Americans who go to church and trust science are also more likely to believe in ghosts and curses, new research shows

Filed 45m ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Funky Boxstep

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Michael Harris · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A study in Social Forces, using the 2025 Baylor Religion Survey of 1,812 American adults, finds that people who trust science and reason over church teaching, yet still believe in God or attend services, are more likely to believe in magic than those who defer to religious authority. Among believers in God, 40% of the secular-rationalist-leaning group leaned toward magic versus 19% of those who rejected those ideas; among regular service attendees, it was 28% versus 19%.

The effect vanished among people with no religious belief or attendance at all, suggesting magic thrives specifically where some residual faith meets a DIY attitude toward truth. The researchers note roughly three in ten American adults now claim no religious affiliation, yet most of those still hold some supernatural belief, from tarot to astrology.

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✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Turns out swapping the priest for your own judgment doesn't make the spirits go away, it just gives them a new landlord. People didn't stop believing in things beyond the natural world, they just stopped asking permission first. That's not a crisis of faith, it's a change of management.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Funky Boxstep · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0