Much of the political research on secularism and politics is devoted to the nonreligious (also known as the “nones”) population. This “nonreligious” category is a sometimes catch-all grouping of people who have various identities that run across a range of possibilities: anti-religion, anti-god, anti-clerical, or even apathetic to religion. In their landmark report American Nones: The Profile of the No-Religion Population, Kosmin et al. analyzed the changes in religious affiliation among Americans between 1990 and 2008.1 Their research demonstrated that in just one generation the percentage of Americans claiming no particular religious affiliation nearly doubled. The researchers compared the results of two large nationally representative surveys: the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification and the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey. The 1990 NSRI interviewed 100,000 US adults and found that less than one in ten (8 percent) or 14 million said they had no religious affiliation. The 2008 ARIS consisted of 54,000 interviews with US adults, by then the number of nonreligious increased to 34 million or 15 percent of the population. The growth of the group continues today. According to the American Values, a project of PRRI (formerly Public Religion Research Institute), 26 percent of American adults identify with no religion. 2 The growth of the “nones,” again, as the nonreligious are colloquially called, is what drives interest in the cohort. Research from the Pew Research Center and PRRI shows that the nones are very young, with a sizable portion of the group being under the age of 30.3 Aside from their youth, nones are also …

Public opinion research shows that young secular Americans have many areas of agreement on political issues that go beyond matters of church and state. In this chapter, I argue that the secular movement needs to focus on policies beyond church-state issues to become a salient political player in the United States. Instead, the movement must show concern for human suffering and propose ideas for improving people’s lives. This shift in focus may be possible thanks to the growth of secularism among young people, especially people of color and women, who show strong preferences for policy matters that go beyond the traditional secular concerns. The movement’s leadership must harness the energy of the current secular population boom to make itself relevant in American politics.

Secularity and nonreligion refer to categories of religious disaffiliation. Secularity means that individuals, as opposed to the state (secularism), are not religious, while nonreligious (or nones) is a term commonly used to refer to this cohort in the literature and the press (Kosmin and Keysar 2007). The nonreligious population is defined by its preference of religion in censuses and surveys. In their case, they state a preference for no particular religion (people who do not believe in God or doubt the existence of God, atheists and agnostics) are also included in this definition.