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Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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David
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Anastasia and Rachel Shillito about growing up godless non religious childhoods in contemporary England. So welcome to the podcast.
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Rachel Shillito
Hello.
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Anastasia
It's nice to be here.
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Rachel Shillito
Yeah, really nice. Thank you.
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David
This is an incredibly interesting book and not to let people peek behind the curtain, but we were talking before we started that. I think it's a book that deals with this kind of fascinating question of non religion in society, but it's also bound up with some really kind of broad sociological questions about social reproduction and how kind of society and ideas carry on and are replicated. Which is absolutely fascinating. And part of, I guess the place to start is around kind of what is the book about, what are the big themes. But also it strikes me that as co authors you've got I guess a kind of research partnership research relationship that's been going on for quite a while. You know, the book is an ethnographic work which obviously takes time, which takes quite a lot of sort of commitment by the researchers. So it'd be interesting to hear about I suppose, kind of as much as where the book came from, where the research partnership came from.
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Anastasia
Oh thanks. So I guess in terms of where the research came from and what inspired it. Rachel and I have both worked in sociology of Religion and the sociology of childhood. And I guess the interest in terms of looking at non religious childhoods was partly because in the uk, but also in the us, other North American and European countries, there's been a really sharp rise in the numbers of people who say that they have no religion in surveys. In fact, in the uk, no religion has recently overtaken Christianity as the majority identity here for the first time. And in the kind of situation sociological work on religion, much of the work in this area has been dominated by secularization theory, which focused really on exploring the decline of religion or the loss of belief. So sort of approach non religion as like an absence of religion rather than something that should be studied as having its own distinctive formations. But as the non religious population has been growing, we've seen kind of growing research interest in the sociology of religion in these so called religious nuns. Who are they, what do they believe in, what are their values and how do they engage with religion? And lots of this work on non religion has kind of focused on challenging some of the kind of stereotypical portraits that you get on atheism in the media, which is often dominated by kind of anti religious or atheist voices. So this work on non religion has provided new insight into the kind of diversity of non religious populations. But although these non religious populations are young, there hasn't really. There hadn't prior to us working on this really been any studies of what non religion looked like amongst children. There'd been some work on teenagers and adolescents, but nothing really on kind of how and why growing numbers of children are growing up non religious. So we kind of spoke about and thought it would be a really great opportunity to understand what's happening in childhood that's driving these changes. So we'd both previously done ethnographic, qualitative projects with children in relation to religion and we thought there was a need for a study looking at how young children are growing up non religious and non believing in Britain. What does that mean to them? What do they believe in and care about? Does their non religion look similar to or different from their parents? And how do they encounter the growing religious diversity that they're also growing up with? So yeah, we discussed collaborating on developing a project in this area and we applied for funding for it. There was a research program that was led by Lois Lee at the University of Kent called Understanding Unbelief which was aimed at deepening understanding of religious unbelief around the world. And so yeah, we thought this would be a good opportunity to dig into these questions further.
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David
I'm struck there by, I suppose, a question about what are we actually talking about. You've mentioned that this phenomenon of kind of non religiosity, if that's the right way to kind of capture everything, isn't atheism. You know, it's not really kind of the classic version of secularism that you find in a lot of, I guess the kind of like 90s sociology about how society was changing. And at the risk of kind of asking for a sort of like single bullet point, it'd be useful to hear, I guess, how we define non belief, non religion, non religiosity.
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Rachel Shillito
Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question, David. It is a tricky definition to approach as it is with the study of religion and the use of the term religion more broadly. But we, we draw primarily on more relational approaches to non religion and specifically Lois Lee's definition of non religion, which is that it's any phenomenon, position, perspective, you know, or practice that is primarily understood in relation to religion that in and of itself isn't considered to be religious. And that's like the key part. So it's something that is under. It has to be understood in relation to religion, but obviously isn't religion itself. So this helps kind of designate non religion, not then covering everything and anything that isn't religious because it could easily do that. It's specifically something that is considered in relation to religion. So, for example, like self identifying as being humanist or being spiritual but not religious. That is what we would understand as, as being non religious. So it's, it's not being used to designate something which is the absence of something. It's something that is characterized, at least in the first instance, through its relation to religion. And then the non belief, again, that's like another, it was another tricky concept to deal with. But we approach non belief again rather than referring to the lack of belief. Sorry, we use it to refer to lack of belief in traditionally, traditionally religious phenomenon, such as belief in God or gods. But what we don't use it is, is to refer as to having no beliefs whatsoever. So it's not sort of to say that non belief means having absolutely no beliefs. It's specifically to refer to non belief as in a lack of belief in traditionally religious phenomena. And that's something that we really wanted to get at in the book because the children that we, you know, worked with and spoke with and as you can imagine, and as you'll have seen in the book, they have loads of different beliefs which, you know, cover all sorts of different, you Know, supernatural, you know, beliefs and magical beliefs, but they also hold non beliefs. So it was looking at the relationship between those two things.
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David
Yeah, I was really struck by the sense of the kids believing both in unicorns and in science as a kind of combination of almost, you know, kind of new forms of faith, but at the same time set against the background of quite profound kind of ethical commitments as well. And I guess we'll sort of unpack them as we think about some of the ideas you discuss. Towards the end of the book, I suppose so far we've had a, a sort of abstract conversation about, you know, how do you define particular terms, you know, what's the kind of phenomena that you're interested in. One thing that would be great actually, is to kind of bring this all to life. So in the book you start really with the kind of the sense of the narratives, the stories, I suppose, the data you've gathered from the young people. And it'd be great to hear just some examples of, of what belief means for these non believers.
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Anastasia
So, yeah, we asked the children what they believed in and what they didn't believe in. And I think perhaps we might have expected more variety here. And there was variety, but at the same time, it was a relatively narrow range of themes that came up when we asked them about belief and what they believed in, what they didn't believe in. Firstly, they mostly told us that they didn't believe in God. In a sense, that perhaps wasn't surprising because we had already done a worksheet activity where we asked them about belief in God. So we sampled with children who didn't believe in God or weren't certain if they believed in God. So they mostly all spoke about not believing in God, and a handful said that they were uncertain about that. And then when we asked them to talk more about that, they often then spoke, spoke about how they didn't believe in God because they believed in science. So lots of them spoke about believing in the Big Bang theory or the theory of evolution instead. And he also often spoke about how they felt belief in God was illogical. There was a kind of faith in reason as well. So they were growing up with the sense that there was this kind of tension in a way between belief in God and science. A few others spoke about how they didn't need belief in God because they had other people in their lives who provided a sense of comfort or cared for them or provided a sense of security. But yeah, as you mentioned, lots of them also spoke about how they believed in magical or supernatural Figures like ghosts, dragons, unicorns or fairies. And they spoke about those kinds of beliefs as things that were fun and playful in their lives and also as part of their friendships with each other. So they spoke, spoke about how like it was, you know, fun to chat about ghosts with each other. And I guess another important and kind of shared aspect of their narratives of their beliefs were this sort of sense that their beliefs were their beliefs. So although they recognized that they were influenced by their parents, they thought it was important that they had chosen their own beliefs. And that was kind of, yeah, important to them. But at the same time they were also aware of their beliefs changing over time. So some of them had spoke about how they used to believe in God when they were younger. And these kids were aged 7, 8, 9, 10, the majority of them was of 8, 9, 10 the ones that we interviewed. So they spoke about how they had believed in God when they were, you know, in nursery, but by the time they were six or seven they decided that they didn't believe in God. And I'd say that another kind of shared thread amongst that kind of united these beliefs was a kind of what we describe as a this way worldly quality to them. So rather than believing in some kind of transcendent otherworldly realm, they kind of rooted their beliefs in. Their beliefs, in their relationships with their friends, their family, their patsies were all sources of meaning and significance. And we suggest enchantment for the children. And I guess they also believed in like fun and pleasure. They spoke about believing like one of the kids who we opened the book with described how he believed in chocolate, but they also believed in caring for others, caring for animals, caring for the natural world as well. So I think yeah, this is the kind of key aspects of belief that came up when we asked them in.
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David
The chapter on parents. You try and I guess kind of demonstrate the way that it's not a kind of one way street between parents and children or parents just kind of passing on non religious beliefs, but also that the, the children, the young people have got kind of agency in the way they develop their beliefs and this kind of impacts and influences the parents. So it'd be great to hear I guess about the kind of parents beliefs and then the kind of sense of co creation or transmission of non belief between parents and children.
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Rachel Shillito
Yeah, thanks. I mean it's a really great question. It's a really sort of key aspect of what the research sought to explore. It wasn't just simply, you know, focusing on the children's own beliefs and identities but it was really trying to take that intergenerational lens and to think about how belief exists across the life course, you know, within, within the family unit. And broadly speaking, the parents beliefs was, were often, you know, quite similar to that of their children. So you know, the top level beliefs of valuing equality, valuing relationships, you know, valuing family, valuing friends, you know, the importance of science, rationality, logic and of autonomy and of choice and freedom. But there were also like some differences as well. And the differences that we noticed between the parents and the children often came back to the fact that religion just had been more a part of the parents own upbringing. So that the parents sort of childhood and memories of childhood. And although a few of our children that were in the study did go to church with their parents, the majority did. For the majority of children, you know, religion just wasn't part of their everyday life. And that was in contrast to many of the parents for whom churchgoing and if you like are taken for granted, Christian had been a part of their own childhood. And so because of this exposure to religion and specifically Christianity for the parents, many parents, including those who did identify as religious, were at some point in the interview to some lesser or greater extent a bit critical of religion. And this was often linked to, if you like, more moral reasons. So for example, criticizing religion as being patriarchal or the course of war and strife and conflict. And a handful of parents, a small number of parents did perhaps express more Islamophobic sentiments. But at the same time there were, you know, a number of parents who were perhaps, you know, a bit more positive and open towards both spirituality and religion. So I guess one of the take homes for parents is that if you like the spectrum or range of stances and beliefs, take attitudes towards religion and belief was a lot broader than that of their children. And you went on, you know, one, one end of the spectrum being quite, you know, strident critique of religion to those who actually valued religion. But across all the parents, something that was common amongst all of them was this continual commitment to their children's own sense of freedom and choice in, specifically in relation to religion and belief. But although a lot of the parents when asked about this would say yes, my child is free to choose, you know, what religion they are or aren't or what they choose to believe in or don't believe in, in practice that didn't always. So if you like work out and as an example, you know, one parent said how he valued his children's freedom in relation to religion, but then later on in the interview spoke about how a friend of his who's evangelical, had given their family, well, their children specifically, a book about Christianity. And he just didn't like the book and didn't want to read it with his children. And when his daughter picked it up from a bookshelf later on and asked him to read it, he said no. So you do see that, if you like that complexity and that messiness in terms of espousing sort of the importance of freedom.
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Anastasia
Yes, yeah. The characterization. We talk about the children as figuring out atheism through that conversation and at school as well. And we. In the book, we kind of suggest that there's a kind of broadly kind of humanist perspective that they are coming to inhabit. And, yeah, so the children are figuring this out, but the parents are also figuring out their own perspectives as well, through their experience of being and becoming parents and the conversations that they're having with their children. So we found that, for instance, lots of the conversations that were going on at home to do with religion or spirituality were being prompted by the kids coming home from school and talking about things they'd been learning about in their religious education lessons or asking their parents what they believed in. And that kind of prompted the parents to reflect on these issues and other instances where the kind of parents were figuring these things out in relation to other aspects of being a parent, not necessarily just being asked about it by their kids. Say, for instance, things like having to decide whether they were willing for. Whether they wanted their kids to. To go to a church school or there was a parent who kind of reflected on how she had been a Christian. And then the experience of having a child actually made her question her faith in God because she reflected on how intensely she loved her child and wanted to protect them. And that made her aware of how there are many people in the world who aren't able to protect their children from things like wars or the effects of poverty. And that. That's down to global inequalities. And so that kind of unfairness and inequality made question her belief in. In God. So, yeah, we kind of suggest that, you know, often in kind of debates about childhood and religion, there's this kind of, you know, portrait of the kind of. And this was the idea of a kind of child as a sponge who's kind of at risk of, you know, being indoctrinated. But we. Yeah, there was a kind of very much a strong sense of the children as having agency in figuring these things out. At the same time, while they were kind of aware their parents influences as well.
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David
It's funny because that sort of sense of the children as sponges and you know, them figuring stuff out can I suppose in sometimes particularly in say media discussions, be completely kind of decontextualized and de Institutionalized. And one thing the book does really well, I think like all the kind of really best sociologies is to bring in institutions and the kind of the institutional setting. So the third part of the story is schools and I was really struck actually by the way that formerly the schools are kind of full of religion both in terms of like particular set pieces, assemblies, singing hymns, all this kind of stuff. There is a, you know, a legal framework in the English context around schools and religion and then there's the kind of like I suppose secular calendar of religious holidays, you know, Christmas and Easter in the Christian calendar being really kind of obvious ones that sort of shape school practice. And I'm interested to know, I guess kind of where schools fit into the story, what, what sort of importance of schools is. But at the same time, I suppose, kind of are we overstating or kind of placing too much weight on the, the schools particularly, because in theory they're meant to be, you know, quite a lot of them are meant to be Christian or, you know, kind of faith based. And yet non religion still seems to be flowering and thriving.
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Rachel Shillito
Yeah, I mean, the role of schools really actually can't be underestimated. And it was often the schools themselves, and particularly the role of re religious education that the children were becoming aware of their own non religious identities. And this was particularly the case for those children for whom religion, you know, played a really marginal part of their home lives. And so it was, you know, through what they learned in school and how they encountered religion and belief in God that they came to the conclusion that, you know, they were in fact non religious and they didn't believe in God. And that wasn't something they perhaps actively reflected on in any other space outside of school. But we found that there was relatively little learning about non religious perspectives explicitly in schools. And although in the years that we've, you know, since finished the field work, there's been more attention to the need to include non religious perspectives in re. In our field work we found there was often an equation of non religious perspectives with scientific perspectives. So they were often seen as intertwined. And this then fed into the idea and the relationship, the perceived relationship that religion and science were opposed and in conflict with each other. And this could be seen because, you know, science and maths were treated as, you know, they were the important areas of the curriculum. They were the things that, you know, often scheduled first thing in the morning. They took up the majority of the school day and were certainly seen as much more important than re. And so this led to children seeing these subjects as important ways of knowing the world and to their valuing of ultimately empiricism and reason and logic. And we also found that the general curriculum, more broadly speaking, was encouraging of the idea of people's voice and autonomy. So, you know, the language that teachers would use, like, are you making the right choice right now? They would often try and avoid, you know, telling the children what to do or if they're doing something right or wrong. They would, they would, they would speak to the children in a way that would encourage their own sense of agency and reflection and self determination. And so this fed into the children's perspective that they did indeed have agency and autonomy, or at least they should have it and this that extended to matters on religion and belief and obviously to other areas of, of their lives too. And like you say, there are other aspects of schools such as, you know, assemblies and collective worships and other festivals and events that fed into how children countered religion, non religion and belief. Anna, I don't know if you wanted to come in and add a little on that.
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Anastasia
Yeah, I think, I mean, yeah. So in relation to this idea of despite the influence of religion in schools through things like collective worship in Ari non religionism overall we suggest that the schools were kind of implicitly making a humanist form of life available to the children. And by humanist here we don't mean necessarily consciously identifying as humanist but rather a sort of worldview that values humans, achievements, significance. Agents see equality and kind of values empiricism and rationality as ways of knowing the world. So that was something that the schools were making available to the children even though they didn't necessarily name it as humanist. But alongside that kind of taken for granted humanist worldview that was being made available, there was also a kind of implicit Christianity in all three of the schools though to different degrees. And that reflects educational law in relation to religion in schools. But we found that the children were often because they're kind of growing up in, you know, taking kind of non religious perspectives often for granted. They often were aware and kind of critical of that kind of assumed Christianity. So for instance in our school that was in the northwest of England, this was a community school so it wasn't a church school. The kids still had to say Christian prayers in assemblies and the children were like often quite critical of that. So there are two peoples, for instance, Jake and Lucas and Rachel asked them why they thought primary schools included prayers. And Jake commented because they want to get you into the life of Christianity. The school is aimed towards Christianity. Then his, his friend Lucas and yes it's very subtly told like when they did about places of worship in re what was the very first thing they showed us Church. And his friend Jake then commented when we learn about Christianity for like seven lessons, we then learn about Sikhs for two lessons. So they kind of the kids are kind of not taking these things for granted because they're also growing up with a strong awareness of religious diversity and kind of values of equality. So they kind of notice this the ways in which the placement of religion in the schools doesn't kind of mirror the religious and non religious diversity that they see in the schools. So yeah, so there's a kind of combination of this humanist worldview being made available to the pupils at the same time as there was this kind of, you know, ambient Christianity.
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David
In a way, that point you just made about values is where the book closes. And actually it's something that kind of came up right at the start of the podcast. There was a particular term that really stood out to me, this kind of sense of ordinary equality that seemed to be the kind of shared ethical commitment that the children had. And it'd be great to kind of hear you unpack that really. And kind of, as you've just been talking about there, the sense of really having quite a strong and in some ways quite skeptical moral framework towards, in that case, the institution and how it does its teaching. But more broadly, these kind of really strong ethical commitments that the children had but didn't really require kind of religious frames particularly to kind of sustain them. So, yeah, what is this ethic of ordinary equality?
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Anastasia
Yeah, that's interesting question. So I guess one of the things we wanted to do in the book is explore the kind of values and moral commitments that are associated with non religion for these children, often because they're kind of stereotypes of kind of being religious equates to being more moral. And we wanted to kind of explore what the kind of moral frameworks that were the children were living by were. And we did find kind of very strong moral commitments that they expressed in their interviews and in the field work as well. And really prominent here was this kind of taken for granted ethic of respect for diversity and the kind of principle of equality. Now, that doesn't mean that the children always acted with respect. There certainly were instances where they othered particular minorities, but by and large they took it as given that religion was an aspect of identity which, like disability or sexual orientation or ethnicity, should be respected and treated as equal. Now, when we were kind of thinking about how to conceptualise this, in some ways it seems similar to how the political theorist William Connolly writes about an ethic of agonistic respect. So he argues that to achieve a kind of deep pluralism in society, the individual experiences the agony of having your own existential faith called into question by others, and also folding in this kind of agonistic contestation of others into the respect you show towards them. So in Connolly's kind of conceptualization of agonistic respect, there is this element of struggle or pain implicit in this kind of yet the agonistic element here. But when we looked at kind of what, how the children spoke about ideas of social difference and diversity and equality, they were really comfortable with it there was a real sense of kind of ease with religious and other kinds of social and cultural difference. And there was little sense of kind of struggle for them in acknowledging the contingency of their beliefs. They often spoke about how, you know, if they'd grown up elsewhere that they'd be likely to see and experience the world very differently, hold different values. And so we thought that yeah, this was kind of captured by the sort of idea of an ethic of ordinary equality and calling this ordinary we meet. We were kind of using ordinary with the sense that it has an ordinary language philosophy to denote the kind of the evolution every day the closer hand, which is also the world of what matters. So we're trying to get across the idea that the children kind of expressing respect for difference is ordinary, but it's also not a given, it's an achievement. So the children create a world in which they embody an ethic of equality in their everyday interactions. And that's an achievement, but it's also a fragile achievement as they're growing up in contexts of racism and othering and other forms of dehumanisation that they're encountering in the world around them. We were doing the fieldwork was being conducted in a kind of post Brexit context that was kind of being marked by incidents of hate crime. So you know, they were aware of kind of forms of racism and you know, families in the schools had experienced experience these things as well. So yeah, that's what we were kind of trying to convey with that concept.
- [32:55]
David
It strikes me that just that concept alone would prompt another book, possibly another couple of books. But then the kind of overall, I guess kind of substantive contribution of the book could forge quite an interesting research agenda on its own. Whether kind of working theoretically through non religion or indeed thinking kind of longitudinally tracking some of the young people as they kind of grow up and enter the social world and the various kind of other institutions they are likely to encounter at young adulthood and then beyond. But at the same time, often for researchers, when they come to an end of a big project, they're a bit like think I'm sort of done with that. So it'd be interesting to hear as we round up what you're working on kind of now next, are you doing more stuff together? Have you got kind of separate related projects? What's next for both of you?
- [33:57]
Anastasia
I've been continuing with different kind of threads that have emerged from this. So kind of been. I've recently been working on a project together with Peter humming Sarah Neal And Joanna Malone, actually Rachel. We originally developed the application together, but Rachel got funding for a separate project so she and she could talk more about that in a moment. But yeah, that project so actually took up some of these issues to do with kind of values and ethics in a project exploring the role of religion in how primary schools in England, Wales and Scotland foster notions of citizenship and national identity. And I suppose it explores questions around the politics of belonging and the kind of values that are interwoven in how schools shape what it means to be a good citizen and how pupils kind of respond to and experience that and how that relates to kind of parents perspectives as well. So I think, yeah, it takes up some of these threads from chapter five about kind of ethics and values, but looks more broadly. So not looking so much just at non religion, but looking across a kind of wide range of religious and non religious identities. And so yeah, we've recently, you know, we're working on a book based from that research and developing other publications from it. We finished the field work for that a while ago. And at the same time I'm also working with others to develop a new collaborative project which takes up this sort of focus on other than religious forms of meaning and value. So as people are increasingly forging existential meaning outside of traditional religions, I'd like to develop a project working with others, looking at how ideas of meaning in life and what makes life meaningful are formed experience and their kind of salience in a range of settings. So yeah, these are the two things that I've been working on. I agree that kind of it would be great if someone wants to take up this kind of longitudinal question because we obviously focused on middle childhood in this book. But I think there is definitely scope to explore how the kind of form of life that we look at in the book, how that might change as these children grow up into adolescence and early adulthood.
- [36:21]
Rachel Shillito
And yeah, I ended up taking quite a different, perhaps more dramatic next step in my research journey. I mean, well, I say the immediate next step is. I actually had a few posts at Birmingham following on from this project with Anna. I worked with Stephen Jones, Rebecca Hato and Fern Els and Baker on a project that looked at the relationship between religion and science and international perspective. And that was really fascinating sort of moving beyond, you know, strictly working with children and thinking about more international perspectives and how religion, religion and belief is experienced and understood in sort of non majority Christian or non religious context. Then as Anna sort of mentioned, then I sort of had another project that looked at morality in childhood, and I specifically focused on school policies such as smsc. So that's the spiritual, moral, cultural and social development in the curriculum in schools and how that's lived and experienced. And then following on from that, I actually decided to leave academia. So I left academia early this year. I'm still firmly within the social science. I'm a social scientist in the civil service, but now I actually work on surveys. So I'm more quants focused now, which is certainly a different journey for me.
- [38:04]
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- [38:17]
David
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