The Nonreligious ─ Understanding Secular People and Societies

The number of non-religious men and women has increased dramatically over the past several decades. Yet scholarship on the non-religious is severely lacking. In response to this critical gap in knowledge,The Nonreligious provides a comprehensive summation and analytical discussion of existing social scientific research on the non-religious. The authors present a thorough overview of existing research, while also drawing on ongoing research and positing ways to improve upon our current understanding of this growing population.

The findings in this book stand out against the corpus of secular writing, which is comprised primarily of polemical rants critiquing religion, personal life-stories/memoirs of former believers, or abstract philosophical explorations of theology and anti-theology. By offering the first research- and data-based conclusions about the non-religious, this book will be an invaluable source of information and a foundation for further scholarship. Written in clear, jargon-free language that will appeal to the increasingly interested general readers, this book provides an unbiased, thorough account of all relevant existing scholarship within the social sciences that bears on the lived experience of the non-religious.

Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and the founding chair of the secular studies program at Pitzer College. He is the author of several books, includingLiving the Secular Life (Penguin, forthcoming), Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (Oxford, 2011), andSociety Without God (NYU, 2008). He teaches courses on secularity, religion, and social theory, and his research focuses on various aspects of secular identity and culture.

Luke Galen is a professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University. He teaches in the field of psychology, specializing in the psychology of religion. He is also a co-host of the podcast "Reasonable Doubts". His research interests include: Religious and secular social cognition, psychological well-being, morality and prosociality, and the social perception of nonreligious individuals.

Frank L. Pasquale is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on individual and institutional forms of secularity and the role of the religious-secular construct in the world. His work has appeared inThe Oxford Handbook of Atheism (Oxford University Press, 2013), Atheism and Secularity (Praeger, 2010), Secularism and Science in the 21st Century (ISSSC, 2008),Secularity and Secularism (ISSSC, 2007), the Archive for the Psychology of Religion, and elsewhere.