Curious Reads: Dones and Nones

Religion leaves a mark, even on the deconverted.

Hello friend, Liz here.

#1 Today’s “top of the fold” story is the “Dones,” by which I mean the once-devout who are now done with their religion.

A study recently published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality by researchers Aaron T. McLaughlin, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Kelly Teahan, Don E. Davis, Kenneth G. Rice, and C. Nathan DeWall took a hard stare at the deconverted and the formerly-religious.

Their hypothesis was that these folks, so often lumped in with the never-religious, might actually straddle the currently-religious and the never-religious in important ways, an in-between sociological group.

So the team asked study participants who had self-identified as “done” with some aspect of their religion to write short essays about their religious experiences. And then they analyzed data from 643 “dones” in the U.S., Hong Kong, and the Netherlands to see what characteristics “dones” might share.

Here’s the study, a summary, and a podcast interview with the study authors at Christi…