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Our study has examined the nature and diversity of unbelief, practice and social connections amongst nonreligious Millennials in six European countries chosen for their differences – from low nonreligion (Romania, Poland) to high nonreligion (UK, Netherlands), and with a mix of Christian heritages (Orthodox, Lutheran, Catholic, mixed), political and migration histories, welfare and wealth. We conducted 70 interviews across 25 European cities/towns and triangulated our findings with survey and social media network data. Our presentation highlights three key findings. First, the persistence of beliefs and practices connected to luck, fate and human and cosmic interconnection, which do not fit within a strictly rationalist-materialist framework. This was found across our sample, including in longstanding low religious cultures (like Eastern Germany), through more prominently in high religion environments. Second, we found a range of forms of collective organisation, from state-funded humanist organisations in Norway to Polish movements focused on challenging aspects of the populist religious conservative government's public policy. Third, our social media analysis showed that while national forums remain important, nonreligious Millennials engage with transnational circuits of nonreligious discourse, particularly in English.

While religious participation is generally in decline across Europe, especially amongst younger generations, religion has become an important cultural resource for right wing populist political mobilisation in several Central and Eastern European countries, including Poland and Romania. For example, in Poland, a socially conservative nationalist political ideology which claims support from traditional Catholic values informs the governing Law and Justice party, leading to measures to restrict women's reproductive rights (hence impacting younger women in particular) and free speech concerning Poland's wartime record. In Romania this influence has been more widely dispersed across the political spectrum since the collapse of the Greater Romania party, but remains influential in public and political discourse. This paper asks, how does this publicization of religion impact on non-believing millennials in Poland and Romania? While survey evidence (WVS) shows the importance of religion and God is in decline especially amongst younger people, still only 2.2% of Romanians and 3.9% of Poles under 30 rated religion as of no importance to them (WVS, 2012), making them a small minority, whilst 45% of Romanians and 17% of Poles considered (WVS, 2006) 'politicians who don't believe in God to be unfit for public office', suggesting the continuing importance of religious conformity for success in public life. The paper draws on three sources to understand the impact of these conditions on young non-believers. First, it draws on surveys of public opinion to situate the phenomenon in broader European and comparative context; second, it examines the rhetoric around atheism and non-belief in populist political discourse, to assess the extent to which this group of religious non-conformists is represented and reacts to this climate; and third, it draws on interviews conducted with non-believing millennials in Poland and Romania in the spring of 2018.

Understanding vaccine hesitancy has become increasingly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the globe have been struggling to convince portions of their populations to participate in vaccination protocols. Here we report on a nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom in which data revealed that individuals indicated more willingness to take unfamiliar or fictitious vaccines (putatively produced by the US government health program Medicare and the now defunct fraudulent healthcare company Theranos) than they were to take the Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines (developed by the Russian and Chinese governments respectively). The data show that the critical factor in vaccine hesitancy among the respondents was anxiety rather than familiarity with vaccines.

Understanding vaccine hesitancy has become increasingly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the globe have been struggling to convince portions of their populations to participate in vaccination protocols. Here we report on a nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom in which data revealed that individuals showed more willingness to take fictitious vaccines (putatively produced by the US government Medicare program and the now defunct healthcare company Theranos) than to take the Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines (developed by the Russian and Chinese governments respectively). The data indicate that the critical factor in vaccine hesitancy among the respondents was anxiety rather than familiarity with vaccines. ; publishedVersion

Europe's contemporary political landscape has been shaped by massive shifts in recent decades caused by geopolitical upheavals such as Brexit and now, COVID-19. The way in which policy makers respond to the current pandemic could have large effects on how the world looks after the pandemic subsides. We aim to investigate complex questions post COVID-19 around the relationships and intersections concerning nationalism, religiosity, and anti-immigrant sentiment from a socio-cognitive perspective by applying a mixed-method approach (survey and modelling); in a context where unprecedented contagion threats have caused huge instability. There are still significant gaps in the scholarly literature on populism and nationalism. In particular, there is a lack of attention to the role of evolved human psychology in responding to persistent threats, which can fall into four broad categories in the literature: predation (threats to one's life via being eaten or killed in some other way), contagion (threats to one's life via physical infection), natural (threats to one's life via natural disasters), and social (threats to one's life by destroying social standing). These threats have been discussed in light of their effects on religion and other forms of behaviour, but they have not been employed to study nationalist and populist behaviours. In what follows, two studies are presented that begin to fill this gap in the literature. The first is a survey used to inform our theoretical framework and explore the different possible relationships in an online sample. The second is a study of a computer simulation. Both studies (completed in 2020) found very clear effects among the relevant variables, enabling us to identify trends that require further explanation and research as we move toward models that can adequately inform policy discussions.