“Nonreligion, ironically, shows us why it’s so important to take religion apart if we’re going to understand it. To talk coherently about the nonreligious, we need to know what they aren’t. According to the latest surveys, around a third of Americans have no religious affiliation. They do not belong religiously. But those same surveys show us that many of the religiously unaffiliated believe or behave religiously. They believe in God or a higher power, for example, or they pray daily or weekly. If someone believes in God and prays daily but doesn’t claim to be part of a religion, then are they nonreligious? There are a lot of people like this; they’re normal. What do we call them?

Atheists are even weirder. Surely, they’re not religious – right? But then, some are. Members of the Ethical Culture movement, often called Ethical Humanists, meet on Sundays to hear sermon-like speeches called Platforms. They have Sunday Schools where their children learn nonreligious ethics. Many, but not all, Ethical Humanists in the US consider themselves religious, and US courts and the IRS recognise their communities as religious. They belong and maybe behave religiously, but they do not believe religiously since they don’t believe in God or the supernatural.

Are Ethical Humanists religious or nonreligious? It’s hard to say. But if we don’t take religion apart – if we don’t disaggregate it into belief, behaviour and belonging – we can’t even understand why it’s hard to say. We can’t tell the difference between the religiously unaffiliated and atheists. We can talk vaguely about the nonreligious or religious decline, but we have no idea what’s actually going on with religion.”

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“The irony of “nonbelievers” having beliefs is not lost on us. We retain the use of “nonbelievers” throughout this essay to emphasize this irony while refusing a break from the existing literature and prevailing cultural trends. We are not asking researchers or everyday people to adopt new terms, nor do we want to elide valuable distinctions under a single umbrella term. We are arguing for a clearer understanding of the terms we already use. Ultimately, it is good news for scholars of religion and nonreligion that self-identified “atheists” and “agnostics” are likely to hold distinctive beliefs beyond the mere negative because it means that decades of research has captured far more than researchers may have intended.

It is also good news that there are certain beliefs that most nonbelievers are likely to hold because it affirms that “atheist” and “agnostic” are not hodge-podge surplus categories like the “religiously unaffiliated” are a distinct social group that surveys on religion have been right to include and that scholars have been bounding and studying with good reason.”

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“If we tell their story another way, nonbelievers become a very strange thing: a disavowed tradition in American thought that looks a lot like a religious tradition of its own. Nonbelievers appear to be a believing minority whose beliefs are so antithetical to the hegemonic Christian culture that they are illegible as beliefs and can only be seen as the antithesis of belief itself. Perhaps it’s time we gave atheists a place in the pantheon.”

Read the full article here.