Are Atheists Immoral, Arrogant, and Angry? (Psychology of Atheism Part 3)

Matt Baker investigated why some people raised in Christian churches become atheists while others remain religious. His PhD dissertation examined whether personality differences explain religious deconversion more effectively than popular claims about selfishness, arrogance, anger, or troubled relationships with fathers.

Baker's central finding was that people with a Thinking–Perceiving (TP) preference on the Myers-Briggs personality framework were more likely to become atheists. He also associated this combination with lower agreeableness and conscientiousness on the Big Five personality model. He argued that personality was a stronger predictor of atheism than several competing explanations.

The research compared 10,525 atheists who had grown up attending church but subsequently left with 1,977 theists who had grown up attending church and remained religious. Both groups shared a background of church attendance, allowing Baker to investigate differences associated with religious deconversion rather than simply comparing people raised in religious and nonreligious environments.

Baker examined four common explanations for atheism: selfishness, arrogance, anger, and poor father–child relationships. He focused particularly on claims advanced by conservative Christian writers who presented atheism as a consequence of moral shortcomings, emotional difficulties, or family problems rather than intellectual disagreement.

Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ provided an example of the argument that immoral desires discourage religious conversion. Strobel described how becoming a Christian would have required him to abandon pleasurable activities and sacrifice time and money. Baker interpreted this reasoning as an example of the broader claim that atheists reject religion because religious obligations interfere with their preferred lifestyles.

Baker challenged the assumption that atheists are inherently more selfish or immoral than religious believers. He pointed to atheists who devote substantial time and money to charitable causes and religious people who engage in selfish behavior, including infidelity and neglecting people in need. He argued that moral behavior cannot reliably be inferred from religious identification.

Previous scientific studies examining morality and religiosity had produced mixed results. According to Baker, some findings favored religious participants while others favored nonreligious participants, offering no consistent evidence that belief in God is strongly connected to moral behavior.

Baker measured selfishness using statements from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a publicly available psychological research resource. This allowed him to compare selfishness scores between former churchgoers who became atheists and those who remained theists.

Both atheists and theists scored relatively low on selfishness in Baker's survey. Although their average scores were not identical, the difference was too small for him to conclude that selfishness played a major role in religious deconversion.

Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity supplied another explanation: that atheists are unusually arrogant. D'Souza argued that atheists mistakenly assume their scientific and rational methods provide complete access to reality, making them dogmatic and arrogant while religious believers supposedly remain modest and reasonable.

Baker tested the arrogance hypothesis using another IPIP personality scale and found insufficient differences between atheists and theists to support it. His results did not indicate that arrogance was an important explanation for why people abandoned religious belief.

Sex was more closely associated with arrogance scores than religious identification in Baker's findings. Male participants scored higher on arrogance, on average, than female participants, regardless of whether they believed in God.

Baker also investigated the claim that atheists are actually angry with God rather than convinced that God does not exist. This interpretation attributes disbelief to emotional reactions against suffering, personal difficulties, or disappointing life experiences.

The study could not directly measure anger toward God, so Baker tested general anger instead. Using an IPIP anger scale, he found that general anger did not appear to play a major role in explaining why some former churchgoers became atheists. He did not claim that this directly disproved every possible form of anger toward God.

Baker connected his anger findings to research by Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, published in Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion. Their research examined people raised in highly religious households who subsequently became atheists, alongside people raised in nonreligious households who later became theists.

Altemeyer and Hunsberger found that most of the atheists they studied abandoned religion for intellectual rather than emotional reasons. Baker presented their findings as evidence against the claim that atheism is primarily driven by resentment, psychological distress, or anger.

People who converted to religion, by contrast, frequently described emotional reasons for their conversion. Altemeyer and Hunsberger found that religious conversion was often associated with serious personal problems occurring around the time individuals adopted religious beliefs.

Altemeyer and Hunsberger identified a paradox in religious upbringing: churches could teach the values that eventually encouraged believers to reject Christianity. They concluded that strong religious emphasis on truth and integrity motivated many eventual atheists to examine Christian teachings critically.

For some former believers, intellectual honesty became more important than preserving their inherited religious identity. According to Baker's account of the research, these individuals abandoned doctrines they believed could not withstand scrutiny, even when leaving religion involved personal costs.

C. S. Lewis had suggested that most people who lose their Christian faith simply drift away rather than being persuaded by honest intellectual arguments. Baker challenged this position, arguing that empirical research into religious deconversion demonstrated that reasoned disagreement was a major cause of lost faith.

Baker's disagreement with Lewis was specifically about the reasons people leave Christianity, not a wholesale rejection of Lewis's work. He described himself as an admirer of Lewis, particularly the Narnia books, while maintaining that Lewis's interpretation of religious deconversion was inconsistent with the research Baker discussed.

Psychologist Paul Vitz advanced a different explanation in Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. Vitz argued that atheism frequently develops from weak, damaged, or nonexistent relationships with fathers, suggesting that difficulties involving paternal figures can influence a person's relationship with the concept of God.

Vitz supported his argument with biographical examples of prominent atheistic thinkers. He cited Sigmund Freud's supposedly weak father and Friedrich Nietzsche's loss of his father at approximately five years old as illustrations of his proposed connection between father relationships and atheism.

Baker criticized Vitz for relying on historical examples without presenting empirical data sufficient to establish the proposed relationship. He therefore incorporated questions about paternal death and the quality of father–child relationships into his own research.

Female atheists in Baker's sample were significantly more likely than female theists to have experienced their father's death. The difference reached statistical significance, indicating a measurable association between paternal loss and atheism among women in his survey.

Male atheists did not show the same statistically significant association with paternal death. Baker's findings therefore did not support a uniform relationship between losing one's father and becoming an atheist across both sexes.

Both male and female atheists reported somewhat weaker relationships with their fathers than their theist counterparts. The differences were statistically significant, giving limited empirical support to the existence of an association between father–child relationship quality and religious identification.

The association between weaker paternal relationships and atheism did not establish which came first. Baker acknowledged that a troubled relationship with a father might contribute to religious deconversion, but becoming an atheist could also damage an existing father–child relationship, particularly in a religious family.

Baker used binary logistic regression to determine whether father–child relationships remained important after accounting for other variables. The analysis evaluated multiple predictors simultaneously, allowing him to compare their associations with atheism rather than relying exclusively on differences between group averages.

The regression included five variables: father–child relationship quality, Myers-Briggs personality preference, intellect, years of church attendance, and overall church experience. Baker had identified the latter three factors as potentially important during his earlier research.

The adjusted result for father–child relationship quality was approximately 1.01, extremely close to the neutral value of 1. Baker interpreted this as evidence that the relationship had very little independent predictive importance once personality, intellect, church attendance, and church experiences were considered.

The father–child findings therefore weakened Vitz's explanation despite the statistically significant differences observed earlier. Atheists reported somewhat worse paternal relationships, but those differences contributed little to predicting religious identification after the other measured factors were included.

The Thinking–Perceiving personality preference produced an adjusted odds ratio of approximately 2.0. Baker interpreted this as meaning that, after accounting for the other variables, people with a TP preference had roughly twice the odds of belonging to the atheist group rather than the theist group.

Baker illustrated the personality result by comparing an INTP with an ESFJ. He described an INTP as approximately twice as likely to be an atheist as an ESFJ, reflecting his broader finding that a TP preference was associated with atheism. The underlying regression result concerned relative odds, not a demonstrated doubling of absolute probability.

Higher intellect was associated with a somewhat greater likelihood of atheism. However, Baker described its predictive contribution as considerably smaller than the contribution of the TP personality preference.

Fewer years of church attendance were also associated with a somewhat greater likelihood of atheism. Length of religious participation therefore provided some predictive information, although it was not as influential as personality in Baker's model.

More negative experiences in church were associated with a somewhat greater likelihood of becoming an atheist. Baker treated religious experiences as relevant but not sufficient to explain deconversion as effectively as the personality variable.

The three additional predictors—intellect, duration of church attendance, and quality of church experience—were individually relevant but comparatively modest. Baker emphasized that their combined inclusion did not eliminate the substantially stronger association between TP personality preference and atheism.

Personality emerged as the strongest of the five predictors examined in Baker's regression model. He concluded that differences in preferred thinking and decision-making styles were more informative than paternal relationships, intellect, attendance history, or the quality of church experiences.

Baker associated the TP preference with making decisions through logic and being willing to reconsider established beliefs. In his interpretation, people with these preferences were more comfortable questioning inherited religious teachings and changing their conclusions when they encountered arguments they found persuasive.

Baker's preferred explanation combined personality differences with the intellectual motivations identified by Altemeyer and Hunsberger. He proposed that some people raised in Christian churches become atheists because they place considerable importance on investigating truth through rational or scientific reasoning and are willing to abandon previous convictions.

The research did not support the claim that atheists as a group were meaningfully more selfish, arrogant, or generally angry than theists. Baker regarded these character-based explanations as inadequate accounts of why individuals abandon religion.

The research also failed to establish troubled father–child relationships as a major independent explanation for atheism. Although some paternal relationship differences existed between groups, their adjusted predictive contribution was negligible in Baker's analysis.

Baker's conclusions concerned statistical patterns across groups, not a universal explanation for every atheist. His analysis identified personality preferences and experiences associated with religious identification; it did not establish that all atheists think alike or that personality alone necessarily causes religious deconversion.

The episode completed a three-part presentation of Baker's PhD research on the psychology of atheism. The first installment examined terminology, the second presented the principal personality comparisons, and the third tested alternative explanations involving moral character, emotional disposition, and paternal relationships.

Baker acknowledged that the three educational episodes simplified the dissertation's research and conclusions. He directed interested viewers to the original academic paper for a fuller presentation of his methodology, statistical analysis, and findings.