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.