Samuel D. Stabler, Hunter College | Shai M. Dromi, Harvard University
Keywords: Nones, irreligion, secularism, Sunday Assembly, moral repertoires, sociology of religion
Social scientists employ a diverse set of moral repertoires to justify their research as morally worthy. By moral repertoires, we mean the logics defining the type of social good research ought to produce (e.g., research that promotes civic equality; studies that give voice to underrepresented populations; work that demonstrates particular methodological or theoretical creativity; etc.). In our work, we overview debates on secularization in the sociology of religion as a field rife with moral repertoires, along with other fields. We claim that the recent research on nones actively worked to move beyond questions about whether religion will ultimately die out, and towards questions that appealed to broader social concerns of their times. As this research has matured – in part, as the result of work by thinkers at the Secularity and Non-Religious Research network – it has increasingly justified itself by framing non-religious believers as making an active spiritual decision, rather than simply opting out. As the research on non-religious reveals, new research domains utilize the diversity of justifications for research that circulate amongst scholars of religion to both enliven research on the new topics and challenge old antinomies.
Varieties of Un-religion: Secularists and Sunday Assemblers
The shifting scholarly perspective on the irreligious is partly the culmination of a generation of post-secular theorists who emphasized that existing secularization narratives neglected the content of secular beliefs. At the most abstract level, philosopher Charles Taylor[i] insisted that “subtraction stories”—accounts of secularization that envisioned the process as the gradual negation of religion, rather than an active pursuit of alternatives to religion –missed the meaty core of changing religious landscapes. According to Taylor, secular ideas were not simply based on a vacuous empiricism that triumphed in the face of religious challengers. Instead, the idea of the secular was itself a result of shifting attempts to make life within an immanent frame worth living.
Today’s non-religion scholars adopt this substantive approach to secularity by interrogating the activities of the nonreligious as meaningful in their own right. They highlight the distinct perspectives of the of avowedly secular – the atheists, self-described secular, and variety of civic minded non-religious groups like the Secular Coalition for America, which replicate the organizational and meanings structure of religious groups in the hopes of advancing secular lifestyles. This statistical minority has increasingly taken center stage in the scholarship. Researchers have emphasized how practices of making meaning without theological commitments allow groups to form and identities to be deepened. Research has not only adapted by analyzing the prevalence of these actively non-religious folks. As scholars have increasingly focused on their activities, the process of concept reconstruction has led to new types of arguments. These new arguments justify continued research on the non-religious as a worthy means to help foster the civic inclusion of the non-religious, to promote their accurate representation in research and media, and to celebrate their inventiveness.
In an influential essay, Quack defines this strain of nonreligious studies by highlighting its connection to existing religious structures. Arguing that “no matter how ‘religions’ is understood in a distinct study, a religious field is always surrounded by a religion-related field that is constituted by a diverse set of religion-nonreligious relation”. Quack draws on what we call the efficiency repertoire, which is a logic that defines concepts and research as justified when they accurately represent reality and account for empirical evidence with precision. Here, research is justified according to the idea that more empirical information will improve our understanding of the phenomenon.
Given the historical links between religion and politics, it’s unsurprising that research on secular political advocacy has also grown popular in the field. Here authors draw on the civic repertoire, which concerns itself explicitly with the study of social problems, the fight for equality, and various processes of social change. Examining the activist work of the Secular Coalition for America, Blankholm argues that the group’s polysemous definition of secularity in terms of the separation of church and state, secular public engagement, secular forms of governance, and secular identity lifestyles gives it key political advantages. Thus, the secular’s importance is not in the way it entails a loss of meaning over time, but rather in the new attachment to alternative structures of meaning it offers. The twin goals of civic activism in the name of the secular and accurate representation of secular people motivate this research.
While civic notions animate some secular people, other secular notions like those related to “wonder and goodness” also animate many non-religious people’s engagement and are notably central to the activities of the Sunday Assembly Movement. Started in 2013 in London by two comedians who “wanted to do something that was like church but totally secular and inclusive of all—no matter what they believed”, the group holds regular worship-like services on Sundays. Research on the Sunday Assembly Movement often draws on the creativity repertoire to justify itself, by emphasizing that the groups unique social practices force researchers to find ways to transcend old theoretical antinomies, generate novel concepts, and propel innovation across the field more generally.
Using ritual theory and ethnographic evidence of a Sunday Assembly’s changing activities, Frost claims the group has developed something like a “‘trial-and-error’ approach to ritual creation”, working through different elements of religious ritual in the hopes of finding experiences which produce ritual fusion. Rather than being weakened by this approach, Frost reports that, “the important takeaway from my findings is that for at least some nonreligious people, ritual and rationality can go hand-in-hand, and many find a rational approach to ritual creation more meaningful than religious rituals”. Here the representation of non-religious people accurately is not merely a scientific concern, but also an explicitly moral one about how the analyst limits’ their own creativity by insisting that ritual’s must be inherited from tradition instead of being actively made up by actors.
“Good without God”: Weird Sociology of Religion
In their weirdness – their commitments to be “Good without God” as respondents often say[ii] – the contemporary non-religious use a wide range of narratives about moral worthiness. The scholarship replicates this trend: as secular people have increasingly entered the public stage by a diverse means of social projects, the study of non-religion has flowered into a lush field of inquiry, rife with morally diverse understandings about its justification for researching these behaviors. In our book, we identify seven distinct repertoires that justify sociological research, with the point being that the diversity of distinct viewpoints enriches scholarship and helps advance social science.
Moreover, by amplifying the ambiguity (or ‘weirdness’) that results from a commitment to be “good without god” using religious tactics, the weird nones also help to paint a new vision for post-secular sociology. Rather than the tired questions about the potential demise of religion, the actively non-religious show that a sound sociology of religion works to map all the distinct ways that the traditions previously associated with religion are being transmuted into quasi-religious systems of social organization and meaning making. Exemplary in this regard is scholarship like Courtney Bender’s on New Age religious enthusiasts’ beliefs in past lives, which “place metaphysicals [non-believers] in multiple histories” and “bring to our [scholarly] attention the possible pleasures and terrors of living in conflicting temporalities”. Here, the scholarly study of religion draws attention to the way social actors participate in and are influenced by seemingly contradictory, or impossible happenings. Indeed, like many of the studies of weird nones, such research has much to teach scholars of religious life more general – when studying the sacred, the weirder the better.
Sam Stabler is a doctoral lecturer in the Sociology Department at Hunter College, CUNY and completed his PhD in Sociology at Yale University. His research examines how moral ideals shape, and are shaped by, conflicts surrounding the built environment, infrastructural development, and the management of religious diversity. By theorizing how moral landscapes are transformed into material settings, his research contributes to enduring debates in the sociology of religion, cultural sociology, and comparative-historical sociology. Beyond this, in three collaborative projects, he examines the moral implications of routine sociological debate, the links between humor and sociology, and the history of demographic research. His writing has appeared in Sociology of Religion, Demography, and Theory and Society.
Shai M. Dromi is Associate Senior Lecturer on Sociology at Harvard University. He is the author of Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2020) and Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2023, co-authored with Samuel D. Stabler). He is co-editor of the Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2 (Springer, 2023). His work has appeared in journals such as Theory & Society, Sociological Theory, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Rural Sociology. He publishes on religion, humanitarian aid, morality, organizations, and social knowledge production.
References
[i] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
[ii] Epstein, Greg M. Epstein, Good without God : what a billion nonreligious people do believe (1st ed. New York]: William Morrow, 2009).
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