The Atheist Family Tree That Gets the World Wrong: UsefulCharts' Dangerous Illusion of a Shared Creed

Matt Baker sets out to explain the history of organized atheism. Instead, he exposes a problem with the way intellectual movements are packaged for popular consumption: complicated beliefs become neat categories, organizational relationships become family trees, and agreement on a handful of principles becomes evidence of something resembling a common creed.

His UsefulCharts video, Atheist "Denominations" Explained, is particularly vulnerable because its most ambitious argument rests on Baker's own doctoral research. He presents a survey of more than 17,000 atheists as evidence that contemporary Western atheists share the beliefs of secular humanism.

But his dissertation contains qualifications, sampling problems, and remarkably revealing comparisons that the video leaves out.

There are also factual errors. The largest involves the global population of people without religious affiliation. Another concerns the founding of the Satanic Temple. A third involves an organizational dispute in which the video presents one contested account as established history.

None requires inventing a scandal. The underlying documents are damaging enough.

1. The World's Third-Largest Religious Category Somehow Became Fourth

Baker begins with a demographic justification for his subject.

He says the category of people reporting no religion is the fourth-largest religious grouping worldwide and the second-largest in the United States.

The worldwide ranking is wrong.

The Pew Research Center's comprehensive 2012 study placed the religiously unaffiliated third worldwide, behind Christians and Muslims. That report estimated approximately 1.1 billion unaffiliated people using population data from 2010.

Pew's June 2025 analysis maintained the third-place ranking, estimating 1.9 billion unaffiliated people in 2020, approximately 24% of the world's population. Pew Research Center

This is not a disputed classification that Baker resolves differently. The relevant demographic research explicitly identifies the group's position.

Nor is this merely a problem of using figures that subsequently became outdated. Pew had already published the third-place ranking in 2012.

An educational presentation built around explaining religious classifications ought to get its opening classification right.

But the more consequential issue is what Baker does with the population itself.

2. China Accounts for Most of the World's Unaffiliated. Baker Gives Us Western Organizations.

Baker acknowledges that religiously unaffiliated people are not necessarily atheists. Some believe in God or maintain private spiritual beliefs.

He then concentrates on atheists, freethinkers, and humanists, tracing their organizational history primarily through European and North American institutions.

That would be a legitimate subject if presented simply as the history of Western organized freethought.

But the video invokes the enormous worldwide unaffiliated population to establish the importance of its subject, then largely abandons the population responsible for that scale.

Pew estimates that China contained nearly 1.3 billion religiously unaffiliated people in 2020, approximately two-thirds of the worldwide total of 1.9 billion.

The United States, by comparison, contained approximately 101 million, or roughly 5% of the worldwide unaffiliated population. Pew Research Center

These numbers change the geographical center of the story.

A history organized around London, Chicago, New York, and American atheist institutions can explain important developments in Western secular activism. It cannot, by itself, explain the beliefs and historical experiences of most people worldwide who report no religion.

The problem becomes more serious when affiliation is mistaken for philosophy.

Pew's research on religiously unaffiliated populations documents substantial religious and spiritual diversity, including ancestor-related beliefs and practices. Its 2025 international study found that significant proportions of unaffiliated adults in numerous countries believe ancestral spirits can influence living people. Pew Research Center

An individual can reject formal religious membership without accepting Western secular humanism.

Baker knows this distinction. He makes it himself.

Yet the video proceeds as though the most illuminating way to understand global nonreligion is through the institutional ancestry of Western organizations.

That is not a world history of nonreligion. It is a Western organizational history given the demographic importance of a much larger and fundamentally different population.

3. The 17,000-Person Survey Has a Problem Baker Doesn't Explain

The most consequential omission involves Baker's doctoral research.

In the video, he describes surveying 17,635 self-identified atheists, asking them to rate their agreement with statements drawn from humanist manifestos.

He reports that the overwhelming majority agreed with humanist principles.

The implication is substantial: atheism may be more than an absence of belief in God. Its adherents may share an identifiable philosophical worldview.

That possibility deserves investigation.

Fortunately, Baker's doctoral dissertation, Psychological Type and Atheism: Why Some People Are More Likely Than Others to Give Up God, is publicly available through the University of Warwick.

Its methodology provides a considerably less impressive foundation for generalizing about atheists.

The survey ran from September 2011 to March 2012. It recruited participants through online networks, social media, blogs, advertisements, and community leaders.

Baker describes the method as snowball sampling: people encounter a questionnaire and circulate it among their contacts.

The dissertation reports 23,697 completed questionnaires across its broader participant population. Its worldview analysis combines 17,632 atheists and agnostics, three fewer than the figure given in the video.

The revealing numbers concern recruitment.

According to Baker's own website analytics, 78% of survey-site visitors arrived through three channels:

• 40% came from Facebook posts shared by friends.
• 24% came through Reddit's atheist community.
• 14% came through atheist blogger P. Z. Myers's Pharyngula.

These percentages describe visitors, not necessarily completed questionnaires, as Baker correctly acknowledges in his dissertation. Nevertheless, they establish how heavily the research depended on particular online networks.

The findings therefore describe a large group of people who encountered and voluntarily completed an internet questionnaire circulated substantially through atheist communities.

They do not establish the views of a representative sample of Western atheists.

That distinction matters enormously.

Someone actively participating in atheist forums may be more interested in secular philosophy, more engaged in disputes about religion, and more familiar with humanist arguments than someone who simply does not believe in God.

A large sample cannot automatically correct that selection problem.

Seventeen thousand self-selected respondents do not become representative merely because seventeen thousand is an impressive number.

Compare Baker's recruitment method with Pew Research Center's 2024 investigation into religiously unaffiliated Americans. Pew used an address-based, probability-recruited panel and weighted its results to reflect the national adult population. Its analysis included 3,317 religiously unaffiliated respondents, including 658 atheists.

Pew's smaller atheist subgroup has a stronger basis for population-level inference because of how participants were selected. wrap.warwick.ac.uk

Baker's survey remains potentially valuable for studying engaged atheists and comparing patterns within that sample.

But the video gives viewers the headline number and the conclusion without explaining the recruitment limitations.

For a presentation celebrating scientific skepticism, that is a serious omission.

4. Baker's Own Research Undermines His Most Interesting Conclusion

The dissertation contains something even more revealing than its recruitment methodology.

Baker argues that atheists share the ethical principles of humanism. He supports this by measuring agreement with statements representing different components of a worldview.

But several of his most striking results demonstrate that atheists and churchgoing Christians agree on precisely the same ethical propositions.

Consider three statements from his questionnaire.

On improving society:

• 98.6% of atheists and agnostics agreed.
• 98.0% of churchgoing Christians agreed.

On defending human rights and freedoms:

• 95.2% of atheists and agnostics agreed.
• 95.3% of churchgoing Christians agreed.

On helping less fortunate people:

• 96.8% of atheists and agnostics agreed.
• 99.1% of churchgoing Christians agreed.

These are Baker's figures, not mine.

He acknowledges the similarities in his dissertation. Yet the video's presentation concentrates on the overwhelming agreement between atheists and humanist principles.

The omitted comparison changes what those numbers can establish. WRAP

If practically everyone in two supposedly competing philosophical communities agrees that society should improve, that agreement cannot meaningfully distinguish their worldviews.

It establishes a shared preference for improving society.

Nothing more.

There is an important distinction between agreeing on an ethical goal and agreeing on the philosophical reason for pursuing it.

A Christian might support helping disadvantaged people because of religious teachings about charity.

A secular humanist might support the same action because suffering is undesirable and human welfare matters.

Both could answer Baker's question identically while holding different philosophical explanations for their answers.

The survey did not establish that identical ethical preferences necessarily arose from identical ethical foundations.

To his credit, Baker's findings on supernatural beliefs and divine revelation distinguish atheists from churchgoing Christians much more clearly.

His dissertation reports that 89.1% of atheist and agnostic respondents agreed that the natural world is all that exists. On questions concerning divine revelation, the differences between atheists and churchgoers were similarly pronounced.

Those findings deserve to survive criticism.

But they also illustrate the problem.

Agreement that the supernatural does not exist is closely connected to the beliefs Baker used to identify atheists in the first place.

Agreement on secular approaches to knowledge adds useful information.

Neither finding establishes that atheists share a distinctive moral doctrine beyond those beliefs.

The genuinely interesting question is not whether atheists and humanists frequently agree. They plainly do.

It is whether humanism provides a meaningful, distinctive ethical identity for atheists, rather than supplying a convenient philosophical label for beliefs also shared by millions of religious people.

Baker's own findings make that distinction unavoidable.

The video does not confront it.

5. Seven Humanist Manifestos Are Not Seven Atheist Creeds

Baker presents seven major humanist declarations as the closest equivalents to creeds within the atheist community.

The analogy is tempting.

A creed ordinarily establishes a set of religious beliefs. Humanist manifestos articulate philosophical and ethical commitments.

Put enough statements together, and the resemblance becomes visible.

But the resemblance has a serious limitation.

The actual authors of Humanist Manifesto II explicitly rejected making their statement binding.

Its 1973 preface says the signatories:

“disclaim that they are setting forth a binding credo”

The document also acknowledges different forms of humanism, including religious humanism, and distinguishes rejection of theism from the broader commitments of humanist philosophy. American Humanist Association

That is important.

A declaration signed by prominent intellectuals is evidence of what those intellectuals endorsed.

It is not automatically evidence of what millions of unaffiliated atheists believe.

Nor does publication by a humanist organization create an obligation for people outside that organization.

There is no universal atheist authority that ratifies humanist manifestos, determines membership in atheism, or requires dissenters to explain themselves.

Baker understands that atheism itself is not an organized belief system. He acknowledges this repeatedly.

Yet his effort to identify something resembling atheist creeds pushes the comparison beyond what those documents establish.

The manifestos are valuable historical records of organized humanist thought.

They do not become the governing philosophy of atheists merely because survey respondents agree with some of their statements.

There is also an unexplored possibility.

Perhaps the manifestos contain principles so broadly attractive that people with substantially different worldviews can endorse them.

Baker's own comparisons with churchgoing Christians make that possibility particularly difficult to dismiss.

If a manifesto's ethical propositions receive overwhelming support from both atheists and Christians, their popularity is hardly evidence that atheists have acquired the equivalent of a religious creed.

It may mean the authors selected principles that cross religious boundaries.

The irony is considerable: a movement that explicitly rejected binding creeds is being examined through a framework designed to discover them.

6. The Satanic Temple Exposes the Weakness of the Entire Classification

Near the end, Baker introduces an unexpected branch of his organizational tree: Satanism.

He correctly explains that some Satanist organizations reject belief in a literal Satan.

He includes the Church of Satan, the First Satanic Church, and the Satanic Temple among organizations sharing atheistic beliefs.

He also distinguishes the Temple of Set, whose followers recognize a supernatural deity.

But his treatment of the Satanic Temple contains two problems.

First, he dates its founding to 2012 and identifies Lucien Greaves as its founder.

The organization's own historical account states that Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry founded it in 2013.

Second, Baker describes the Satanic Temple as something resembling an updated version of Anton LaVey's Satanism.

That description obscures an important philosophical dispute.

The Satanic Temple explicitly distinguishes its commitment to compassion, empathy, and political activism from the Church of Satan's emphasis on individualism and self-interest.

The organizations disagree about fundamental principles, not merely institutional branding. Their rivalry is documented in the Satanic Temple's own published comparison. TST

The distinction becomes even more interesting when examining the organization's legal identity.

In 2019, the Internal Revenue Service recognized the Satanic Temple as a tax-exempt church. The organization supplied its recognition notice to the Associated Press, which reported that the IRS classification identified it as a church or association of churches.

Its members do not need to believe in a supernatural Satan for their organization to claim a religious identity. ksl.com

That produces an awkward result for Baker's framework.

The Satanic Temple can be atheistic in theology while religious in institutional identity.

There is no necessary contradiction.

But a chart organized around “nonreligious denominations” struggles to communicate this distinction.

The same absence of belief in God can exist within explicitly religious organizations, secular advocacy groups, humanist associations, or among individuals with no organizational affiliation whatsoever.

These are different kinds of relationships.

One concerns supernatural beliefs.

Another concerns ethical philosophy.

Another concerns institutional membership.

Another concerns legal religious identity.

A family tree can display organizational descent. It cannot make these different relationships interchangeable.

Baker's inclusion of Satanism is not itself the mistake.

The mistake is treating a shared rejection of supernatural beings as sufficiently explanatory when the organizations themselves regard their philosophical and institutional differences as fundamental.

7. Paul Kurtz Was “Forced Out.” The People Involved Disagree.

The video describes Paul Kurtz, a central figure in modern secular humanism, as having been effectively forced out of his leadership position at the Center for Inquiry.

This is presented as an established organizational development.

The underlying dispute is more complicated.

Kurtz resigned from his remaining positions in May 2010 following disagreements over the organization's management and direction.

In an October 2010 interview, he described his resignation as voluntary but undertaken under substantial pressure.

He accused the organization's leadership of restricting his authority and suppressing his criticism.

Those allegations were serious.

But they were also disputed.

Ronald Lindsay, the Center for Inquiry's president and chief executive at the time, responded publicly that Kurtz had resigned voluntarily and denied that he had been expelled or forced to leave.

Lindsay described a leadership transition that began in 2008, including disagreements about executive authority and board governance. He maintained that Kurtz continued to exercise formal responsibilities until his resignation.

Both accounts appeared in written interviews published by Dangerous Intersection in October 2010. Dangerous Intersection

I cannot establish from those conflicting statements alone whether Kurtz was improperly forced out.

Neither can Baker.

The defensible conclusion is that Kurtz departed following an acrimonious leadership dispute, with the parties disagreeing about the circumstances.

That would have been straightforward to explain.

Instead, the video adopts the more dramatic interpretation.

There is a further omission.

After his departure, Kurtz established the Institute for Science and Human Values, pursuing a separate organizational direction.

The University at Buffalo records his departure from the Center for Inquiry in 2010 and the establishment of the new institute. University at Buffalo

That development is particularly relevant to a family tree of secular organizations.

It represents the creation of another institution following a dispute over leadership and direction.

The video finds room to describe the controversy but leaves out the organizational continuation.

The result is a simplified story about a founder being displaced, rather than a fuller explanation of the institutional conflict and what followed.

8. The School Prayer Case Was About Government Power, Not Simply Forced Participation

Baker recounts how Madalyn Murray O'Hair challenged Bible readings and school prayers, eventually securing a Supreme Court victory.

He describes the Court as ruling that students could not constitutionally be forced to pray or read the Bible.

That is true as far as it goes.

But the actual decision established something more substantial.

In Abington School District v. Schempp, decided June 17, 1963, the Supreme Court ruled against state-sponsored religious exercises in public schools.

O'Hair's related case, Murray v. Curlett, was considered alongside it.

The Court held that the public-school practices violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause even when students could be excused from participating.

The availability of an exemption did not make the government's religious exercise constitutional. Legal Information Institute

This distinction matters because the constitutional question was not restricted to whether an unwilling child could be compelled to participate.

It concerned the government's authority to organize religious exercises in public schools.

Private religious expression was not prohibited by that decision.

The government was being prevented from conducting religious observances as part of the school day.

Baker's abbreviated explanation makes the case sound like a dispute over compulsory participation.

The actual ruling established a more consequential principle concerning government neutrality toward religion.

That principle also illuminates the earlier secular organizations Baker discusses.

Their struggle for equal citizenship was not necessarily a campaign to eliminate religion.

It often concerned whether the state could impose religious practices or privileges on people who did not share them.

That is a much more useful distinction than the simple narrative of atheists becoming increasingly assertive in their opposition to religion.

The Verdict: A Beautiful Family Tree Cannot Repair a Broken Classification

UsefulCharts has a genuine talent for making complicated historical relationships understandable.

But simplicity becomes dangerous when it conceals differences that determine what the subject actually means.

Baker offers a history of Western atheist organizations, borrows the demographic importance of global nonreligion, and connects the resulting categories through a philosophical framework that his own research does not fully justify.

The problems are cumulative.

His worldwide population ranking is incorrect.

His geographical emphasis leaves out most of the population invoked to justify the subject.

His doctoral survey depends heavily on self-selected online participants, limiting the conclusions that can be drawn about atheists generally.

His own findings demonstrate that supposedly characteristic humanist moral principles are also overwhelmingly endorsed by churchgoing Christians.

His interpretation of humanist declarations moves toward the language of creeds even though the documents explicitly reject binding religious authority.

And his treatment of Satanism demonstrates that atheism, nonreligion, religious identity, and institutional lineage cannot be reduced to a single classification.

The strongest defense is obvious: Baker never claims to be providing a comprehensive sociological study of global nonreligion. He openly acknowledges the looseness of his terminology and limits much of his philosophical argument to the contemporary Western world.

Those qualifications matter. They prevent this from being a case of wholesale fabrication.

They do not repair the central weaknesses.

The video still uses global demographics to establish the significance of a much narrower story. It still presents unrepresentative survey findings without their essential methodological context. And it still makes the existence of a shared humanist worldview appear more firmly established than the underlying evidence permits.

There is a legitimate history here: the development of Western freethought, secular advocacy, organized humanism, scientific skepticism, and their overlapping institutions.

That history needs no borrowed population, manufactured unity, or resemblance to religious denominations to be interesting.

The serious error is not drawing a family tree of atheism. It is allowing the elegance of the tree to become more persuasive than the evidence supporting its branches.

A chart can make a complicated subject easier to remember.

It can also make a questionable classification remarkably difficult to forget.

References

Original work

1. Atheist "Denominations" Explained — UsefulCharts, Matt Baker. The original video establishes Baker's claims, terminology, organizational chronology, and presentation of his doctoral findings.

Primary research and demographic evidence

1. The Global Religious Landscape — Pew Research Center, December 18, 2012. Establishes that religiously unaffiliated people were already ranked third worldwide in Pew's 2010 population estimates.

2. Religiously Unaffiliated Population Change, 2010–2020 — Pew Research Center, June 9, 2025. Establishes the updated worldwide population of 1.9 billion and China's dominant share of the category.

3. Psychological Type and Atheism: Why Some People Are More Likely Than Others to Give Up God — Matthew James Baker, University of Warwick, 2015. Baker's original dissertation documents his sampling methodology, recruitment sources, participant counts, and comparisons between atheist and Christian respondents; the voluntary sample is not nationally representative.

4. Religious 'Nones' in America: Who They Are and What They Believe — Pew Research Center, January 24, 2024. Provides probability-based survey evidence distinguishing atheists, agnostics, and people without religious affiliation, including their different supernatural beliefs.

5. What Do Religious 'Nones' Believe? — Pew Research Center, September 4, 2025. Documents religious and spiritual beliefs among unaffiliated adults across 22 countries, demonstrating that lack of affiliation does not establish a common secular philosophy.

6. Humanist Manifesto II — American Humanist Association, 1973. The original document explicitly disclaims establishing a binding creed and distinguishes humanism from the mere rejection of theism.

Organizational records and historical disputes

1. Church of Satan vs. The Satanic Temple — The Satanic Temple, undated organizational statement. Identifies Malcolm Jarry and Lucien Greaves as co-founders in 2013 and describes the Temple's philosophical differences with LaVeyan Satanism; the account represents the Temple's own perspective.

2. Satanic Temple: IRS Has Designated It a Tax-Exempt Church — Associated Press, April 25, 2019. Reports the organization's receipt of federal tax-exempt recognition as a church, illustrating the distinction between supernatural belief and religious institutional identity.

3. Paul Kurtz Explains His Departure From the Center for Inquiry — Dangerous Intersection, October 2, 2010. Records Kurtz's firsthand allegations that his resignation occurred under pressure and that organizational leaders restricted his authority; his allegations are not independently established by the interview.

4. The Center for Inquiry Responds to Paul Kurtz — Dangerous Intersection, October 22, 2010. Records CEO Ronald Lindsay's opposing account, documenting why the circumstances of Kurtz's departure cannot responsibly be described as undisputed.

5. Paul Kurtz, 1925–2012 — University at Buffalo, October 25, 2012. Confirms Kurtz's subsequent establishment of the Institute for Science and Human Values after leaving the Center for Inquiry.

Legal evidence

1. Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 — Supreme Court of the United States, June 17, 1963. Establishes that state-sponsored Bible readings and prayers violated the Establishment Clause even when students could request exemption from participation.