Dr Anna Strhan, Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, has just won a research award from the John Templeton Foundation for a project entitled ‘Nonreligious Childhood: Growing Up Unbelieving in Contemporary Britain’.
Quantitative research has drawn attention to the significance of the family, education, and geographical variation in contributing to declining religious belief, affiliation, and practice, and to increasing numbers of children identified as nonreligious. There is however a lack of knowledge about the nature, varieties, and substance of children’s unbelief, in the UK and other global settings. Previous research on religion and socialisation has been dominated by North American studies, based on largely white, Christian samples or surveys of teenagers, which have charted the decline of religious identification and belief but have not explored unbelief as an area of inquiry in its own right.
Situated in conversation with a small but growing literature on childhood and religion in sociology, anthropology, and religious studies, Anna’s project will address what it means to be unbelieving for children in the UK. The project will ask a number of questions, including: how, when, and where do children learn to be unbelieving? What does this mean for them and for adults in relation to them? How do children negotiate and experience their unbelief as they move across a range of social settings, such as home, school, and other social spaces? How are children’s unbeliefs interrelated with particular worldviews and existential cultures? What range of beliefs, practices, identities, and moral orientations are held alongside their unbeliefs?
The project will fill an important gap in our understanding of the substantive nature and forms of children’s unbelief, enabling future comparative and theoretical work on children’s nonreligious formation and their cultures of unbelief.
The project is funded by the John Templeton Foundation through the Understanding Unbelief programme. This major new research programme aims to advance scientific understanding of atheism and other forms of ‘unbelief’ around the world. For provisional details about the broader programme, see: http://understanding-unbelief.net