The Nonreligious

Abstract

There are now more nonreligious people than ever before. The number of secular men and women has dramatically increased over the past several decades in Europe, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. But what do we really know about secular men and women? This book provides as thorough and empirically grounded an answer as possible. This book offers a summation and analytical discussion of existing social scientific research on the nonreligious, and it sharpens and improves upon existing conceptual frameworks, theoretical typologies, and empirical trajectories. While many books concerning secularism are either polemical rants critiquing religion, or personal life stories/memoirs of apostates who rejected their religion, or abstract philosophical explorations of theology and antitheology, this book is something altogether different: an empirically based, research-based, data-based overview of the social science of secularity. More and more social scientists have begun taking secularity seriously as a subject of study in its own right, and conceptual as well as empirical research on the nonreligious within sociology, psychology, and anthropology has been rapidly increasing and diversifying in recent years.

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