It’s generally known that secularization has turned Europe into a collection of largely non-religious nations. Callum Brown, a historian at the University of Glasgow who specializes in oral history, has published a book (“Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West”), which investigates the history of Western culture’s loss of faith. To get a sense of just how secular Europe has become, Brown reports that a Swedish respondent, during his interview, said that Swedes think that people who go to church “are slightly weird” — not a description that an American would be likely to use.

Brown interviewed 85 people, born between 1920 and 1965, from 19 countries (including several Asian nations) and also utilized oral history archives. The United States was not neglected; in fact the second highest number of respondents (16) were from America.

As Brown is aware, the United States has experienced less secularization than Europe, but surveys show that the loss of faith here has been substantial, and is ongoing. ABC/Washington Post polls for 2003 and 2017 reveal, for example, that, in 2003, 12 percent of respondents said they had “no religion.” In 2017, that proportion was 21 percent.

Those findings correlate well with the Pew Public Religion Research Institute’s data, which show that in 2004, 14 percent of those surveyed identified their religious affiliation as “atheist,” “agnostic” or “nothing in particular”; in 2017, 24 percent gave that response. And it’s the one of the youngest American generations that is the most secular. A recent Pew survey found that 40 percent of millennials have no religious affiliations.

Though professor Brown’s book uses the word “atheist” in the title, and most of the people that he interviewed self-identified as “atheists,” he thinks that the term should be used in a broad sense. Those who abandon religion often go through stages in doing so, and it’s not uncommon for them to experience decades of total indifference to religion before they examine their own convictions and declare that they are atheists.

Moreover, “atheist” is a term that non-religious people have long avoided because it tends to elicit strongly negative reactions from others. Even now, when surveyed, people will more readily answer “no” to the question “Do you believe in God?” than answer “yes” to the question “Are you an atheist?” Brown believes that the term “atheist” should not apply to just those who accept the label, but to anyone who lives his or her life “as though there is no god.” He calls those people “de facto atheists.”

Professor Brown is interested in the various paths taken by those who become atheists, whether de facto or self-professed. One common path, with which I am familiar, begins with a non-religious childhood and a general disinterest in religion until sometime in high school, when the usual teenage self-examination leads to open disbelief.

A majority of Brown’s respondents, however, had religious upbringings, yet many also moved away from religion at an early age. Brown says, “It is a remarkable finding of this project that a considerable proportion of respondents reported that their loss of faith happened between the ages of 7 and 15.”

What led those young people to reject their religions? For earlier generations, atheist doctrine was largely unknown, especially by the young, yet members of those generations report that they found Christianity unpersuasive, if not downright silly. A Scottish woman said that, as a child, she was a Marvel Comics fan and wondered, “How do we decide that the god thing is ‘real’, but we know that Superman ain’t?”

Many people abandon religion as adults, either by ceasing to care about it or by openly rejecting it.

History and culture enter into the matter, of course. In the 1950s, religion was solidly dominant. Then came the politico-cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s: a rebellion against a war and the “establishment” in all its forms, including traditional religion. People became religious “seekers,” and New Age spirituality flourished, at the expense of Old Age faiths.

In Brown’s view, this period had an especially revolutionary effect upon women’s religiosity. The old sexual morality was overthrown — a morality grounded in the patriarchal church. Young women now encountered a liberating culture of sexual freedom, adventure and autonomy. The feminist movement surged and the U.S. Congress, in response, passed bill after bill prohibiting discrimination against women in the workplace, in education, in housing, as well as in the bedroom. Roe v. Wade, remember, was decided in 1973.

Young women suddenly saw a future other than simply marriage and child-raising. A great many of them left behind not only the morality and narrow expectations of the past, but the religion that had enforced those limitations on women’s lives. As Brown puts it, people “seeking to escape religion are, in some cultural contexts, escaping from other things.”

Race and ethnicity are also relevant factors. For Afro-Americans and Muslims, religion is so strongly linked to their cultures that renouncing it threatens not merely ostracism but a loss of self-identity (not to mention those Muslim nations in which apostasy is punishable by death).

Brown found that there is no uniform pattern of discarding religion, and that both emotion and intellect have played roles in his respondents’ accounts. Many have experienced anger at Christianity’s immorality — its refusal to recognize LGBTQ rights, its debasement of women, its rejection of the right to die, its total insensitivity to the rights of non-human creatures. Hindus report rejecting Hinduism in large part because of its support of the caste system.

For those of an intellectual bent, religion has often been abandoned simply because science provides a far more complete and trustworthy account of the world (and of religion itself). As for literature explaining the atheist perspective, Brown’s older respondents reported little contact with it in the mid-20th century. Now it is widely available, including the articulate and persuasive works of neo-atheist writers like Richard Dawkins, Peter Hitchens and Sam Harris, and trenchant critiques of Christianity by Bart Ehrman, Atheist or secular humanist organizations were also rare in the earlier 20th century (except for that beloved halfway house on the road to atheism, Unitarian Universalism), but now they can be easily found.

It may take quite a while before the average American regards local churchgoers as “slightly weird,” but at least we are moving in the right direction.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.