Publication: MORALITY, PIRITUALITY, AND RESIDUAL RELIGION
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Date
2026-04-16
Authors
Van Tongeren, Daryl
Journal Title
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Type
Poster
Abstract
The Residual Religion Hypothesis (RRH; Van Tongeren et al., 2021) proposes that religious influence persists following disaffiliation, gradually fading over time across moral, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. This study tested the RRH among three groups: currently religious individuals, religious "Dones" (formerly religious), and "Nones" (never religious), using measures less commonly applied in this literature.
A sample of 1,304 U.S. adults (from an initial 1,500) was recruited via Prolific in March 2025. Participants completed the Morality as Cooperation Questionnaire (MAC-Q), two Gallup-derived items assessing perceptions of moral decline, and the SHALOM 2G spiritual well-being scale. Dones additionally reported time since disaffiliation and whether their prior religious commitment was intrinsic or extrinsic.
Contrary to predictions, the MAC-Q revealed no significant group differences in cooperative moral values, including group-preserving domains (Family, Heroism, Deference) hypothesized to be highest among the Religious and to show residual decay among Dones. Religious participants were modestly less pessimistic about the state of U.S. moral values, though this finding warrants caution given the sample was collected in early 2025, a period of significant partisan mood fluctuation following a presidential election. On spiritual well-being, Religious participants reported less dissonance between their ideals and lived experience, but Dones did not differ significantly from Nones, again failing to support RRH.
An exploratory finding proved notable: only 20% of Done respondents described themselves retrospectively as having been deeply committed to religious beliefs and practices. This suggests the Done category may be too heterogeneous for clean hypothesis testing and points toward the need for finer-grained classification of religious disaffiliation in future research. A follow-up study (not represented on this poster) was conducted to test this hunch.