Features
Berdina Shorten: Her long and circuitous journey to returning to her Jewish roots
By BERNIE BELLAN Berdina Shorten has lived in Winnipeg since coming here with her family from the Netherlands in 1953. Although Berdina was Jewish by ancestry (going back to her great-grandmother), she hadn’t been raised Jewish. It was only several years after having come to Canada – and having got married, that Berdina – and her late husband, Ken Shorten, both converted to Judaism.
Typically, the stories we publish in this paper about people’s wartime experiences have to do with the Holocaust. Those stories are all certainly horrendous – and almost always riveting, but when I happened to be talking to Berdina about a totally unrelated subject (the renewal of her subscription) and the conversation got around to her wartime experiences, I said to her that I wanted to write about her story.
I should also mention that I had heard Berdina speak at the Shaarey Zedek several years ago, but at that time I didn’t take any notes. (I can’t recall exactly why I was there or how I happened to be in the room when Berdina told her story, but I remember thinking that this would make a great story for the paper some day.)
In any event, here’s a recounting of the first part of Berdina’s story, based on a phone interview that I conducted with her on February .
First, a little history is needed, in order to understand the context for what happened to Berdina and her family.
The German army had invaded Poland in September 1939. After consolidating its gains there, Germany turned its attention to Western Europe in April 1940, first by invading Norway and Denmark, then launching an attack through Belgium into that country, also the Netherlands and Luxembourg (despite those three countries having adopted positions of neutrality).
The German invasion of The Netherlands began on May 10, 1943.
That is where Berdina’s story picks up. But first, a little background on her family history.
Berdina’s father, Theodore (or Theo, as he was known) was a master leather cutter. His “family was Protestant, but his mother was Catholic, so he was raised Catholic,” she said.
As Berdina explained, “his family had come from France in 1610. He used to say the reason his family didn’t go to the New World was ‘no pretty cruise directors, no first class cabins, no air conditioning.’ The real reason was they were Huguenots and they weren’t allowed to go to the New World – unless they went to England and went with the Protestants,” e.g., the Pilgrims on the Mayflower.)
Berdina’s mother (Anna), however, “was born Jewish” but, as Berdina noted, “the family never practiced Judaism. What happened was her mother was born Jewish to a Dutch girl and a German Rhine skipper. Her father died when she was four years old, so her mother went back to Holland, but her family wouldn’t accept her back because she had married someone who was not Jewish. She raised her child (Berdina’s grandmother) with the help of local charities and working in a grocery store.
“When she met my great-grandfather, he was more Catholic than the Pope, so she never practiced her religion and she raised her children as Catholic – but they were actually Jewish – by Jewish law.
“It wasn’t until I was 12 – and I had been sent to Catholic school. I was always challenging the nuns. I wanted to check out Judaism, but I wasn’t allowed.
I asked Berdina whether “she had an awareness that she was Jewish?”
She said she did. “I always knew. My mother knew also, but they hid it.”
I asked then how she knew about her Jewish heritage?
She answered: “My relatives. I heard conversations when I was a child.”
While, Her mother “didn’t practice any religion, her “father did. He’d go to Mass once in a while,” Berdina noted.
When the Germans invaded the Netherlands, Berdina’s father was in the Dutch army, fighting on the “Grebenberg (or the Grebbe line, the main line of Dutch defence)– where they held the Germans back for many days.” (Actually, it wasn’t many days at all – only three. The Dutch were badly equipped and totally outmaneuvered by the Germans.)
Berdina continued her story: “My father was a fantastic shot…But the Queen (Wilhelmina) capitulated. They were bombing the hell out of Rotterdam (May 14, 1940).” The Netherlands surrendered the next day.
Berdina’s father was taken prisoner and sent to work as a forced labourer (in Germany): “So my father was taken and put into a factory. He was a master leather cutter – making shoes.”
Berdina’s family lived very close to the German border with the Netherlands. Thus, even though Theo was forced to work in Germany, it was only a three-hour walk for him to return to his hometown – and his family. It seems somewhat strange to think of someone who’s kept as a forced labourer – which Berdina described as “slave labour”, yet who was allowed to return home on weekends, as she explained:
He was allowed to go home (where mother lived) once a week, Berdina said. “He was given one egg a week, so he would take that egg with him, so my brother (Corey, who was born four years before Berdina) would be able to have at least a little bit of protein in his diet.”
All the while Theodore though, was part of the Dutch underground– meeting with other members of the underground surreptitiously while he was in forced labour for the Germans.
Berdina told this story about one harrowing brush with danger her father had while he was in the resistance: “A story he told was that he was going to a meeting (of the underground) with a friend. They were caught by a young German soldier and the soldier” pointed his rifle at them and “told them to put their hands up. Somehow my father was able to overtake this young soldier.
“His friend said ‘We have to run.’ My father said, ‘No, we can’t. If we run and they find him (the soldier), they’ll kill ten people on this street.“ (That was the retribution the Germans typically exacted, Berdina explained.)
“So my father was able to get a hold of some liquor, put it over the kid’s mouth, then took his guns and papers to the nearest police station, which was controlled by the Germans, and said: ‘One of your soldiers was drunk and we took his guns and papers before he hurt someone.’
“My father was given a pass to go anywhere he wanted that night.”
I asked Berdina if she knew when it was that her father fled the factory for good and ended up going totally “underground” with the Dutch Resistance, but she said she didn’t know exactly when that happened.
When the Canadian army reached Holland in September 1944, anyone who had been in the Dutch army was able to join the Canadian army, Berdina explained, so her father ended up joining the Canadian army.
“When the Dutch army reorganized, he went back to the Dutch army.”
Her father was uncomfortable talking about what he did during the war, Berdina noted, but according to her brother, Theo had once told him that he “had killed at least one German that he knew of (a sniper) and probably more, but he wasn’t sure.”
I asked Berdina whether there were any other memories from the war that she wanted to talk about.
She said there was a young girl – only 14, in her town, “who was the first girl (in Berdina’s home town) to get pregnant by a German soldier.”(That soldier died in a plane crash coming back from North Africa, Berdina added.) “She was also the first girl to get pregnant by a Canadian soldier.
“After the war the people in that community were going to get her and shave her head and send her packing.
“My mother said to my father: ‘That little girl is still only 15 years old. She’s still walking around in Bobby socks and skipping with a skipping rope. Theo (Berdina’s father), could you please do something to stop those people from hurting her?’
“My father went out on to the street and he saw about 50 people coming for the girl. He stopped them.”
In 1953, Berdina, along with her parents and three brothers (two of whom were born after the end of the Second World War), came to Canada.
“My father started to work as leather cutter in the Canada West shoe factory,” Berdina explained.
“Maitland Steinkopf hired him. Eventually my father started to work in St. Boniface Hospital; he’d had a year’s medical training in Edinborough after the war – so he started to work in the hospital, in the x-ray department.
“He worked four hours a night doing piece work for Maitland. He made more money doing that than he did in the hospital.”
I was curious to know more about Maitland Steinkopf and his connection to the shoe business. I knew that Steinkopf was a very successful businessman who also played a leading role in the development of the Centennial Concert Hall, as well as being a prominent Conservative politician and cabinet minister, but other than that I didn’t know much about him.
Berdina said to me that Steinkopf’s success in the shoe manufacturing business was a result of his decision to go to Minneapolis at one point and come back with the Canadian rights to a line of shoes called “Hush Puppies”. That reminded me of another famous decision made by a local Jewish businessman – Samuel Cohen, who decided to begin importing transistor radios made by a company called Sony.
Turning to Berdina’s decision to become Jewish, here is how she explained how that came about:
“My late husband, Ken Shorten (whom I incorrectly referred to as Frank in my previous article), came from an Irish family – that originally came to Canada in 1690, and they farmed in the McCreary area.
“He worked in Eatons – and I worked in Eatons as well. That’s where I met him and we got married.
“Well, he was Protestant and I had been raised in a Catholic environment. We decided that we weren’t going to let the difference in our faiths have a negative effect on us, so we just stuck to ourselves when it came to the religious part.
“But that didn’t work for me and it didn’t work for him and I always knew about my Jewish heritage, so I said to him one day: ‘You know, I’d like to learn more about Judaism; it’s part of my heritage.’ And he said: ‘Me, too.’
“He had some very good Jewish friends at the time (who were all in the NDP). One of them was Cy Gonick, another was Harry Shafransky. He got to know quite a few Jewish politicians. He liked their ethics, liked their values, and so we started to look into Judaism.
“We went to see Rabbi Nesis and (the late) Rabbi Berkal, and we studied with them for two years, and then made the conversion.”
Interestingly, Berdina said that she also spoke with (the late) Rabbi Weizman, who told her that “You can’t convert – you’re already Jewish”.
“But, I said to him, ‘It’s my decision. It’s my journey. I want to do the process.’
“We had two children that we had adopted before we decided to convert – and we brought them in with us.”
I asked when this all happened?
Berdina said the conversion process went from 1973-75.
“We were officially converted in May of ’75,” she said, “and then we were married in the rabbi’s office again.”
“I sang in the Shaarey Zedek choir for 36 years,” Berdina added, “and my son, Theodore, sang in the choir for 20 years…and both kids had their bar and bat mitzvah together.”
“It was the best decision I ever made in my life,” Berdina observed. “It completed me as a human being. I finally fit – because I used to question those nuns. I must have been a real pain in the tuch.”
I asked, “Do you have relatives remaining in Holland?”
Berdina answered: “Yes, I have many.”
I asked, “Are any of them Jewish?”
She answered, “I have one cousin who recognizes himself as Jewish – and that’s it.”
I said to Berdina that what she had told me about her Jewish ancestry and her family’s subsequent conversion to Christianity, it jives with what I had read about how commonplace it was for Jews to have become Christians. I said that I recalled hearing from the late Rabbi Rappaport that only about one-quarter of all Jews in Europe remained Jewish through the years. The rest either converted willingly or by force.
During the course of our conversation, Berdina told me many more stories about her wartime experiences in the Netherlands, all of which were fascinating. Since she was only two years old by war’s end, naturally the stories she tells are one that have been recounted to her by others, but they are all worth retelling.
One that stood out for me in particular was about a Jewish doctor who was kept hidden by his Dutch housekeeper, unbeknownst to anyone else in the town. According to Berdina, when German soldiers came to the house looking for the doctor in 1940, the housekeeper said to them: “I kicked him out long ago when I knew you would be coming. He was miserable to work for and he never paid me enough.”
All through the war that housekeeper was ostracized by her fellow townspeople, as the doctor was universally loved. As Berdina told it, when the town was liberated by Canadian soldiers in 1944, the doctor emerged from the basement – where he had been kept hidden the entire period of occupation by the housekeeper.
Berdina is a great storyteller and when I asked her whether she’d be willing to tell her story to other audiences – as I had heard her do several years ago at the Shaarey Zedek, she readily agreed. If a day comes when Berdina will be able to tell her story to a new audience, I’ll be sure to post something in this paper.
Features
Seeking gangsters, must speak Yiddish: Bringing the Hasidic underworld to life in ‘Caught Stealing’
By PJ Grisar September 3, 2025
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
A duo of burly, gun-toting Hasidic gangsters and their doting bubbe are the breakout characters in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing — at least, for figures not of the feline variety. To bring them to life, the film had a secret weapon: a Yiddish whisperer.
Motl Didner, program director for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, first heard rumblings of the crime caper through a casting notice seeking Yiddish-speaking actors. He didn’t know the notice was for an Aronofsky film, but he passed the details along to members of the company, and even sent in a self-tape to be considered for a role.
Later, the production got in touch to use him as a Yiddish coach.
“That’s when I found out who exactly it was that I lost out to,” Didner said in a phone interview. “I don’t feel so bad about losing out to, like, Liev Schreiber.”
Didner worked with Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio and Carol Kane — respectively playing a pair of frightening drug lords and their grandmother — settling on a Hungarian dialect for their dialogue, and even rewriting some of their Yiddish lines. (The dynasty to which the brothers belong is never specified, but their scenes with Kane were filmed on location at a Lubavitcher household in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.)
The duo show up as a threat to the film’s protagonist, Hank (Austin Butler), who finds himself caught in the middle of their quest to recover piles of money from other ethnic gangs in 1998 New York City.
Kane, Didner said, took naturally to the mamaloshen. While she isn’t conversational in Yiddish in real life, her breakout role was as a Yiddish-speaking immigrant in Hester Street, and she more recently had Yiddish scenes in the Amazon Prime show Hunters.
Schreiber, for his part, sang Yiddish songs growing up, and “had an ear for it,” Didner said.
D’Onofrio, who isn’t Jewish, was “really kind of thrown deep into the Jewish world,” Didner said, but was very meticulous in getting his “meshugenahs” on point. Crucially, he nails the pronunciation of his beloved bubbe’s title: For native Yiddish speakers, it sounds more like “boh-beh” than “bubbie.”
Didner was on set for the scene in which Butler’s Hank slurps a bowl of matzo ball soup with the brothers. Somehow, word spread that the Oscar winner was shooting in the neighborhood, something of a novelty for the Hasidic enclave. Evidently the heartthrob has a young Chabad fan base.
“When filming wrapped at the end of the day, there were a couple hundred teenage girls waiting to get a glimpse of Austin Butler,” Didner recalled. It was like the reception of the Beatles or, better yet, Elvis.
Didner wasn’t the only dialect coach for D’Onofrio and Schreiber; they had a separate one for English.
“Darren Aronofsky was very specific,” Didner said of “the boys” — how Aronofsky referred to the characters. “He didn’t want them to speak English with a Yiddish accent.”
Instead, they speak with Hank in a measured, yet still menacing, American aksent. It’s when they discuss how to handle him — and whether he deserves to be roughed up — that they revert to Yiddish.
There were also separate consultants, Didner said, to make sure the customs included in a bustling pre-Shabbat sequence at Bubbe’s house were authentic.
Didner saw the film over the weekend, and was happy to see diverse languages included in it.
“There’s also Spanish and Russian in there,” Didner said, adding he hopes that linguistic richness is “part of an increasing trend that people are looking for that sort of authenticity.”
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
What led to the complete disappearance of Sabra Hummus from store shelves?
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”
-from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970)
By BERNIE BELLAN I wasn’t actually thinking about Sabra Hummus until one day recently when I was sitting together with a group of guys – some of whom were Israeli-born when, out of the blue, one of them asked me if I knew why you couldn’t find Sabra Hummus anywhere in Winnipeg?
“Can’t find it?” I thought. Surely it must be available somewhere here. I said that I thought it must be on a grocery shelf at least in Sobeys on Taylor because if any store was going to have a product with as obvious an Israeli name as “Sabra,” it was going to be Sobeys on Taylor.
After all, going back a few years, anytime you went shopping for hummus the Sabra brand was ubiquitous.
So, I said to the fellow who had asked the question that I was now curious to delve further into whether Sabra Hummus had indeed disappeared from Winnipeg store shelves. I added that I would start by inquiring at the Sobeys store on Taylor – where I knew the manager, Dave McDonald, and that I would ask Dave whether it’s true that Sabra Hummus is no longer available at his store.
I emailed Dave asking him that question but, while I was waiting for a response, I began to search on the internet to see whether there might be an explanation as to what had happened to Sabra Hummus – and whether its disappearance from store shelves wasn’t something unique to Winnipeg.
Naturally, I began with a Google search for Sabra Hummus. While the search led me to discover many different things about Sabra Hummus, the one thing that I found most surprising is that Sabra Hummus, despite its Israeli name, is now wholly owned by PepsiCo.
It was when I received a phone call from a Sobeys representative in response to an email I had sent that it also emerged that, as has been the case with many other products that come from the US, Sobeys had decided to stop importing Sabra Hummus (which used to come in 30 different varieties) ever since Trump imposed his tariffs on Canadian exports going back to February of this year. (Sobeys, by the way, owns many different brands of stores: Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, Foodland, FreshCo, Thrifty Foods, Farn Boy, Longo’s, and Lawtons Drugs.)
But, to my even greater surprise, I learned from a representative of PepsiCo that Sabra Hummus is not even being produced any more – at least not in the plastic tubs that had the very recognizable Sabra logo on them. I’ll have more about what the PepsiCo representative wrote in an email to me, but first – a brief history of Sabra Hummus – and the many problems it’s endured over the years.
Most of my information came from – where else? Wikipedia, but it turned out the Times of Israel also had a very interesting article – written in December 2024, that examined the effect that the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement (BDS) had on Sabra Hummus.
Yet, while both the Wikipedia and the Times of Israel articles did talk about the problems that the Sabra brand had been encountering in recent years, it was only when I received that email from a representative of PepsiCo that I was able to verify that, as of now, Sabra Hummus is no longer being manufactured altogether although, as I’ll explain later, Pepsico does plan on bringing it back into production in 2026.
What happened to Sabra Hummus then?
Here’s some of the information about Sabra Hummus that is largely taken from the Wikipedia article about Sabra Hummus:
“The company was founded in 1986 by Zohar Norman and Yehuda Pearl as Sabra-Blue & White Foods. The company was bought in 2005 by Israeli food manufacturer Strauss.
“In March 2008, Strauss entered a joint-venture partnership with Frito-Lay, a division of the multinational PepsiCo corporation. Strauss owned 50% and PepsiCo 50% of the company. In November 2008, the company announced the construction of a new $61 million plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia, expected to employ 260 people and come on line in mid-2010. The company grew over 50% between August 2008 and August 2009.
According to Wikipedia, by 2016, Sabra Hummus had become the dominant player when it came to selling hummus in the United States: “By 2016, Sabra had gained a 60% market share of hummus in the United States, and, through its co-ownership and sales channels with PepsiCo, was close to $1 billion in annual sales.”
The Times of Israel article noted that Sabra’s share of the hummus market in the US grew even more: “At the start of 2021, Sabra Dipping Company — which is jointly owned by Strauss Group and PepsiCo — sold US supermarkets nearly two-thirds of their hummus.”
Yet, it all seemed to start coming apart in recent years. By 2024, according to Wikipedia, Sabra’s share of the US hummus market had dropped to only “36%.”
There are many reasons for Sabra’s rapid descent from dominance of the US hummus market and both the Wikipedia and Times of Israel articles examine those reasons, but it does seem strange that, notwithstanding the drop in sales that Sabra might have suffered in the past few years, PepsiCo has simply stopped producing it altogether.
I wouldn’t have believed that until I received the email from a representative of Pepsico, to which I referred earlier. Here’s what I was told: “Regrettably, we are temporarily stepping back from full-size hummus tubs to improve product offerings. We know that’s a big disappointment since fans like you have been looking high and low for it!
“Our full-size hummus tubs are expected back in late 2026. In the meantime, our Guacamole and Hummus Snackers remain available at many grocery stores across Canada.”
After reading that email, one might be forgiven for thinking that something drastic – something beyond loss of market share, had happened to Sabra Hummus.
But Sabra had had huge problems in the past – from which it always bounced back.
Here’s what Wikipedia noted about problems Sabra had encountered in the past: “On April 8, 2015, Sabra recalled 30,000 cases of its classic hummus after a tub in Michigan tested positive for Listeria.”
Then, the Wikipedia article went on to say: “On November 19, 2016, Sabra voluntarily recalled multiple hummus varieties across the U.S. after Listeria was discovered at one of its manufacturing plants, though the company stated the bacteria had not been found in any of its actual products.
“In March 2021, Sabra recalled about 2,100 cases of 10 oz. Classic Hummus, following a routine inspection by the FDA in the US, due to a possible salmonella contamination. The recall affected 16 states in the U.S.”
Yet, despite all that, as has previously been noted, the Times of Israel article of December 2024 pointed out that, prior to that March 2021 product recall, Sabra Hummus still dominated the US market for hummus, to the extent that nearly two-thirds of the hummus sold by US supermarkets came from Sabra.
To this point we haven’t mentioned one other factor that certainly affected sales of Sabra Hummus, although to what extent is very hard to determine: The concerted boycott campaign which was part of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement that targeted Sabra Hummus in particular, and which had been started at several different universities in the US, beginning in 2010.
According to the Times of Israel December 2024 article, the “campaign against Sabra hummus started on the US West Coast 14 years ago, when anti-Israel activists began denouncing Sabra for donating food to the IDF Golani Brigade.
However, despite that campaign having “kicked into higher gear”… with “hundreds of supermarkets and other stores in North America and Europe” having had stickers denouncing Israel placed on tubs of Sabra Hummus, the ToI article insists that the BDS campaign which was carried on mostly on US college campuses was not a major factor in declining Sabra Hummus sales.
Instead, the Times of Israel article claims it was the March 2021 product recall that was the decisive factor in Sabra Hummus sales plummeting. According to the ToI article, “a salmonella contamination recall on products made at Sabra’s Virginia factory took a devastating toll on the brand, which lost half its market share in just one quarter.”
And yet – to make matters even more complicated, an article in still another publication suggested that, notwithstanding that March 2021 product recall – which also led to a complete shutdown of Sabra’s primary manufacturing plant in Virginia, sales began to bounce back in 2022!
In a December 2022 article in an online publication titled “Manufacturing Dive,” Sabra CEO Joey Bergstein is quoted as saying that the brand has been “‘consistently climbing back,’ and it has regained its No. 1 position in the hummus category, according to IRI data cited by Sabra. When it was missing from shelves, he said more than half of consumers decided not to buy hummus instead of switching to another brand. Those who did switch are coming back to Sabra, the IRI data showed, and the brand is taking back market share.
“‘When you stop production, you open the door for a competitor,’ Bergstein said. ‘We’ve been able to grow back in a relatively short period following that disruption, which I think speaks to the health of the brand.’”
In the final analysis, there is a combination of factors that have led to the disappearance of Sabra Hummus from store shelves – not, as I first thought, perhaps only in Winnipeg but, as it turned out, everywhere in Canada and, as I learned after reading that email from the PepsiCo representative – in the US as well.
There were multiple incidents of suspected contamination of Sabra products; there was the campaign that was part of the BDS movement to boycott Israeli products – especially Sabra products; and finally, there was the decision by major Canadian grocers to stop importing products from the US.
Although I did like Sabra Hummus, I can’t say that I’m heartbroken to learn of its disappearance. But it is sad to think that a product which had such an identifiably Israeli name is no longer available – even if that product had stopped being manufactured in Israel years ago.
One more note: In 2018 PepsiCo acquired another well known Israeli food company: SodaStream. SodaStream still has a plant in Israel although, again after coming under fire for having a plant on the West Bank, SodaStream closed that plant in 2015 and opened a new plant within the green line. Chalk that one up to a victory for the BDS movement. I wonder whether, in the future, we’ll learn more about how much damage the BDS movement really did cause Sabra Hummus. It still seems strange to me that a product which was, until quite recently, the dominant player in its field, has simply disappeared. It suggests to me that the BDS movement had quite a bit more impact than one might be willing to concede.
Features
Many Religious “Nones” Around the World Hold Spiritual Beliefs
But at lower rates than people who identify with a religion
| WASHINGTON, D.C. (Sept. 4, 2025) – Around the world, many people who do not identify with any religion – a population that has climbed rapidly in the recent past – nevertheless hold a variety of spiritual and religious beliefs, according to a Pew Research Center study of 22 countries with relatively large religiously unaffiliated populations. |
| In general, religiously unaffiliated people – sometimes called “nones” – are less likely to hold spiritual beliefs, less likely to engage in religious practices and more likely to take a skeptical view of religion’s impact on society than are Christians, Muslims and people who identify with other religions. But sizable percentages of religiously unaffiliated adults do hold some religious or spiritual beliefs. Here are some of the key findings of the study:Who are religious “nones”? “Nones” are adults who describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” In nearly all of the 22 countries analyzed in the study, the largest subgroup of “nones” is people who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” rather than those who identify as atheist or agnostic. For more information about these three subgroups, refer to the report’s overview. |
| Do “nones” hold religious beliefs or follow religious practices?In all 22 countries surveyed, about a fifth or more of “nones” believe in life after death. The shares who say there is definitely or probably an afterlife range from 19% of unaffiliated adults in Hungary to 65% in Peru. Large shares of “nones” in some countries believe that “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.” For instance, 61% of “nones” in Mexico and 65% in Brazil express this belief. Many religiously unaffiliated adults also express belief in God. This includes solid majorities of “nones” in South Africa (77%) and in several Latin American countries, such as Brazil (92%), Colombia (86%) and Chile (69%). By contrast, religiously unaffiliated adults in Europe and Australia are much less inclined to believe in God. Just 18% of “nones” in Australia, 10% in Sweden and 9% in Hungary are believers. Compared with the large percentages of “nones” who hold religious beliefs, smaller shares tend to engage in the religious practices asked about in the survey. |
| How do “nones” view religion’s impact on society?Many “nones” express negative views about religion’s influence on society. In 12 of the 22 countries studied, religiously unaffiliated adults are more likely to say religion encourages intolerancethan to say it encourages tolerance. In every country included in the analysis, at least half of “nones” say religion encourages superstitious thinking. Across the countries surveyed, a median of 53% say religion mostly hurts society, while a median of 38% say it mostly helps. |
| How important is religion to “nones”? Most religiously unaffiliated people feel that religion plays only a minor role in their lives. In half of the 22 countries analyzed, at least six-in-ten “nones” say religion is not at all important to them. In a few countries, however, about half or more of “nones” say religion is either somewhat or very important in their lives. This is the case in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and South Africa – possibly reflecting the prevalence in these countries of traditional African, Afro-Caribbean, or Indigenous and Indian religious beliefs and practices (even among people who don’t identify with any religion). |
| These are among the key findings of a new Pew Research Center analysis of 2023-24 surveys conducted in 22 countries with samples of religious “nones” that are large enough to analyze and report separately. The Center interviewed more than 34,000 respondents in the 22 countries, including more than 10,000 who are religiously unaffiliated. This analysis was produced by Pew Research Center as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation. |
| To read the report, click here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/09/04/many-religious-nones-around-the-world-hold-spiritual-beliefs/ |