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58
Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
Religion and atheism from a gender perspective*
TIINA MAHLAMÄKI
I A the Finnish Broadcasting Company
YLE, summarising the results of the World Values
survey, released them under the headline ‘Re-
ligion is a women’s issue’. Is atheism and secularity
then, by contrast, an issue for men? It is tempting to
answer the question positively when one looks at the
names of the new atheist bestselling authors, or the
names in the index lists in the back pages of books
with reference to atheism, as well as the names of the
researchers into atheism and secularity: they tend to
be male much more oen than female. In this paper
I will examine the ways in which both religiosity and
non-religiosity and atheism are gendered phenom-
ena. I also look at feminists’ views on religion by
pointing out in which ways they intersect with the
opinions of the new atheist texts.
Because both (sec-
ond wave
) feminists and atheists consider religion
from a relatively narrow point of view, I’ll bring out
the ways in which the contemporary study of reli-
gion denes, sees and studies religion and religious-
ness, while it takes the concept of gender seriously.
* An earlier version of this artice was published in
Finnish: Tiina Mahlamäki . ‘Uskonto, uusateismi
ja sukupuoli’ [Religion, new atheism and gender].
In: Jussi K. Niemelä (ed.), Mitä uusateismi tarkoit-
taa? [What New Atheism Means]. –. Turku:
Savukeidas.
With the term ‘new atheist’ I refer to well-known and
distinguished writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam
Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.
I’m aware that they do not think or write identically,
but they join in a common and quite similar under-
standing of the concepts of religion, religious belief
and religiousness.
By this I mean the Women’s Liberation Movement
and feminist research up until s. e focus
(concerning religion) was on revealing the patriarchal
structures of the world religions and the multiple
ways in which religions have subordinated women.
I also discuss the seemingly indisputable fact which
the stat istics point to; namely that women tend to be
more religious than men and men tend to be more
oen atheist than women (my examples are most-
ly from the Finnish context). I also present some
models of explanation which scholars have applied to
these problems.
First of all, I’ll clarify my own standpoint regard-
ing the issue. I’m interested in the ways in which the
atheist critique has become a visible part of the pub-
lic discussion of religion. As an ideological statement
and a form of irreligiousness, atheist discourse pro-
vides interesting data for the study of religions. Al-
though atheism and secularity are not institutional-
ised forms of religion, they can be seen as ideologies
because they are not merely describing the world;
they also want to change it (Davie & Woodhead :
). For my part, I do not position myself as an athe-
ist, nor as a member of any religious community.
In Finland, at least, some scholars of religion
are taking atheism as a standpoint for studying and
teaching comparative religion. e critique of re-
ligion, as being the mission of the new atheist dis-
course, is imparted by them as a foundational trait
within comparative religion: the less religion, accord-
ing to this view, the better o the world is. ey hold
that the task of comparative religion is to prove the
arguments of religious traditions to be unreliable,
false and untrue. According to this line of reasoning,
religions are regarded as harmful both for individuals
and societies (see, for example, Visala : ).
I don’t perceive this to be the task of comparative
religion, but rather agree with Teemu Taira’s (:
–) proposal that scholars of comparative religion
should examine religions in their social contexts (re-
ligion as it is lived and experienced, at a certain time
and place). e critical study of religion should mean
that we take seriously the concepts of power, class,
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Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
race, ethnicity, and gender, which in many ways are
connected to the practices of religion. is raises
important questions: who speaks for whom, whose
voices are privileged and whose are silenced? (Beattie
: .)
I’ll start with a short tour of the relationship be-
tween religion and science, as it seems to constitute
an integral part, both of the new atheistic discourse
and the gender problematic.
The war between science and religion – a strong and
durable metaphor
e conict between religion and science can be seen
as an underlying basic principle in the texts of the new
atheists, in which the purpose is very oen to dem-
onstrate how religious beliefs are false and incorrect.
Religion and science are seen as separate and oppos-
ing arenas. Religious beliefs and scientic knowledge
are perceived to be mutually exclusive, and their con-
temporaneous existence is at variance both in society
and in the minds of individuals. is attitude has its
roots in the Age of Enlightenment, but it became vis-
ible and clear cut in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, when science, as we have come to know it,
developed. During that period science emerged as an
independent domain within society, and to work as
a scientist became a real profession. e modern sci-
entist had to build his identity by clearly separating
himself from the area of religion. Formerly, however,
science and religion had not occured in separate do-
mains, but were integrated in the sphere of natural
philosophy. Western science or natural philosophy
was born within Christianity (see e.g. Brooke ).
As Gavin Hyman (: ) puts it, ‘it seemed en-
tirely natural that a scientist should also be a priest’ –
and it seemed even more natural that both scientists
and priests were men. e identity building project
of the scientist was denitely a male project, as it was
not possible for women – with some exceptions –
to enter into academic education or to concentrate
on doing research until the late nineteenth century
(see Beattie ) – at least in Finland, women who
wanted to begin university studies had to request a
special dispensation on the grounds of their gender.
At the same time, at the end of the nineteenth
century, the metaphor of a conict or war between
science and religion rapidly evolved. Religion (the
church) was perceived as the active and aggressive
party in the conict, and was accused of having pre-
vented the development of science in previous cen-
turies. Within the metaphor of conict
historical
events tend to be perceived one-sidedly and simplis-
tically; the history of science and religion shows that
the roots of conicts (or events identied as conicts)
are multidimensional disagreements on, for instance,
power, authority and resources (see e.g. Brooke ,
Ferngren ). Similarly, the concrete conict be-
tween science and religion at the end of nineteenth
century was not born, according to Tina Beattie, from
‘a struggle between religious and scientic ways of
explanation’ but merely from a struggle of power and
authority between men of science and men of God.
‘e triumph of science over theology required the
total discrediting of theological knowledge.’ (Beattie
: .) is active discrediting is still being con-
tinued by the new atheists.
When the metaphor of the conict between sci-
ence and religion is used, it does not concern all sci-
entic knowledge and research but, more specically,
the natural sciences (in Finnish there is no linguistic
separation between the natural sciences and other
disciplines: one word, tiede, ts all disciplines from
the arts and humanities to social sciences and the
natural sciences). It is not unproblematic to trans-
fer the contemporary notion of science to history –
there was, for instance, no distinction between the
Cre ator and His creation within natural philosophy;
the scholars of natural philosophy studied both. (See
e.g. Brooke : –; Ferngren : xi–xiv.) Nei-
ther was the other side of the conict, religion, not
just any religion, but historically the church, and for
the most part the Catholic Church. e new atheists
use the word ‘religion’ mostly to refer to the estab-
lished church of their own country, or more oen,
to conservative and fundamentalist forms of Chris-
tianity and Islam. In its modern form the metaphor
of conict has a slightly dierent conguration;
within the new atheist discourse (natural) science is
seen to overpower all religious traditions and beliefs,
because it oers neutral and justiable knowledge,
while religions, even liberal and moderate ones, are
seen as a platform to more fundamentalist views (see,
for example, Pyysiäinen ). e metaphor of war
has thus returned and serves the new atheists on their
historical crusade against religions, ultimately in or-
der to exterminate them.
e origin of this inuential and enduring metaphor
lies mainly in two books: John William Draper’s
History of the Conict between Religion and Science
() and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of
the Warfare of Science with eology in Christendom
(). See also Brooke and Ferngren .
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Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
At the core of the conicts of the late nineteenth
century, as well as at the core of the new atheism
today is Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selec-
tion. e model is conveniently transferred from
biology to other disciplines in order to explain, for
instance, the evolution of societies – but it has also
been used as a justication for eugenics and racism
(see Brooke : –). In the new atheist dis-
course, especi ally in the works of Richard Dawkins,
evolution theory works as a weapon against religions.
Here the counterpart appears to be fundamentalist
Christianity only, with its rm belief in creationism
– which is to say, reading the Genesis as a historic-
al and biologic al textbook. Evolution is, of course, a
biological fact, but for the new atheists it ‘has become
a power ful quasireligious myth by which atheists
such as Daw kins confer meaning on the world’. It has
become ‘a powerful folk-tale about human origins’.
(Beattie : , quoting Mary Midgley.)
Religious women – atheist men
Statistics conducted in countries all over the world,
for as long as statistics on religion have been collected ,
conrm that women are more religious than men.
is concerns every dimension of religion. Women
participate in religious ceremonies more oen than
men; women pray more oen than men; they more
likely than men believe in God, a Spirit, or Life Force;
they hold matters of faith and religion more import-
ant than men do. Women are more committed than
men to their religious communities and are less will-
ing to resign from them. Although older women are
more religious than young ones, women of all ages
are more religious than coeval men are. Women are
members of both traditional religious communities
and new religious movements more oen than men.
Young, urban men are the least religious of all groups.
is is equally true also in such religious traditions
that seem to be hostile to women, such as fundamen-
talist traditions (see, for example, Berger et al. :
; Davie ; Freese ; Furseth ; Miller &
Homann ; Niemelä , ).
Non-religiosity and secularity are gendered too.
In Finland, according to dierent data sets,
approxi-
mately – per cent of Finns identify themselves as
convinced atheists. According to the World Values
survey, per cent of Finnish men consider
World Values Surveys –; e Church Moni-
tor ; International Social Survey Programme
(ISSP ).
themselves as religious, per cent non-religious and
per cent as convinced atheists ( % did not know),
whereas in the whole population the equivalent per-
centages are per cent (religious), per cent (non-
religious) and per cent (convinced atheist) ( % did
not know), thus demonstrating that non-religiosity
and atheism are more common among men. Al-
together per cent of Finnish females consider them-
selves to be atheists, while per cent of men do the
same. e same survey conrms that per cent of
Finnish women consider religion to be an import ant
aspect in their lives, whereas only per cent of Finn-
ish men have this opinion. e International Social
Survey Programme (ISSP ) attests that per
cent of Finns believe in God without any doubts;
per cent despite their doubts. Among women per
cent believe in God without any doubts, but among
men only per cent. Approximately per cent of
women and per cent men have no belief in God,
Spirit, or Life Force. (Monikasvoinen kirkko :
, –; Borg et al. ; Furseth ; Ketola et al.
.) All the surveys examined above point out that
women are more religious than men and that men
are more non-religious and atheistic than women .
Although the number of religious men is smaller
than the number of religious women, there are still
more religious than non-religious men. However, it
is not just the quantity of religiosity that is gendered,
but also the content of religiosity that diers between
men and women.
Men have proved to be more resolute than
women as to religious beliefs. In other words, both
atheists and fundamentalists are more oen men
than women. A tendency among men is to accept
‘the whole package’, which means that they are more
apt to embrace everything pertaining to their (Chris-
tian) belief. Women are more selective; they believe
Via Giordano Bruno in Messina, Sicily. Giordano Bruno
(1548–1600) was burnt at stake for his heretic views.
Thousands of women who met the same fate have
remained without statues or streets named after them.
Photo by Tomas Mansikka.
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Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
in a loving God, but not in Hell, the Devil or the Last
Judgment. e world-view of women can even con-
sist of beliefs which contradict each other; a belief
in the resurrection of Jesus does not prevent women
from believing in reincarnation and astrology as well.
According to Kati Niemelä, men are looking for an
explicit pronouncement; they do not commit them-
selves to loose or unclear religiosity (Niemelä ).
Although men are more passive as regards partici-
pating in religious events, more unwilling to believe
in one God and a life aer death, they do wish, almost
as oen as women, to maintain religious practices in
moments of life transitions, such as birth, marriage
and death. Religious rituals thus also occupy an im-
portant place in the lives of men (Niemelä : ).
Why does religion attract women and atheism men?
Contemporary studies of religion seem to prove un-
varyingly that women tend to be more religious than
men. A stronger religiosity is found among women in
all European countries as well as in the whole of the
Western world. ere are several dierent strands and
approaches for explaining this phenomenon. Some
models of explanation have been suggested, but none
of them is unanimously acknowledged as established.
Can the dierent modes of socialisation or dierent
kinds of social obligations projected for women and
men explain the dierence? Or do women and men
simply, in some basic and fundamental way – bio-
logically or socially – dier from each other?
One suggested model of explanation is education.
Historically women have obtained much less educa-
tion than men, and more educated women tend to be
less religious than their less educated sisters. Educa-
tion could be seen to shield individuals from adopting
supernatural beliefs, thus associating a lack of educa-
tion with vulnerability. However, when women have
taken the opportunity to educate themselves, the dis-
parity is maintained, as educated women in compari-
son are also more religious than their male equals.
Another model of explanation has been socialization.
In the same way that women are taught to be more
submissive, passive and obedient than men, they
are also more religious. Women’s traditional roles as
caretakers – giving birth and nursing babies, caring
for sick and dying persons – puts them into a more
immediate relationship with the ultimate questions
of life and death. At least historically, women’s social
life has been more restricted than men’s. is in turn
could be seen to engender more conservative and
traditional value systems for women than for men.
But most oen the stronger religiosity of women is
connected to the fact that women are more involved
in bringing their children up, maintaining the chain
of memory and traditions. In addition, women spend
much more time at home, having more time to prac-
tice religion and consider religious questions (this
explanation must have come from a man who has
never spent time at home with all the responsibili-
ties it involves). But statistics also show that women
working outside the home are as religious as women
who work at home. (Berger et al. : –; Davie
; Freese ; Miller & Homan ; Niemelä
, ; Woodhead .)
Recent studies indicate that gender dierences in
religiousness might be caused by biological and psy-
chological factors – an explanation that is based on
nature not on nurture (Berger et al. : ). What
is it in sex dierence that exposes or shields one from
religion? What models could explain the dierences
of religiosity not only between the sexes, but also
within each sex? Dierent studies show a signicant
relationship between gender orientation and being re-
ligious; masculinity and femininity are identied as
important determinants of both women’s and men’s
A list of popes, Vatican, Rome, contains no names of
women – at least not yet. Photo by Tomas Mansikka.
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Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
religiosity. Men with a feminine orientation share a
greater religious involvement than men with a mas-
culine orientation. e results also indicate that femi-
nine women are more religious than women with a
masculine orientation. (Miller & Homan ,
ompson & Rennes , Freese .)
e standards of masculinity within Western cul-
ture encourage men to seek adventure, danger, and
to take risks. In some studies the gender dierence in
religiousness is explained by risk preferences: men are
more likely to commit crimes, they behave violently,
when driving they are oen convicted of speeding,
they hunt large and dangerous animals, and so on.
According to these researches irreligiousness and the
rejection of religious beliefs are part of a typically
masculine risk-taking behaviour (Miller & Homan
, ompson & Rennes , Niemelä ).
ese results can be interpreted in many ways. ey
might lead us to assume that atheists tend to be mas-
culine risk-takers. We should however also remem-
ber – as Abby Day remarked during a conversation
– all of the risks that women are exposed to: giving
birth to children, enduring violent marriages, walk-
ing out in a mini skirt at midnight in parks and so on.
Aren’t they forms of risk-taking, too?
A conflict between religion and women?
Feminism, religion and atheism
Although women tend to be religious, there are, of
course, non-religious women and even non-religious
mothers. Especially women with feminist attitudes
tend to be non-religious. Second wave feminism, in
particular, views religion as highly problematic: as
patriarchal, misogynic and oppressive. Many femi-
nist women have found it hard to remain within their
religious traditions (see, for example, Furseth :
). Feminist texts and (second wave) feminist re-
search join with the discourses of the new atheists in
articulating, quite correctly, that religious traditions
have in many ways legitimated the oppression and
discrimination of women. Within the world religions
both actors and leaders have been, and still are, men.
Also religious beliefs and doctrines have been his-
torically transmitted by men to men, as the contact
and communication with the supernatural has been
the privilege of men. e founders of the great world
religions have also been male, as well as most of those
who have instituted religious communities. And not
only have the sacred texts been written by men, but
nearly all of the great gures, saints, martyrs, teachers
and leaders of religious traditions – at least those we
know by name – have been men. Women have also
been excluded from various religious rituals, and
there has been an extensive debate within religious
traditions in the West as to whether women pos-
sess an immortal soul. e possibility for women to
reach salvation has mostly been spelled out in terms
of suppression and renunciation: to reject sexual-
ity, motherhood and marriage, and to withdraw to
a monastery and wholly give up one’s life to God.
Although women have, in some religious traditions
– for instance revival movements – had an import-
ant role as preachers or prophets in the movements’
early stages, they have later been removed from lead-
ing positions when the movement has become more
organised (see, for example, King ; Nenola ,
; Woodhead ; Young ).
From the points of view illustrated above – bear-
ing in mind of course that it is not the whole picture,
but a picture second wave feminism and new athe-
ism usually gives – it appears as a miracle that women
have not le their churches and religions en masse
and converted to atheism. e situation is quite to the
contrary, as we have seen: even feminist women tend
to be religious. Some of them have le their churches,
some have tried to reformulate and reinterpret their
tradition in woman-friendly directions. Some of the
religious feminists have founded totally new woman
-centred forms of religion and spirituality. us,
feminists can be atheists, but they are not necessarily
so. As a matter of fact, many feminists who identify
themselves as atheists have experienced the culture
of discussion within atheist circles to be quite mascu-
line and misogynic; they perceive atheism as a pro-
ject belonging to white western men (Beattie ,
Woodhead , Furseth ).
What is signicant here is that the arguments put
forward against religion are quite similar, both of the
new atheists and the (second wave) feminists. ey
resemble each other in many ways. Unfortunately,
very little research has been done on the relation-
ship between atheism and feminism. ere are, how-
ever, exceptions, such as work by Christine Overall
() and Inger Furseth (). Furseth, leaning on
both quantitative and qualitative data sets, illustrates
gendered structures in worldviews. She shows that
both feminist identities and masculine rationality
lead away from religion – but not necessarily from
spirituality. An article by Christine Overall examines
arguments by feminists who are critical of religion –
such as those discussed in the previous paragraph.
When taking the critical arguments at face value,
Overall considers whether these feminists should
63
Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
be atheists as well. However, as Overall and several
other researchers point out, religious traditions do
not exist outside of, or apart from, social and cultural
phenomena, but reect them – this gives one explan-
ation for androcentrism in the religious traditions of
the world. From a historical perspective female ac-
tivities and inuence have been situated outside the
institutions of society, for instance outside scientic
and theological educational institutions. Because of
this, women have not been able to participate in the
construction and formulation of processes within
social institutions, including religious traditions and
rituals. (Overall : ; Nenola , ; Young
.)
Both (second wave) feminists and new atheists
see the practices associated with religious and cultur-
al traditions as being harmful to women. e norms
which restrict women’s lives concern rst and fore-
most sexuality: birth control, abortion or divorce may
be prohibited; any forms of sexuality beyond what is
included in a heterosexual marriage may be seen as
illegitimate; women’s importance lies most oen in
being a wife or a mother, while the value of infant
girls, as well as older women or widows, are mostly
minimal (Overall : ; Nenola , ).
For these and many other reasons feminism and
religion are oen regarded as opposites. Women
with feminist orientations are alienated from reli-
gious traditions, and feminist research has not been
able to positively evaluate religion or religious tradi-
tions. Religious women are seen as either ignorant or
gripped by an erroneous perception. Both (second
wave) feminist sociological studies of religion and
the writings of the new atheists approach religion and
women’s religiosity in a black-and-white way: either a
great deal of space is given to religion, or it is totally
bypassed. Especially when considering women from
remote or unfamiliar cultures, there is a tendency to
dwell on religious points of view alone. Religion be-
comes the only lens through which women are scru-
tinised, as if there were no other dimensions to their
lives. A well-known example is that of the veiled Mus-
lim woman, who has become a metaphor for submis-
sion and ignorance – the sexual and racial ‘other’. e
idea of an educated, independent, professional femi-
nist Muslim woman doesn’t t into the frame. (Vuola
a: –, b: ; Beattie : ; Berger et
al. : .)
e new atheist and feminist scholars who bypass
the multidimensionality of religious traditions share
a common attitude; an inability to discern between
dierent levels and dimensions of religion and re-
ligiosity. ey focus merely on levels of institutions,
interpretations of the elite, and on holy scriptures
and dogmas. As a result, the lived, everyday reli-
gion and interpretations and experiences of ordinary
people are le out. e monotheist religions of the
Near East appear, for sure, to be very patriarchal, if
one is solely concentrating on ocial interpretations
(Vuola a: ). Both traditionally feminist and
new atheist critics of religion tend to focus on theo-
logical questions, in conjunction with interpretations
of religion from biological perspectives. is means
that they oen get caught up in details, as for ex ample
issue of the hymen – was Mary a virgin before, during
and aer giving birth to Jesus? – and do not regard as
meaningful or relevant the actual beliefs held by or-
dinary religious persons, or the appropriate hermen-
eutics usually applied to sacred texts. (Vuola b:
.) Elina Vuola gives examples of interpretations
by Latin American women of the myth of the Virgin
Mary, which dier in many ways from the ocial in-
terpretations of the Catholic Church – which inter-
pretations many of the women were not even aware
of. When focusing on the Mariology of the Catholic
Church, the Virgin Mary is seen as an origin and a
symbol of the subordination of women – the same
eect is happening with the scarf worn by Muslim
women. e symbol can, in both of these cases, be
‘the vehicle of the subordination, but it cannot be
it without considering the other preconditions,
women’s self-understanding and cultural identity,
which is more than religious identity’. (Vuola a:
.)
Elina Vuola (a: ) points out an important
duty of the scholar of religion: to correct the most
stereotypical perceptions on religion and gender in
other disciplines and in public discussions – and
not contributing to their further dissemination. She
also reminds us that the cultural clash is not occur-
ing – at least not in the domain of sexual ethics – be-
tween dierent religious traditions, but within them.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam agree in practice on
sexual ethics and family legislation, at least concern-
ing questions of homosexuality and abortion. It is
the polarisation within religions which is much more
important. (Vuola a: .) Religious communi-
ties usually become divided into opposing camps –
conservatives and liberals – with varying and incom-
patible attitudes towards modernisation, pluralism,
lifestyle, gender and sexuality (Ketola : –).
It is the conservative factions of devotees that be-
come the target of the new atheist (and feminist)
critics, while liberal religiosity is seen as a platform
64
Approaching Religion • Vol. 2, No. 1 • June 2012
for potential conservatism (and fundamentalism).
Vuola recommends, for dealing with dierent forms
of religiosity, taking a position which simultaneously
critical and which seeks to understand. A scholar of
religion must distinguish between conceptual and
functional levels of religious traditions; to discern the
dierence between religion in terms of institutions,
doctrines, or religious elites, and the lived religion of
ordinary people. (Vuola a: .) Only then may
one understand in what ways women have found the
space to develop their talents within (the patriarchal)
religious traditions, as well as in what ways the reli-
gions have become resources for women, and have
given support, meaning and substance to women in
their everyday lives (Berger et al. : ; Nenola
, ).
Whose voices are heard?
Altough women do tend to be more religious than
men, there is a growing number of women who are
distancing themselves from religion, or women for
whom religion is not regarded as important in their
lives. Still, very few of these women identify them-
selves as convinced atheists, even when they share a
common attitude with atheists; namely that religions
are harmful to societies, and religious beliefs are false
from a scientic perspective. e forms of non-reli-
giousness amongst these women varies from indier-
ence on religious issues to extreme forms of atheism.
In Finland, atheism has not become popular on
a large scale; a more likely and common standpoint
is to be religiously indierent, even when one is a
member of the Finnish Lutheran Church. ose who
leave the Church are seldom convinced atheists, but
people who feel themselves to have been oended or
disappointed by Church employees, or by some of
the attitudes supported by the Church. ey may also
simply be alienated from the teachings of the Church,
or the doctrines of Christianity, and do not regard
them as important or meaningful for their lives (see
Niemelä ). Finns do not reect overly much on
religious questions in their everyday lives, or weigh
up the scientic evidence pertaining to certain reli-
gious beliefs. Teemu Taira has followed discussions
on atheism, and by atheists, in the leading Finnish
news paper Helsingin Sanomat, and maintains that
although contemporary Finns are not passionate
defenders of religion, this doesn’t make them active
supporters of atheism. e most visible and noisy
Finnish atheists focus their criticism on the Finnish
Lutheran Church and its visibility and status within
Finnish society. ere have also been lively debates
on religious education in public schools and its secu-
lar equivalent, the study of the philosophy of life. Of
all the atheist interviewees only two were women.
(Taira : , –.) e same tendency was ex-
plicit in the lively debate on science versus religion
in the leading Swedish-speaking newspaper Huf-
vudstadsbladet during the spring of . e male
counterparts in the discussion – where science and
the theory of evolution was pitted against theism and
the Church – did more or less disregard each other’s
views, with no serious attempts at understanding
each another.
What are still mostly invisible in the public dis-
cussion are the varieties and forms of everyday non-
religiousness, the lived non-religiousness. It would
be important to examine, for instance, the ways in
which non-religious mothers and families raise their
children in everyday life and in times of crisis. How
they organise transition rites or annual festivals, the
contents and forms of which are mostly based on
Christianity. How children of non-religious families
experience the presence of (Christian) religion (fes-
tivals, prayers, hymns) in kindergarten or at school.
What do the worldviews of non-religious people con-
sist of? Or what forms or dimensions of spirituality
are closest to the views of secular people?
Dr and Docent Tiina Mahla mäki
is Lecturer in Comparative Reli-
gion at the University of Turku,
Finland. She is member of the
executive board of the Finnish
Society for the Study of Religion,
and the co-editor-in-chief
of Temenos: Nordic Journal of
Comparative Religion. Her main
research themes are: literature
and religion, gender and religion
(both religiosity and non-
religiosity) and civil religion. She
has recently written on Emanuel
Swedenborg’s influence on Finnish national literature and
on the Anthroposophical themes in the works of the Finn-
ish female author Kersti Bergroth. Email: tituma(at)utu.fi.
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