that coalition is correspondingly diminished.
This is already visible in the policy priorities of right-wing parties that have attracted substantial secular support. The shift from issues like prayer in schools and opposition to same-sex marriage, which were the defining priorities of religious conservatism in the 1990s and 2000s, toward issues like immigration, economic nationalism, and opposition to progressive cultural politics reflects, in part, the changing composition of the conservative coalition. The new conservative voter who does not attend church does not feel the same urgency about explicitly theological policy questions that the evangelical voter of a previous generation felt. The political agenda shifts accordingly.
For organised religion, this represents a long-term strategic problem. Political influence has been one of the primary mechanisms through which religious institutions have maintained their social relevance and, frankly, their practical power in areas like education, healthcare, and social services. If the political coalition that sustained that influence is being populated by people who have no particular loyalty to religious institutions, then the institutional church’s ability to extract policy concessions from conservative governments will diminish over time, even if the governments themselves remain nominally conservative. The secular conservative has no particular reason to support state funding for faith schools, exemptions for religious organisations from anti-discrimination law, or the privileged position of religious voices in public deliberation. Those policy preferences are grounded in theological commitments that the secular conservative does not share.
The longer-term demographic trajectory compounds this problem. The number of people who have privately abandoned religious belief while maintaining social conformity has been growing for decades, and as social conformity pressures around religion diminish, more of those private disbelievers will become public non-affiliates. The intergenerational transmission of religious belief has weakened dramatically: children raised in nominally religious but not actively practising households have very high rates of disaffiliation by early adulthood. The pipeline of future believers is narrowing, and there is no demographic trend in the data that suggests a reversal.
Carl Sagan observed, in “The Demon-Haunted World,” that science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking, a habit of sceptical inquiry that, once genuinely adopted, is difficult to confine to any particular domain. The same might be said of irreligion: once the habit of questioning supernatural claims is genuinely established, it tends to spread. The person who has genuinely worked through the question of theism and arrived at disbelief through reasoning is less likely, over time, to exempt other inherited beliefs from the same scrutiny. Whether that process of generalised scepticism eventually reaches the political beliefs of the current generation of secular conservatives is one of the genuinely interesting empirical questions of our political moment, and the answer will have consequences well beyond the specific question of religious affiliation.
10. What the Non-Religious Conservative Tells Us About Atheism’s Unfinished Work
The existence of a substantial cohort of non-religious conservatives is, ultimately, a challenge to the secular movement and its self-understanding rather than a vindication of it. The growth of the “none” category is not the same thing as the growth of critical, evidence-based thinking. It is entirely possible for a society to become less religious in the institutional sense while remaining just as susceptible to tribalism, motivated reasoning, and the comforting certainties of identity politics. The departure from organised religion, absent the development of genuine epistemological humility and the habits of sceptical inquiry, simply creates a vacancy that other forms of dogmatism are perfectly positioned to fill.
This is what the phenomenon of the non-religious conservative most clearly demonstrates. It shows that religious disaffiliation, by itself, is not a sufficient condition for the kind of secular, rational politics that the Enlightenment tradition was aiming at. The person who leaves the church without acquiring the habit of subjecting all inherited beliefs to critical scrutiny has not, in any philosophically meaningful sense, become more secular; they have simply changed the institutional location of their tribal loyalties. The flags and jerseys have changed; the cognitive habits have not.
Russell, in his celebrated 1927 lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian,” noted that the intellectual virtues he valued most, the willingness to follow an argument wherever it leads, the refusal to accept comfortable conclusions without evidence, and the genuine openness to being wrong, were virtues that religious institutions had historically suppressed rather than cultivated. What the existence of the non-religious conservative demonstrates is that leaving religious institutions does not automatically confer those virtues. They have to be actively cultivated, through education, through intellectual culture, through the deliberate practice of examining one’s own beliefs with the same rigour one applies to the beliefs of others.
The task for the secular movement, if it has one beyond the merely negative project of arguing against supernatural claims, is to contribute to the creation of an intellectual culture in which those virtues are genuinely valued and practised. That means engaging seriously with the human needs that religion addressed: the need for community, for ritual, for meaning, for an account of mortality that is honest without being merely bleak. It means taking seriously the legitimate anxieties about belonging and identity that have driven some non-religious voters toward conservative populism, and offering something more than the accusation that those anxieties are themselves a moral failure. And it means maintaining the intellectual consistency that genuine scepticism requires: applying the same critical standards to one’s own political tribe that one applies to the religious claims of others.
The honest answer to the question of what the non-religious conservative tells us is this: they tell us that the secular project is much less complete than the growth of the “none” category suggests. Institutional religion may be in decline, but the habits of mind that religion cultivated, the deference to authority, the preference for tribal solidarity over honest inquiry, and the tendency to mistake cultural inheritance for moral truth, are proving considerably more durable than the institutional structures that once housed them. The question of how to address that durability is the genuinely difficult work that lies ahead, and the secular movement has barely begun to grapple with it.
There is a further dimension to this reckoning that deserves to be stated plainly. The secular movement, in its most publicly visible forms, has sometimes been better at critiquing the specific doctrinal claims of religion than at offering a convincing positive account of what replaces religion’s social and psychological functions. The critique of theism, however rigorous and however justified, does not by itself answer the question of how communities should organise shared meaning, how individuals should confront mortality, or how societies should generate the bonds of solidarity that make collective life possible. These are not trivial questions, and the fact that religion has answered them badly, or dishonestly, or cruelly, does not mean they do not require answers. The non-religious conservative, for all the intellectual incoherence of their position, is at least gesturing toward a real problem: the problem of what fills the space that religion occupied. The secular movement’s failure to engage with that problem seriously has contributed to the conditions in which a secular politics of nostalgia and tribal identity can find a ready audience among the disaffiliated.
Conclusion: Secularism as Practice, Not Identity
The growth of the religiously unaffiliated right is, in one sense, a straightforwardly sociological development: people are leaving religious institutions at a faster rate than those institutions can retain them, and they are distributing themselves across the political spectrum in ways that reflect their pre-existing cultural environments rather than any philosophical consistency. In another sense, it is a reminder of something that Enlightenment thinkers understood but that their contemporary heirs have sometimes forgotten: the project of reason is never finished, and its gains are never secure.
Secularism, properly understood, is not an identity to be claimed by checking the “none” box on a survey. It is a practice, a disciplined commitment to subjecting all claims, including one’s own most cherished ones, to the test of evidence and argument. By that standard, the non-religious conservative who has retained the moral framework of a tradition they no longer believe is no more secular than the moderate believer who has retained the institutional affiliation of a tradition they no longer interrogate. Both have stopped somewhere short of the destination that genuine sceptical inquiry points toward.
The demographic shift is real and consequential. The implications for organised religion, for secular politics, and for the future of public reasoning in democratic societies are significant and will take decades to fully unfold. But the shift in affiliation numbers should not be mistaken for a shift in the quality of collective reasoning, and the secular movement does itself no favours by treating every new “none” as a recruit to the cause of rational inquiry. Among the expanding cohort of the disaffiliated, a sizeable and politically significant proportion are people who have left one inherited certainty without having acquired the tools to do without certainty altogether. That distinction, between the absence of religion and the presence of reason, is the most important one that the current moment requires us to hold clearly in view.
Huxley, who understood the intellectual demands of genuine agnosticism better than almost anyone, insisted that the honest thinker must follow reason wherever it leads, and must resist the temptation to stop at a comfortable point before the inquiry is complete. The non-religious conservative has, by and large, followed reason part of the way and then stopped at a point that happens to coincide with the cultural comfort zone of their upbringing. That is understandable as a human response to the unsettling demands of genuine inquiry. It is not, however, something that the secular tradition should mistake for an achievement, and the distinction matters more now than it has at any point in the three decades during which the “none” category has been expanding. The secular project was never merely about emptying the pews. It was about cultivating a particular quality of mind, one that remains as rare, and as necessary, as it has ever been.
References
Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” 2023. Public Religion Research Institute, “American Values Survey,” 2022. Dawkins, Richard, “The God Delusion,” 2006. Russell, Bertrand, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” 1927. Sagan, Carl, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,” 1995. Davie, Grace, “Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing Without Belonging,” 1994. Bruce, Steve, “God is Dead: Secularization in the West,” 2002. Hitchens, Christopher, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” 2007. Harris, Sam, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason,” 2004. Murray, Douglas, “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam,” 2017. McWhorter, John, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” 2021. Taylor, Charles, “A Secular Age,” 2007.