Browsing by Subject "Nonreligion"
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Item Modern But Not Meaningless: Nonreligious Cultures and Communities In the United States(2020-06) Frost, JacquiWe are currently seeing an unprecedented growth in the number of nonreligious people in the United States. However, our sociological understandings of this growing demographic have been limited by dominant cultural and social science narratives that presume the loss of religion comes with a detrimental loss of certainty, meaning, and community. Much of the social scientific theorizing about the consequences of modernization and secularization is based in a “subtraction story” – a story of moving away from stable social identities, communities, and religious beliefs, and moving toward a hollow and meaningless secular modernity that leaves individuals feeling uncertain, anomic, and socially isolated. In this dissertation, I draw on three years of ethnographic research with a network of atheist churches called The Sunday Assembly to disrupt this narrative of loss, revealing the meaningful cultures and communities that nonreligious people are constructing without religion. Rather than simply the absence of religious beliefs and practices, atheist churches signal the presence of substantive nonreligious beliefs and practices. And I show how practice-oriented investigations of these nonreligious cultures and communities can shed new light on core sociological questions about social change and meaning-making in contemporary social life. Instead of a demographic burdened by a detrimental loss of certainty, community, and meaning, I found a rich nonreligious field full of politicized certainty and meaningful uncertainty, contested conceptions and practices of community, and a meaning-filled discourse of “scientific spirituality” that combines the language of spirituality and transcendence with commitments to secular worldviews and scientific rationalism. I use the case of the Sunday Assembly to show how these nonreligious meaning systems are constructed, contextual, and contested.Item No Church in the Wild: The Politics of American Nonreligion(2019-07) Stewart, EvanThe number of Americans with no religious identification has grown to nearly a quarter of the population in 2018. What are the political implications of this cultural change? Current research views religious disaffiliation as an example of either backlash to the religious right (expecting the unaffiliated to be engaged partisans) or drift from institutions (expecting them to be disengaged from politics). I address this debate with three studies that examine political engagement, opinion formation, and organized advocacy among the nonreligious. Across all three studies, theories from cultural sociology suggest that simple categorical measures of nonreligious identity hide substantive differences in how people engage nonreligion in their personal lives (through low religious practice, non-belief, and nonreligious identification) and in public life (through opposition to religious authority in the public sphere). For engagement, new analysis with existing survey data with validated voter turnout shows that classic measures of low church attendance associate with higher odds of turnout among unaffiliated respondents. For opinion, analysis of original survey data shows that measures of public nonreligion are more closely associated with progressive political views than measures of personal nonreligion. For advocacy, analysis of tax and lobbying records of forty nonreligious organizations shows how a focus on personal nonreligious identities creates a closed network of groups with a more narrow agenda than organizations lobbying for the separation of church and state. By focusing on the substantive differences between cultural repertoires of personal and public nonreligion, I highlight how public religious considerations are an important explanatory factor in political life. Slippage between these repertoires can explain why the nonreligious appear to have large political potential, but limited political impact.