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Given the recent wild popularity of books that have been touting the benefits of atheism, one might wonder if an overpopulation of turkeys is going to be our next environmental crisis.

Say again? What’s the link? According to Gallup surveys, every year one out of every eight Americans either plan a non-traditional Thanksgiving or do not observe the holiday at all. Who are those least likely to head over the river and through the woods to gather for the annual family feast? Atheists. These polls report that people who have no religious preference or who never attend church services are more than twice as likely to skip the traditional thanksgiving observance compared to those with stronger ties to religion and religious communities. Over a century ago, poet and painter Dante Rossetti said “the worst moment in the life of an atheist is when he or she feels thankful and has no one to thank.” On the other hand, gratitude and thanksgiving are concepts that are very much at home in religious discourse.

But is it true that atheists have no one to thank? The rejection of God need not mean the rejection of Thanksgiving, and the attitude upon which it is based, gratitude. Although there may be no atheists in foxholes, surely there can be atheists at the Thanksgiving table. Why can’t they use their annual Thanksgiving dinner as a brief occasion to pause and remember to be thankful for family, friends, and food? They may have to work a little harder at being thankful. Scientists studying the cognitive basis of religious belief and non-belief contend that atheism does not come naturally, but rather flourishes under certain environmental circumstances (urbanization, post-modernism, and technologies that sever the link between moral behavior and material consequences). Conversely, according to this cognitive science perspective, belief comes naturally. We are born to believe. From early in life, the tendency to see the world as purposefully designed and to detect signs of supernatural agency appears to be built into our psychological architecture. It takes extraordinary means (e.g. communist regimes) to strip people of this natural tendency to believe in God.

If these scientists are correct, then, it is easy to understand why people would believe that the good things that they have in life—those blessings that they are grateful for—were intentionally given to them for their benefit. Our mental tools support such an inferential process. It would be far more unnatural to see these blessings as randomly occurring, or attribute them to luck or fate, or solely to human intervention. This being the case, gratitude is a nearly inevitable outcome of how our mind works. When the blessings that we have cannot be attributed to human benevolence, attributions to God’s goodness become all the more likely. Therefore, people are more likely to sense a divine hand in cherished experiences that cannot easily be attributed to human effort—the birth of a child, a miraculous recovery from illness, the restoration of an estranged relationship—for which gratitude to God—and the Thanksgiving celebration are apt responses.

The culture wars between atheists and believers show no signs of cooling off. Atheists are offended when believers give credit to God for good fortune in their lives, erroneously assuming this means they are not giving credit to those who are truly deserving of their thanks. Believers, on the other hand, assume that atheists are miserable and lonely because they have no one to thank. Perhaps each side can pause gratefully on this Thanksgiving to give thanks, each in their own way. Gratitude is one of the building blocks of civil and humane society, and surely civility and humanity are gifts we can give each other this holiday season.
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Robert A. Emmons is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis and author of Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (2007, Houghton-Mifflin).