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Americans do not necessarily abandon supernatural beliefs when they trust science. A study published in Social Forces in July 2026 found that people who still identify with religion while giving science and personal reasoning greater authority than religious institutions are more likely to endorse beliefs in ghosts, curses and related forms of non-Divine supernatural influence.
What the study found
Paul Froese, Isaiah King and Ruiqian Li analyzed responses from 1,812 U.S. adults in the 2025 Baylor Religion Survey, a nationally representative survey fielded early that year. The researchers compared respondents’ support for “secular rationalism” with their beliefs about six forms of supernatural causation that do not depend on a traditional God, while also measuring conventional miracle beliefs.
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The strongest difference appeared among people who said they believe in God. Those who agreed with secular-rationalist ideas were about twice as likely to lean toward what the researchers describe as “magic” as those who rejected those ideas.
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|---|---|---|---|
| People who believe in God | 40% | 19% | A 21-percentage-point difference in openness to non-Divine supernatural beliefs |
| People who attend religious services | 28% | 19% | A 9-percentage-point difference among service attenders |
The relationship disappeared among respondents who never attend services or who do not believe in God. That boundary is central: the result is not that every science-trusting person is unusually likely to believe in ghosts. It is concentrated among people who combine an ongoing religious connection with a more individual, science-oriented approach to authority.
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What “secular rationalism” meant in the survey
The researchers did not treat the phrase as a simple yes-or-no identity label. They built a measure from four views:
- Science is the only way to understand the world.
- Moral decisions should rely on reason rather than religious teaching.
- People should interpret spiritual matters for themselves.
- Religious authorities should not be the sole arbiters of truth.
This definition matters because it combines confidence in scientific or human reasoning with skepticism toward religious gatekeepers. A respondent could therefore value science, question official doctrine and still accept a ghost, curse or other personally interpreted spiritual claim.
Ghosts and curses are already common beliefs
The Baylor Religion Survey’s Wave VII results show that these ideas are not fringe positions in the U.S. sample. The 2025 survey reported the following levels of belief or experience:
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| Belief or experience | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Believe in ghosts | 49% |
| Believe in curses | 38% |
| Believe objects contain spirits | 31% |
| Have felt an evil presence | 41% |
| Perform a ritual or superstition to avoid evil | 31% |
The study also measured traditional miracle beliefs separately. That distinction lets the analysis ask whether a person rejects or accepts institutional religious authority while retaining supernatural explanations that are not specifically framed as acts of God.
What the numbers do—and do not—prove
This is an association, not a cause-and-effect finding
Survey responses can show that two characteristics occur together, but they cannot establish that trusting science causes someone to believe in ghosts or that church attendance produces paranormal beliefs. The study did not randomly assign people to religious or scientific viewpoints, and it does not show which commitment came first.
The word “magic” covers several beliefs
Respondents were compared across a group of non-Divine supernatural ideas, including ghosts, curses and communicating with the dead. They may not all use the word “magic” in the same way. Someone who believes a deceased relative can send a message is not necessarily expressing the same worldview as someone who fears a curse, so the headline percentage should be read as a composite measure rather than a single doctrine.
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The pattern is not universal among religious Americans
The elevated figure was found among God-believers and, more modestly, among people who attend services. It was not present among people who never attend services or people who do not believe in God. The evidence therefore supports a specific combination of commitments, not a general rule about atheists, churchgoers or scientists.
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Why the authors say institutional religion can decline while supernatural belief persists
The authors summarize their broader argument with the sentence, “Institutional secularization does not necessitate a secular public.” In their interpretation, weakening trust in religious institutions can move spiritual authority toward individuals rather than eliminate spiritual thinking altogether.
Under that model, a person may accept scientific explanations for physical events, prefer reason in ethical decisions and interpret religious teaching independently, yet reserve room for experiences or claims that science does not settle for them. The study identifies this coexistence in survey data; it does not determine whether respondents see these beliefs as literal, symbolic, cultural or uncertain.
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How the finding fits wider U.S. surveys
Other national surveys point to broad public openness to unseen forces, although their questions and field dates differ and they are not replications of the Baylor analysis.
| Survey | Finding | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| Pew Research Center, 2023 | 65% of U.S. adults said other spirits or unseen spiritual forces exist; 14% said they do not, and roughly one-fifth were unsure. | Shows that belief in unseen forces is widespread, using wording different from Baylor’s ghost and curse questions. |
| Pew Research Center, 2023 | 74% said there are some things science cannot possibly explain; 25% said science can explain everything, even if people do not yet understand how. | Measures views about science’s limits, not paranormal belief directly. |
| Gallup paranormal poll | 39% said they believe in ghosts, with lower paranormal openness among weekly churchgoers than among infrequent attenders. | Not a direct contradiction: question wording, dates and attendance categories differ from the Baylor study. |
These differences illustrate why survey design matters. A question about “spirits,” “ghosts,” “magic” or the limits of science can produce different totals, even when the underlying population is the same.
What remains unknown
- The analysis does not show whether secular-rationalist views lead to supernatural beliefs, or whether people who already hold those beliefs become more independent of religious institutions.
- It does not establish how stable these combinations of beliefs are over time.
- It cannot show why a particular respondent accepts a curse, ghost or spiritual presence.
- The Baylor Wave VII page says the survey was fielded in early 2025 and that the data will be available in 2027. The 2026 article reports an analysis now, but readers should not assume the full microdata are already public.
The clearest conclusion is therefore limited but important: among Americans who retain a religious connection, greater reliance on science and personal reasoning can coexist with—and in this study was associated with—higher reported belief in non-Divine supernatural forces. Trusting science and believing in ghosts are not mutually exclusive categories in the survey data.
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