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Religion and Prosociality? The Volunteerism of Canadian Atheists

David Speed, University of New Brunswick

Keywords: volunteering, civic engagement, atheism, nonreligion, comparative religion, Canada

If I may don my Hat of Mild Hyperbole for a moment: one of the discussed virtues of religion is that it is steeped in prosociality. Give a gal or fella a religious text, and lo and behold they are out there making society a better place. In contrast, those folks who aren’t on the religion train are, perhaps, less motivated to make the world a better place. At least, this is the common refrain from clergy, pundits, politicians, and surprisingly, some researchers. There are several valid scientific studies that show the religious are more prosocial than the nonreligious. In particular, this has been studied extensively in the context of volunteerism, that is, donating your time to help others.

Now, as a somewhat skeptical person, I have always felt that religion as a driver of volunteerism was … well, a bit lazy. Yeah, a lot of religious citizens may volunteer their time and effort, but the proffered explanation seemed too neat. Last year, Penny Edgell and I investigated patterns of volunteering in Canadians, and how different atheists were in this regard. Fortunately, Statistics Canada collects tons of data on this topic and we were fortunate enough to be able to access it. Our questions were pretty simple: 1). Do the religious volunteer more than atheists? and 2). Why might religion be connected with volunteerism at all?

Science is all about mechanisms; what is the reason that X and Y are related? For example, it’s all well and good that Newton noticed the apple falling toward the ground, but his real contribution was in explaining the mechanism for this behaviour (i.e., gravity). In a similar vein, it’s all well and good that the religious may volunteer more, but why is this the case? Broadly speaking, there were two contenders to account for this relationship. While I describe these mechanisms as two separate entities, I will say up front that they are not an exhaustive or exclusive list of why religion and volunteering are connected.

The first mechanism to explain the relationship between religion and volunteering is that people who are religious are more prosocial by their very involvement in religion. To put it a bit reductively: once you accept tenets X, Y, and Z, you now want to be a more prosocial person. Let’s call this the inclination explanation; people who are religious want to behave in a prosocial manner. The second mechanism was that people who are religious have more opportunities to volunteer. Once you do activities A, B, and C, you find yourself inundated with chances to help out your fellow human. Again, to put it a bit reductively: once you join a religious organization there are opportunities galore to be more prosocial. Let’s call this the opportunity explanation.

Our study had a simple logic: if religion is associated with greater prosociality, then individuals who are super-duper-not-religious should report lower levels of volunteerism than people who are more religious. Atheists would be non-volunteers because they should, in theory, lack inclination and opportunity. But we wanted to know if it was specifically inclination or opportunity that drive volunteering. Fortunately, the data we had access to addressed prayer and religious attendance. Using this information, we reasoned that if it was inclination driving the relationship, then people who reported higher levels of prayer should volunteer more. Similarly, if opportunity was driving the relationship, then we would expect religious individuals who frequently attended religious services would volunteer more.

Our results were a mixture of the expected and unexpected. To our shock, in less complicated models, atheists out-volunteered most religious groups. In other words, the average atheist was more likely to volunteer than the average religious individual. However, this effect transformed slightly when we modelled prayer and religious attendance. The gist of our findings is that religious affiliation and religious behaviours influence volunteering behaviours together.

When we compared atheists who never pray to religious individuals who never pray, there were few differences between the groups. When we compared atheists who never pray to religious individuals who pray daily, there were also few differences between the groups. Recall that while prayer was our measure of the inclination explanation, private religious activity seemingly had little impact on volunteerism. When we compared atheists who never go to church to religious individuals who never go to church, atheists volunteered more than several groups. However, when we compared atheists who never go to church to religious individuals who go to church weekly, atheists are out-volunteered by several groups. Recall that religious attendance was our measure of the opportunity explanation, and it looks pretty reasonable as a mechanism. Basically, differences in volunteerism emerge when religious individuals report higher levels of religious social activities, not higher levels of religious non-social activities. As the youth say, opportunity explanation FTW.

But wait, there’s more! When we compared the amount of time spent volunteering once an individual reported volunteering, there weren’t a lot of differences between atheists and others. Once nonbelievers started volunteering, they ostensibly approached it with the same gusto as believers did. Finally, we teased apart what activities the religious were volunteering for, and then filtered out individuals who only volunteered in a religious context (and no other contexts). In this case, we found that the differences between atheists and non-atheists volunteering evaporated. So the religious do volunteer more than atheists, but they are volunteering in a narrow religious context.

Penny made the point that there are social activities that help to connect different elements of society (bridging social capital) and there are social activities that help to reinforce the group that an individual is a part of (bonding social capital). Congregants aren’t finishing Sunday service and sprinting to sign up for the PTA; they are finishing Sunday service and then volunteering at (presumably) their religious organization. Granted, religious organizations may do public outreach that benefit everyone, but it’s also possible that the people who benefit the most from religious people volunteering are other religious individuals.

The nonreligious have been maligned for their disinterest in prosociality. Given the results of our study, this seems pretty unfair. Atheists likely aren’t a part of an organization that calls for volunteers, which means that they are disadvantaged in partaking in altruistic behaviours. There needs to be a greater interest in interrogating how atheists see themselves as a part of society, because the status quo is in dire need of help.

Dr. David Speed (BA, Brock University, 2008; MASP, MUN, 2011; PhD, MUN, 2015) is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of Psychology. David’s specialization is in the topic of atheism and nonreligion and how they relate to health and well-being. To date, David has authored over a dozen studies addressing nonreligion, which included the largest study of Canadian atheists in the literature. David a co-editor of Secularism & Nonreligion, which is an academic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge of ‘the secular’. He teaches a variety of classes including graduate statistics, research methods, and is the coordinator of the Master’s of Applied Psychology, Research, and Evaluation program. When David isn’t researching, teaching, or groaning at the amount of administrative work he must perform, he enjoys spending time with his wife and three children.

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Event Report: 2024 NSRN Lecture

In this post, Chris Miller reports on the NSRN’s 2024 Annual Virtual Lecture, presented by Dr. Donovan Schaefer and moderated by NSRN President Dr. Atko Remmel on May 8, 2024. Chris summarizes Schaefer’s lecture, highlighting his argument of how disenchantment has been misunderstood, and how scholars can move forward in their work with a renewed understanding of this concept.

On 8 May 2024, the NSRN welcomed Dr. Donovan Schaefer (University of Pennsylvania) to deliver the 2024 NSRN Annual Lecture, titled “The Re-Disenchantment of the World: Thinking, Feeling, and Secularity.”This lecturebuilt upon ideas developed in two of his previous monographs: Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (2015) and Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism After Darwin (2022) to argue that we have been looking at disenchantment ‘inside out.’

Schaefer began with an outline of what he calls the ‘common sense’ of disenchantment. This approach to disenchantment posits a fundamental break in human history. Simply, it claims we humans used to live in an enchanted world, and now we don’t. This shift was triggered by the advancement of science, leading to a state of disenchantment as a new epistemic and existential condition.

To problematize this simplistic understanding, Schaefer offered a close reading of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. He explained that this book’s enduring resonance is the concept of biopolitics, or how power functions through control of human bodies. However, since Foucault only turns to this idea in the volume’s final pages, Schaefer suggests that we are better served by a wider focus on the book as a whole.

Schaefer drew attention to the book’s original French subtitle: La volonté de savoir, or ‘Will to Knowledge.’ In a reference to Nietzsche, Foucault highlights the will to knowledge as something that manifests in our impulses, or an intellectual conscience that drives us forward. Schaefer argues that rather than trying to understand why (or if) humans are sexually repressed, Foucault is concerned with the emotional dimension of this question. Paraphrasing Foucault, Schaefer asked why we say, with so much certainty, that we are repressed. The answer, Schaefer suggests, is that there is an emotional dimension to posing such a question and feeling a sense of power by defying one’s supposed condition.

Schaefer also turned to Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus, suggesting that we should pay attention to the role of pleasure in this relationship. Schaefer argues that there is a sense of pleasure which flows through the intellectual response to thinking about science. That is, there is a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure simply through the discourse and science of sex. Rather than view pleasure and knowledge in opposition to each other, therefore, Schaefer suggests that we see a matrix of positions of Power-Knowledge-Pleasure, which bodies can occupy in a range of ways.

In addition to his focus on Foucault, Schaefer analyzed Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation. Before diving into a close reading, Schaefer first gestures to the work of Jason Ā Josephson-Storm, who also pushed back against the ‘common sense’ version of disenchantment, and proposed the idea of ‘secular enchantment,’ which holds that science does not necessarily negate emotion or enchantment but that these forces actually co-exist. Diverging from Josephson-Storm, and other thinkers working with ‘secular enchantment,’ Schaefer argues that secular enchantment is disenchantment, at least in the way Weber originally intended.

Turning to Weber, Schaefer first highlighted the definition of disenchantment in the original German, which translates more closely to ‘de-magification’ or removing magic from the world. This describes a state of the world in which there is no part of the world that is not understood. Schaefer clarifies that it does not mean that everything is understood, by everyone and at present. He offered the example of the average person who might not understand how their phone works. While this technology’s inner workings are unknown to many individuals, one could theoretically read enough books and figure it out, just as the many scientists who worked on that technology have done.

Schaefer reflected on a passage in which Weber describes a student asking him how he might attain the post of academic that he so strongly desires. Weber squashes this dream quickly, telling the student to not aim for it, as there are many aspects of academic life which are undesirable (little pay, lack of respect, so on). However, Weber clarifies that there are some who see science as a passion or intoxication. These people, Weber says, have the calling for science, and they are the ones who should pursue this vocation. For these people, science is saturated with feeling and passion, not bereft of it. Schaefer argues that science draws from the same reservoirs of inspiration as art, as one is driven by a profound passion to understand the surrounding world. Linking back to Foucault, Schaefer explained that to Weber, disenchantment represents the affective dimension of pursuing knowledge. Schaefer concluded that whatever the secular is, it has something to do with the advancement of knowledge, and he calls on scholars to attend to new configurations of emotional formation. Just as Foucault asks why we are obsessed with asking why we’re oppressed, Schaefer asks why we are obsessed with asking why we’re disenchanted, or with so loudly claiming that we’re no longer enchanted. It is through asking and pursuing these new questions that we can better understand the meanings of these formative works by Foucault and Weber, in addition to paying more critical attention to the affective contours of knowledge and science.

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Nonreligious Afterlife? Death Cafés and Emerging Understandings of Death

Chris Miller, University of Ottawa

Keywords: death and dying, nonreligion, Death Café, afterlife

Religion has traditionally been a major influence on how people and societies make sense of death. Questions such as why people die, what happens after we die, and what rituals should we perform to mark someone’s death were typically answered by religious authorities. As religion declines, people’s understandings of and responses to death undergoes shifts as well.

As one of the studies conducted by the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project, our research on Death Cafés explores changing conceptions of death and dying. Death Cafés are informal, pop-up events in which people (often strangers) gather to discuss death, dying, and related issues. Events take place in all manner of venues, from coffee shops and restaurants to libraries or churches. Attendees comprise a range of backgrounds, including people in the ‘death care’ field (funeral directors, hospice volunteers, and death doulas), as well as people interested in death for other reasons, whether they are facing a terminal diagnosis, caring for elder parents, or simply curious to explore the topic. Conversations at events flow freely and cover many topics, including navigating healthcare systems, complaining about the funeral industry, and reflecting on how to best remember loved ones.

To better understand these events and their attendees, our team conducted focus groups and interviews with religious and nonreligious individuals who have attended Death Cafés in Canada, the US, and the UK.[i] Although, like Death Cafés themselves, our research explores a range of topics, one common theme that emerged among participants was the afterlife. Lori G. Beaman and I recently explored such changing conceptions of the afterlife that emerge in these spaces. In what follows I will discuss our key findings, from which we identify four categories of ‘afterlife imaginaries’: cessation, energy, unknown, and transition.

Cessation

Death for some is seen as the end of human activity and consciousness. This reflects a concept in afterlife research that is often labelled extinction or annihilation, which was often framed as the default ‘secular’ or nonreligious outlook.[ii] Participants who maintain this outlook often referred to science, suggesting matter-of-factly that, as one participant stated, “when the brain stops working, it seems likely … that will be the end of my own personal experience.” While most of the participants within this category identified as atheist, there were also some religious believers who see death as a finite end.

Energy

Energy was by far the most popular category that we uncovered, but we encountered several different understandings of how people might continue as energy. Some referenced this in a purely scientific manner. Vanessa[iii] talked about the atoms in her body breaking down, then becoming “all of the things that I love, like waterfalls and sunsets.” Others referenced science indirectly, vaguely alluding to quantum physics and a general understanding that “energy never dies.” For others, energy connected to a more poetic outlook, believing that their energy will continue, in some form, to reverberate throughout the world.

Despite the range of perspectives this category includes, it is important to highlight the pervasiveness of the term. Energy was the exact language that many used, whether referencing scientific or spiritual understandings. This malleability may explain the term’s popularity. Considering all our participants attend Death Cafés, the common use of this term may also point towards a specific discourse that emerges in death positive spaces.

Unknown

Some are content with death being mysterious. These participants often defaulted to the idea that no one truly knows what happens after death, so it remains a mystery. While Terror Management Theory suggests that mortality can invoke fear (especially if one doesn’t find a comforting explanation, like heaven), some were “fascinated” or even “excited” about possible outcomes. These ranged from the continuation of human consciousness to complete cessation. Though open to many potentialities, these participants would ultimately resort back to saying they aren’t quite sure, and that they are okay with not knowing.

Transition

The final category we identify encompasses more definite visions of human consciousness carrying on. Some described traditional religious beliefs in an afterlife where they would reunite with loved ones. Others saw death as a transition to some new world, using such allegories as birth or the wardrobe to Narnia. Finally, some who had experienced near-death experiences spoke with certainty about what happens after death, namely, returning to a peaceful place they had already (briefly) experienced.

Conclusion

Each category we identify reveals an immanent understanding of death. Participants all see death as an important event, and they believe that many important things happen when death occurs. However, most do not see death as dependent on some transcendent or external power. Instead, the significant transformations that will occur are connected to the world here and now. Nature is particularly influential in how people understand death. This includes people like Vanessa, who sees her atoms breaking down into waterfalls and sunsets (or a less romantic possibility which she acknowledges: a parking lot). This also includes people like Abigail, who want a green burial so that their ‘energy’ can re-join the Earth. Finally, this includes participants who believe that consciousness will continue, and that one can experience continuing bonds with deceased relatives through the wind, water, or birds.             As religion declines and transforms, afterlife imaginaries also evolve. We do not seek to identify which categories or beliefs are religious, and which are nonreligious. Indeed, such an attempt would face the challenge that each of our four categories included both religious and nonreligious participants. By mapping the categories that people posit, we identify strong overlap among both religious and nonreligious people. The perspectives that support each outlook reflect a range of influences, including religion, science, literature, and popular culture. By exploring these imaginaries among people who attend Death Cafés, we also uncover new spaces in which people can explore and reflect on this major life event.

Chris Miller wishes to acknowledge that the research on which this post is based was conceptualized, collected, and analyzed in collaboration with Dr. Lori Beaman

Dr. Chris Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project at the University of Ottawa. Through projects that focus on Death Cafés, obituaries, and green burial, his work explores death, dying, and nonreligion. His broader research interests include New Religious Movements, and religion and popular culture

References

[i] At the time of writing, researchers working in Norway, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil have also begun exploring Death Cafés. The present reflections, however, are based only on data from participants in Canada. This research was conducted by a team led by Lori G. Beaman, and I would like to thank Hannah McKillop, Sohini Ganguly, Hinna Hussain, Edmundo Maza, and Mathilde Vanasse-Pelletier for their research assistance.

[ii] For studies that include this category, see for example Walker 2000; Cave 2015; DeSpelder and Strickland 2015; Haimila and Muraja 2021. While Haimila and Muraja note that their participants mainly endorse a view of annihilation, similar to our findings, many also allow for continuation in some form.

[iii] The names of all participants have been replaced by pseudonyms.

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Anti-Atheism as a New Focus for the Study of Nonreligion

Petra Klug, University of Bremen

Keywords: anti-atheism, relational approaches, discrimination of atheists, United States, blasphemy, apostasy

In recent years, the study of nonreligion has experienced significant growth. Following the novel works of scholars such as Colin Campbell, Lois Lee, and Johannes Quack, much research in this field has explored how the nonreligious relate to religion. But what about the other way around? How does religion relate to the nonreligious or to atheism? In this article, I will argue that religion has always defined itself through its demarcation from those who believe differently or not at all. Based on my book Anti-Atheist Nation (Routledge, 2023), I show that, in the US-American context, atheists are the ultimate outsiders, suffering from prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating.  

At least in monotheism, religion relies on drawing a boundary between a righteous in-group and an unrighteous out-group. This demarcation is already established in the sacred texts: Despite its teachings of love and kindness, the Bible contains passages that express animosity towards individuals deemed as God’s adversaries. Psalm 139: 19–24, for example, explicitly incites hatred: “O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil! Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.” The New Testament in Ephesians 4:17–19 describes the nonreligious—or Gentiles in Biblical language—as “darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart,” and it depicts them as insensitive, licentious, and “greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” The Quran describes the fate of the nonbelievers, or kuffar in Arabic, as a painful torment. According to Sura 4:56, “those who reject Our revelations” shall be sent to the fire to burn. “When their skins have been burned away, We shall replace them with new ones so that they may continue to feel the pain.”

For the religiously orthodox, the out-group includes everybody who deviates from their narrow dogma. But in religiously pluralistic settings, such as those in most liberal societies, atheists are often considered the ultimate outsiders to the religious in-group.[i] This is visible already in the language we use. The term atheism, from the Greek ‘a-‘ (without) and ‘theos’ (god), means godlessness. In ancient times, it was also used to describe wickedness. However, what is more intriguing than its negative connotation is that the term itself is formed as a negation: the prefix ‘a-‘ denotes a lack or denial. Thus, the word atheism alone characterizes the phenomenon as a deviation from the norm, simultaneously defining theism as normative. This grammatical structure is mirrored in the terms infidelity, impiety, and irreverence, which are negations of fidelity, piety, and reverence, dis- or unbelief, which negate belief, as well as in irreligion, which indicates a lack or neglect of religion. And this might even be reproduced in the term nonreligion although it was introduced explicitly as a more neutral alternative.

So far there has been little systematic attention to this phenomenon, which is best described as anti-atheism. Anti-atheism is a disdain for people who do not believe in God.[ii] It targets not only actual atheists, i.e., people who consider themselves godless, but also those accused of godlessness because they adhere to a different religion.[iii] Thus, anti-atheism is potentially directed against everyone. Furthermore, it can refer to both belief and the non-observance of religious norms in practice. Since religion manifests and reproduces power structures, anti-atheism also intersects with other forms of discrimination, such as racism and patriarchal gender norms.[iv]

Anti-atheism leads to persecution and discrimination against atheists worldwide. Some Islamic states even treat apostasy and blasphemy as a capital offense. In states that do not enforce such laws, fanatic believers sometimes punish atheists and those perceived to hurt religious feelings. But the persecution of atheism and blasphemy has also been a part of Christian countries, from the killing of other nations as heathens and pagans, the persecution of heretics, dissenters and so on.

Even the United States, which prides itself for its religious freedom, was established as an anti-atheist nation. This has led to the discrimination, exclusion, and demonization of atheists and other groups accused of godlessness, such as Native Americans, religious dissenters, Catholics, Jews, so-called witches, freethinkers, secularists, scientists, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, communists, homosexuals, hippies, people who seek or provide abortions, humanists and so on. And since Pat Robertson’s book New World Order[v] and Qanon, there are also specifically anti-atheist conspiracy theories. They depict atheists and secularists as powerful, hidden forces who persecute Christians, eradicate religious influence and want to govern the entire world.

But what, then, prompts this inclination toward fostering such division? Among the over 90 individuals and groups from different religious backgrounds I interviewed in California and the American South, I observed a tendency in which all the good things in the world are attributed to divine influence, while the bad things must originate from nonreligion. This resulted in a strict binary perspective: allegiance is either to divine will or, by default, to malevolence. This sharp division was first critically examined by Ludwig Feuerbach in the 19th century. He noted that believers project all their positive traits onto God, failing to recognize this projection. This externalization inversely casts perceived negative traits onto humans in general and the nonreligious in particular, branding them as morally corrupt, selfish, greedy, hardhearted, dishonest, vindictive, and prone to follow their sexual desires: as already symbolized by the doctrine of original sin.

The dilemma of reconciling a good, omnipotent, and omniscient deity with the presence of evil in the world—the classical problem of theodicy—persists. My interviewees often rationalized evil as part of God’s plan. So, as Karl Marx has already claimed, religion functions as “consolation and justification” of a world that cannot be justified. A common coping mechanism for the perceived withdrawal of divine favor, such as in the face of calamity, is to attribute blame to a scapegoat, a concept dating back to the Hebrew Bible’s idea of a collective covenant with God. In contemporary times, this blame is often cast upon atheists and secularists, accused of removing God from public life and education, thus inviting divine retribution.

This perspective is deeply entrenched in the psychocultural fabric of patriarchal societies, where, as Sigmund Freud observed, the concept of a monotheistic God is modeled on the paternal figure, offering protection and guidance in a world fraught with uncertainties. Atheism, by challenging this divine protectorate, becomes a threat not just to individual belief but to the societal order underpinned by such an authoritarian system.

My interviews also suggested that suppressed wishes and desires of the highly religious are projected onto atheists. Oftentimes, when believers fail to live up to their own restrictive religious norms, this failure is projected onto atheists, who are then portrayed as devoid of any kind of morality and accused of all kinds of atrocities, including murder. This leads to discrimination of atheists and exclusion even within their families. Many atheists therefore choose to remain in the closet.

So the persistence of anti-atheism not only shows the challenges faced by atheists in asserting equal rights, it also highlights the responsibility of religious studies scholars to analyze the ways in which atheism and secularism have been marginalized in academic discourse.

Dr. Petra Klug is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bremen, Germany, and has served as a Guest Professor for the Critical Theory of Society at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, Germany. She is the author of “Anti-Atheist Nation: Religion and Secularism in the United States,” published by Routledge in 2023. Her work focuses on religion, nonreligion, gender relations, human rights, climate change, and Critical Theory.

References

[i] Petra Klug, Anti-Atheist Nation: Religion and Secularism in the United States (New York, London: Routledge, 2023), 9.

[ii] Kenneth Sheppard, Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England 1580–1720: The Atheist Answered and His Error Confuted (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015), 4.

[iii] Martin E. Marty, The Infidel: Freethought and American Religion (Whitefish: Literary Licensing, 2012 [1961]).

[iv] Petra Klug, Anti-Atheist Nation: Religion and Secularism in the United States (New York, London: Routledge, 2023), 2.

[v] Pat Robertson, (1991). The new world order: It will change the way you live. Dallas: World Publishing.

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Weird Nones: The Moral Justifications for Religious Research on Non-Religious People

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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Religious diversity in the workplace: Exploring the perceptions of nonreligious and Catholic business people and entrepreneurs

Iriana Sartor

The economic field is commonly characterized as rational, technical and, therefore, secular, with its own dynamics that differentiate it from other fields. However, various works identify a large segment of business people associated with “conservative” religious communities, for example, and others highlight the growing importance of new age spiritualities within the business community. This indicates that the economic field is not entirely separate from other spheres of life, and therefore the circulation, production and transformation of (non)religious beliefs in the field can be explored.

I am interested in exploring the perceptions of nonreligious and Catholic business people and entrepreneurs in Córdoba (Argentina) about religious diversity in their workplaces. We conducted 14 in-depth interviews that asked participants to respond to two hypothetical situations.[1] Five of the participants identified themselves on the nonreligious spectrum (atheists, agnostics, non-believers with an interest in Buddhism), while the rest are Catholics, some of them belonging to organizations such as Opus Dei and Saint John Society. They work in various fields: technology, media, development, services, food, toys and cooperatives. This research is part of a broader project on the trajectories, beliefs and practices of business people that is based at the Catholic University of Córdoba.[2]

The individual or the company?

The first hypothetical situation raised during interviews consisted of an employee’s request to leave work for a religious holiday when they had to deliver goods or provide a service in a very short period of time. A dilemma emerges between the needs of the company and the needs of the worker; that is, between the pragmatic, the economic and the financial on the one hand, and human dignity and respect for the individual on the other (Porth, 1997).

We found that nonreligious participant responses were guided by an intention to prioritize their well-being. This was part of a personal vision that some described as “put people first,” which is actually intended to permeate their companies. In this regard, it was important for these interviewees to maintain a flexible work structure, as it seeks to create an environment in which employees feel comfortable working. Therefore, an employee’s ability to request time off for a religious holiday becomes a “necessity” along with other personal and/or family needs that may arise and require time off.

In contrast, for the five religious participants, their responses were mostly associated with respect for religious beliefs and its underlying importance. This approach is in line with a broader vision and values they demonstrated throughout their interviews. For example, Norberto[3]stated: “[Y]ou have to respect it because it is one of the transcendent values of the human being, so there is no discussion on that.” Danielsaid: “I am the first to respect religious holidays so I would never force anyone not to respect it.”

Four of the nine Catholic participants explained that some negotiation would be necessary for granting time off since productivity cannot be affected; that is, the individual can be benefited to the extent that the company can be benefited as well. Only one of five nonreligious respondents held this view, specifically for when the religious holiday is not an official public holiday.

Lastly, two participants, both self-identified agnostics, recognized that the company would perceive a benefit by granting the holiday, since it would have positive consequences on the employee’s work performance: “[T]his issue of believing has so much influence on the human being that he would come to the factory unhappy (…) I know that if I give him that day he will give it back to me with [economic] growth” (Ezequiel). In this way, “believing” or the emotional well-being of the individual in their terms, translates into profitability and productivity for the company in the medium/long term.

Few participants have experienced a situation like this hypothetical one proposed during interviews. One interviewee commented that his company respects Sabbath as a non-working day for Adventist employees; and another acknowledged that his work team was mostly atheist.

Religious and nonreligious expressions in high hierarchical positions

The second scenario involved the staging of a meeting with executives of the company or other companies, where one of the participants proposes a moment of prayer or meditation. The nonreligious participants expressed that they would respect the prayer, depending on the context and in some cases, as long as religion is not integrated as a central theme of the meeting; they commented that this scenario is more common when it comes to meetings with clients from other countries or executives from other companies. However, they are more open to the idea of meditation in the workplace. Two participants mentioned underlying benefits of meditation, stating it helps to detach from “daily baggage” and to be able to think “straight.”

Seven Catholic participants affirmed that they have encountered situations of this type, both within their companies, and with clients and executives from other companies. Some of them are part of business networks such as the Christian Association of Business Leaders (ACDE), where this kind of practice is common. In other cases, they seek out colleagues (usually of a higher position) with whom they share the same religion, and take advantage of certain work spaces to pray.

Norberto (Catholic), on the other hand, views religious practice as a private matter; such a situation would be inconceivable within his company. He states: “I would not do it to others because it seems to me that [one] should pray in his room and very much with God and there is no reason to go around publicly involving third parties in your moment of prayer.”

Conclusion

The link between beliefs and business or the economic field has been scarcely explored in the Argentine academic literature. The objective of this article is to make a small contribution by exploring the perspectives of 14 business people in the city of Córdoba about religious diversity in their workplaces, based on their answers to two hypothetical situations.

In general, a respectful attitude towards religion prevails in our interview data. Nonreligious business people conceive it as part of the individual’s emotional well-being, and Catholics as a “transcendental value.” A dilemma emerged from the first hypothetical situation that creates a tension between the individual and the company. However, two interviewees found a positive link between “believing” and profitability, so that such tension ceases to exist.

Regarding religious diversity, these business people did not perceive it as problematic, but its expressions and practices were not described as being promoted in their workspaces either. It seems that they limit their actions to the provisions of the Argentine regulations regarding employment, which are not very exhaustive. Nevertheless, the visibility of religious diversity in the workplace was described as being greater within hierarchical spaces and among religious peers.

[1] We have taken as a reference the work done by Stephen Porth in Religion, Spirituality and Business Decision-Making: A Preliminary Investigation, including our own adaptations. However, the participants’ answers are also based on concrete and real situations they have had in their companies/businesses.

[2] The research project “Transformations of lived religion in urban contexts of Latin America: the case of the business community in Córdoba” is directed by Hugo H. Rabbia, ph.D. (CONICET – IIPsi, UNC; UCC).

[3] All participant names have been changed to pseudonyms.

References

Porth, S. J. (1997). Religion, Spirituality and Business Decision-Making: A Preliminary Investigation. In Second International Symposium on Management Education and Catholic Social Teaching, Antwerp, Belgium. Retrieved May (Vol. 1,  p. 2006).

Iriana Sartor is a CONICET doctoral fellow in the Institute of Psychological Research (IIPsi) at the National University of Córdoba (UNC). Her research focuses on the role played by religious and non-religious organizations in the processes of assistance, reception and accompaniment of refugees and asylum seekers in Argentina. She is a research assistant for the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project, and also participates in the research project “Religious and business ethos: transnational experiences and practices in and from Latin America” at the Catholic University of Córdoba (UCC).

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Religious Change Not Religious Decline: An Excerpt from Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society

Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun

The 2023 NSRN Annual Lecture, co-hosted by the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project, featured a presentation by Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun on their recent book, Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (NYU Press, 2023). In the book’s first substantive chapter, the authors tackle secularization theory and the common criticism that the world is not experiencing religious decline, but simply changes in the way people do religion. They refer to this criticism as the ‘change not decline’ argument. In this post, the authors provide an excerpt from their book that outlines five counterpoints to the ‘change not decline’ argument. They also detail six criteria for ‘change not decline’ advocates who aim to demonstrate that secularization, or declining religiosity, is not taking place.

“First… secularization takes place at three levels—­macro, meso, and micro—­and secularization is best conceptualized as declining religious authority at all of these levels. When people ‘do religion’ outside of the framework of organized religion, that is a manifestation of secularization. Religious authority is not dictating how they are doing religion; individuals are dictating how they are doing religion. This is a decline in the authority of religion. Thus, invisible religion, private religion, spirituality outside of religion, spirituality but not religion, and lived religion are all manifestations of secularization, not arguments against it.

“Second, some [authors] have argued for very, very broad definitions of religion. McGuire (2008), for instance, gives the example of people gardening as a form of doing religion. If everything people do can be or is religion, then religion is everything. And if religion is everything, ipso facto, religion is also nothing, as the word ceases to meaningfully demarcate something in the world that is different from something else. By this line of reasoning, it would be possible to argue that the most strident atheist who actively works toward the destruction of organized religion, does not identify as religious or spiritual, and either rejects all notions of the supernatural or suspends belief toward them, is religious because they find the game Animal Crossing meditative and relaxing. Such a definition of religion does ‘violence to language,’ to quote Durkheim (1997). Let us be very clear here: Religion cannot encompass all things. Such an understanding of religion is meaningless.

“Third, while we find value in this kind of thick description of how people do religion, it is also important to continue to use traditional and consistent measures of religiosity over time. Without consistent measures of religiosity, it’s impossible to illustrate change. A simple example will help. Advocates of the ‘change not decline’ argument might suggest that measuring how often people attend religious services in Iceland fails to capture widespread belief in elves and the various actions people take to protect elves or to illustrate that they believe in elves (Warren 2017). Of course that is true. But that does not make measures of religious service attendance worthless or meaningless. Traditional measures of religious service attendance provide scholars with an indication of how often (or, more accurately in the case of Iceland, how seldom) people attend organized religious services and how that has changed over time. If we stop using such measures, there would be no way to illustrate that people’s behaviors have changed, increased, or declined.

“Fourth, the ‘change not decline’ argument has not, to date, been formulated as a theory. There is nothing theoretical about the claim that people customize religion to suit themselves and this is how they “do religion.” That is an empirical observation. But it is not a theory about religious change or about the relationship between modernization and religion or about rationalization, differentiation, or any other social processes. It’s literally just describing what people are doing. Descriptive research is perfectly fine. It is widespread in the natural sciences as people describe the behaviors of aardvarks or atoms or asteroids and should be more widespread in the social sciences. But lived religion, invisible religion, believing without belonging, and spirituality are not theories about religion but rather are descriptions of what people believe and do. To be considered theories, these ideas would have to explain the phenomena that they describe, and such explanation is lacking in this body of scholarship today.

“Fifth and finally, the ‘change not decline’ argument is a beautiful illustration of the ‘moving the goalposts’ fallacy. It would be apt to describe this as the ‘change not decline hydra.’ Whenever a scholar asserts that secularization is happening, the ‘change not decline’ crowd point to a new specific example of someone doing something lived religion/invisible religion/spiritual-­esque and assert that religiosity has just changed, not declined. When scholars like David Voas (2020), Steve Bruce (2018), or Isabella Kasselstrand (2021) muster evidence to challenge these claims, another head of the hydra pops up making the same claim over again but perhaps with a different example. It appears as though the ‘change not decline’ advocates continue moving the goalposts indefinitely when new evidence of religious decline is presented.”

After this passage, we suggest that it would be perfectly fine to argue that there is “change AND decline” rather than “change NOT decline.” We also suggest that the “change NOT decline” advocates should be held to very strict standards when making arguments that religiosity is not on the decline, including the following six criteria:

  1. They must demonstrate that whatever it is that they are observing can be considered religion or religious by well-­accepted definitions.
  2. Those claiming “change not decline” must establish that the function of these lived religion/spiritual activities is largely the same as the functions of traditional religion.
  3. Those claiming “change not decline” must demonstrate that these lived religion/spiritual practices are as meaningful to those engaged in them as were traditionally religious practices.
  4. Advocates of the “change not decline argument” must demonstrate that these lived religion/spirituality practices carry the same authoritative weight as did traditional, organized religion in decades past.
  5. Advocates of the “change not decline” argument must demonstrate that these lived religion/spiritual practices consume just as much physical or cognitive time as did traditionally religious practices.
  6. With the mountains of evidence that has accumulated in favor of secularization both from other scholars and what we include in the following chapters, the burden of proof has arguably shifted to the advocates of the “change not decline” argument. Those claiming that there is only change and not decline need to demonstrate that secularization is not occurring.

As scholars who embrace empirical evidence, we would be delighted to have someone present evidence that meets the above criteria. We would gladly change our minds and revise the next edition of our book in light of such evidence. Until that point, we will continue to suggest that the evidence for secularization is Beyond Doubt!

References:

Bruce, Steve. 2018. Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West. New York: Oxford University Press.

Durkheim, Emile. 1997. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Free Press. Pg. 66.

Kasselstrand, Isabella. 2021. “Secularization or Alternative Faith? Trends and Conceptions of Spirituality in Northern Europe.” Journal of Religion in Europe.

McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Voas, David. 2020. “Is the Secularization Research Programme Progressing? Debate on Jörg Stolz’s Article on Secularization Theories in the 21st Century: Ideas, Evidence, and Problems,” Social Compass 67(2): 323–­29.

Warren, Rich. 2017. “More than Half of Iceland Believes in Elves.” National Geographic, December 1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/believes-elves-exist-mythology.

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Persecution of the nonreligious: the handling of asylum claims based on nonreligion in the UK

By Lucy Potter

Signatories to the Refugee Convention have recognised persecution on the grounds of ‘religion’ is a basis for an asylum claim. However, anecdotal evidence from this project’s collaborative partner suggests there are significant misunderstandings in decision-making processes, for nonreligious asylum seekers who claim on the same grounds. Although the legalities and drawbacks of the British asylum system are generally well-documented, there are very few studies that address religion-based asylum claims in the UK.

The project will consider the legal landscape of nonreligious human rights, an analysis of the UK’s Home Office asylum determination policies, and apply a focus on the lived experience of nonreligious people who have sought asylum on these grounds. This project is funded by the University of Sheffield, conducted collaboratively with the leading human rights organisation – Humanists UK, in the hope that the outcomes of this project will lead to an improvement in the inclusion of the nonreligious in consistent asylum determination.

Through Humanists UK asylum advocacy work, this collaborative partner has unique access to the participants in this study. This PhD project will seek to capture in-depth and data-rich academic research. Underpinned by qualitative methodologies, it will undertake document analysis of key international law articles as well as the UK’S Home Office policies and guidance. It will also conduct interviews with individuals with experience of claiming asylum on these grounds, human rights advocates, and Home Office officials.

Freedom of Religion or Belief

Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) is a fundamental human right, enshrined in international law under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Yet, individuals and communities in many parts of the world experience discrimination and marginalisation due to the beliefs they hold. A range of identities can have their right to FoRB undermined such as the Baha’i religious minority suffering grave persecution in Iran. The limiting of access to justice, adequate food, housing and state-sponsored persecution against members of the Falun Gong in China. Women converts from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan face house arrest, sexual abuse, violence and forced marriage.

As the above examples illustrate, current research surrounding asylum cases submitted under religious persecution are largely considered to be derived from religious minorities and conversion. Absent from these accounts, are how nonreligious beliefs may also be a basis for a religion-based asylum claim. Nonreligious people in particular are believed to be facing an increasing threat to their right of FoRB, yet they are notably overlooked in academic research.

To pick a few examples, in a report by the UK’S All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief (APPG for FoRB), in Egypt several prominent atheists and agnostics have been arrested and convicted for their beliefs; the expression of  nonreligious  beliefs in Iran are deemed virtually impossible due to intense social stigma; and in Iraq the  nonreligious  are not able to formally identify their beliefs on national ID cards.

In 2022, over 70% of the world’s population reside in countries which severely discriminate against the nonreligious, as reported by Humanists International. The previous Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Dr Ahmed Shaheed stated, ‘In my observations, humanists, when they are attacked, are attacked more viciously and brutally than in other cases.’

What’s more, is that 13 countries hold the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy, 40 more impose prison sentences. Plus, there are extrajudicial murders in several more, such as in Bangladesh and India.

Nonreligion

The number of people identifying as nonreligious is thought to be increasing. In 2010, the PEW Research Center surveyed 1.1 billion religiously unaffiliated people around the world, this made the unaffiliated the third largest religious group globally, following Christians and Muslims. Although, thorough global data is lacking and under-representative due to some states restricting individuals from identifying this way.

The nonreligious is a complex group consisting of a multitude of identities ranging from atheists to freethinkers and humanists. Though they hold different beliefs, they all share a profound experience of discrimination and marginalisation in many different parts of the world. Ranging from widespread distrust of atheists in the US (Gervais, Shariff, and Norenzayan 2011), being viewed as a threat to society and potentially dangerous (Beaman, Steele, and Pringnitz 2018), to deliberate prevention of the ability to express their nonreligious beliefs in society.

The British Asylum System

Due to the threat of persecution, some individuals seek asylum in the UK. However, there are significant misunderstandings of assessing religion-based asylum claims from nonreligious applicants in the British asylum system. This research will work closely with Humanists UK to draw on their work supporting nonreligious asylum claims. They state, ‘the Home Office often does not treat the nonreligious  as a distinct belief group with needs that are different to persecuted religious minorities.’  Nonreligious people seeking asylum in the UK are under-researched and there are no official statistics collected by the UK’s Home Office.

The first potential barrier faced by a nonreligious person seeking asylum comes from choosing a ground for asylum. Concerningly, grounds for ‘nonreligion’ are absent from the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Thus, the nonreligious must choose the religion ground of the Convention. There are a series of problems with this. Including not being explicit that holding nonreligious beliefs is in fact a persecuted category. Therefore, this group tends to be overlooked in the British asylum system and hence religious persecution focuses on those from a religious minority or conversion. Due to this misperception, the questions in a credibility assessment are often inappropriate for the nonreligious.

For example, a notorious and well-cited case surrounds a Pakistani national who identifies as a humanist. Faced with death threats for his family after leaving Islam in Pakistan, Hamza bin Walayat made a claim for asylum in the UK. Strikingly, his original asylum claim was rejected by the Home Office because he was asked about his knowledge of Plato and Aristotle – neither of whom were humanists.

Additionally, the country-of-origin information utilised by the UK’s Home Office does not cover instances of religious persecution of the nonreligious at all  (with the exception of Bangladesh). In the UK, an assessment of an applicant’s credibility must be consistent with country policy and information notes. However, with a lack of well-established country guidance provided for nonreligious persecution, asylum claims often lead to refusal.

Recently*, the UK has seen the ‘Illegal Migration Bill’ proposed to create new legislation which will see anyone arriving in the UK through non-legal routes denied the right of entry. It is a new strategy put forward by government to act as a ‘deterrence’ policy, despite no evidence of these types of policies working in practice. Research does however demonstrate that enhancing borders leads people to make more dangerous journeys and increase risk of death; and making people more vulnerable to exploitation and forced labour. The Illegal Migration Bill may present new challenges to the nonreligious. It lists 57 countries that are ‘safe’ for people to be removed to, from the UK. In particular, the list includes Nigeria, which holds the death penalty for blasphemy.

There is no doubt more barriers and complications for nonreligious asylum applicants to navigate when seeking protection in the UK. The purpose of this PhD project is to seek out systematic inequalities within the asylum determination process which impede against those who hold nonreligious beliefs. This original contribution to academic research will seek to advance the field of nonreligion and migration studies.

Key words: Nonreligion, religious persecution, asylum, international human rights.

*The Illegal Migration Bill is now an Act of Parliament (law) after receiving Royal Assent on 20th July.

References

Beaman, Lori G., Cory Steele, and Keelin Pringnitz. 2018. “The inclusion of nonreligion in religion and human rights.” Social Compass 65, no. 1 (January): 43-61. https://doi-org.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0037768617745480.

Gervais, Will M., Azim F. Shariff, and Ara Norenzayan. 2011. “Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101, no. 6 (December): 1189-1206. 10.1037/a0025882.

Lucy Potter is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the British asylum system and cases submitted under grounds of nonreligiosity. She is an aspiring migration scholar, interested in research which intersects with asylum and human rights. Lucy is the network assistant for the Migration Research Group and a teacher of classical sociological theory.  

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Religious Affiliation and Prejudice

By Nadia Beider

The relationship between religion and tolerance is unclear. Some studies report that certain aspects of religiosity, such as attendance and belief, are associated with prosocial behaviours and compassion. However, religious belonging is often associated with higher levels of prejudice, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia relative to those who do not identify with a religious tradition (Zuckerman 2009). The dichotomy between nones (who have no religious affiliation) and affiliates can be overly simplistic, especially as the size of the unaffiliated population increases apace. Given the importance of childhood religious socialization in determining subsequent religious, political and cultural orientations, distinguishing between disaffiliates, who were raised within a religious tradition and have since exited organized religion, and lifelong nones, who have never been affiliated, may give a clearer understanding of patterns of tolerance among religious nones and of the relationship between affiliation and prejudice.

Using data from the European Values Study, it is possible to compare the attitudes of disaffiliates, lifelong nones, and Christians towards a range of religious, national, and ethnic minorities in contemporary Europe. The pattern that emerges from the quantitative data analysis indicates that being a disaffiliate is correlated with a more positive attitude towards members of minority groups. Disaffiliates, who left the religion in which they were raised, are less Islamophobic, antisemitic, xenophobic and racist than either lifelong nones or Christians. As most nones in Europe and North America are disaffiliates rather than lifelong nones, these finding suggest that the apparent lack of prejudice among nones is, in fact, a function of the specific characteristics of disaffiliates, rather than simply a lack of religious belonging. The results are particularly surprising as we might have expected disaffiliates to occupy a half-way house position between Christians and lifelong nones, as they do for indicators of religiosity such as belief and attendance, which show that disaffiliates retain elements of their childhood and current religious identity.

Why are disaffiliates so tolerant?

There are a number of possible explanations for the positive attitudes of disaffiliates towards Jews, Muslims, immigrants/foreign workers, and members of a different race. Aspects of religion such as faith promote prosocial, altruistic behaviours, while others, such as affiliation may increase the likelihood of viewing others negatively (Ben-Nun Bloom, Arikan, and Courtemanche 2105). It may, therefore, be necessary to conceptualize religion, and indeed nonreligion, as a complex set of elements, each of which may have different and even contradictory outcomes. Disaffiliates, especially those who retain elements of religious faith and teachings are uniquely placed to feel some of the positive effects of religious commitment, without the social identity that renders the affiliated more likely to express intolerance of members of other groups.

Social identities increase the distance between members of different groups, bringing about positive evaluations of in-group members and negative attitudes towards others. Identifying as Christian, for example, increases the odds of negative evaluations of non-Christians. This effect is particularly marked among Christians whose religious identity is cultural or national, rather than a result of deep spiritual connection. The data indicate the active Christians (defined as those who attend religious services at least once a month) tend to be more tolerant than nominal Christians, for whom religious belonging may be an expression of ethno-religious identity. This form of Christian nationalism takes its most extreme form in Russia, where the identification of the nation with the church is used to frame a discourse that promotes intolerance of a range of ‘others’ situated outside of the national collective.

Alternatively, we may need to look more closely at the factors motivating disaffiliation. Hout and Fisher (2002) have argued that it is the discomfort of liberally oriented Christians that explains the huge rise in disaffiliation in the USA in the last few decades. Although the political conditions in Europe differ from those in the USA, there is evidence for this kind of Christian nationalism in the context of the debate over the EU referendum in the UK (McAndrew 2020). In that case, we may be witnessing a realignment in which those who have liberal values are more likely to reject their religious identity. In contexts in which religion is perceived to be intolerant towards minorities (for example sexual minorities) and hostile to liberal positions on a range of issue such as divorce, contraception and abortion, some may cease to identify as affiliated in order to bring their religious and social attitudes into alignment. If a liberal orientation is truly a predictor of disaffiliation, that may explain the high levels of tolerance found among disaffiliates.

Whatever the reasons, the data indicate that there are significant differences between the attitudes of lifelong nones and disaffiliates towards religious, national, and ethnic minorities. These findings problematize the notion that affiliation is associated with prejudice while being a religious none is linked with tolerance. It is impossible to fully understand the relationship between religious belonging and tolerance without distinguishing between nones on the basis of their childhood religious socialization experiences and dividing them into disaffiliates and lifelong nones. Over time, the proportion of lifelong nones within the nonaffiliated population is expected to rise, which will likely change the relationship between religious affiliation and tolerance. Should lifelong nones represent a higher proportion of the unaffiliated population, the difference between the levels of prejudice found among nones and affiliates would be expected to converge.

Keywords: disaffiliation, lifelong nones, prejudice, tolerance

Nadia Beider is a postdoctoral fellow at the Social Research Institute, University College London. Her research focuses on religious change, particularly the ways in which religious switching shapes attitudes and behaviors. 

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Indigenous practice as culture in the Alberni case

Lauren Strumos

In Canadian legal cases, the framing of religious practices as ‘culture’ most often appears as a strategy to maintain Christian majoritarianism. In the Saguenay case, for example,a city in the province of Quebec argued that a prayer, which was recited at the start of municipal council meetings, was part of its ‘cultural and historical heritage.’ This argument was affirmed in 2013 by the Quebec Court of Appeal, but later rejected in 2015 by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In this article, I suggest that the more recent Alberni case brings to light an alternative approach: the construction of Indigenous practices as ‘culture’ as a way to foster inclusion and confront the hierarchy of settler colonialism. The Alberni case took place in the province of British Columbia. It was first heard in 2019 by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with the decision being appealed in 2022 to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. Below I provide a summary of the case, followed by a discussion of how ‘culture’ appears in the Court of Appeal decision. I conclude by noting the potential relevance of Alberni to those interested in (non)religion in law and society.

Servatius v. Alberni School District No. 70

The Alberni School district is situated on the territories of Nuu-Chah-Nulth Nations of the West Coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. ‘Nuu-Chah-Nulth’ means ‘all along the mountains and sea.’ During the 2015-2016 school year, a public elementary school in this district invited two guests to demonstrate Indigenous practices. The first was a demonstration of smudging conducted in classrooms by an Elder. The second was a hoop dance at a school assembly during which a prayer was said by the dancer.

Candace Servatius, an evangelical Protestant and mother with two students at the school, claimed that these demonstrations infringed upon her freedom of religion as protected under Section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is part of the Constitution of Canada.  She argued that (1) her children were compelled to participate in Indigenous ‘religious ceremonies’ that conflicted with her own religious beliefs, and (2) that the school board promoted Indigenous beliefs over others, breaching the duty of state neutrality.

In its 2020 decision, the Supreme Court of British Columbia determined that the demonstrations did not amount to an infringement of religious freedom, nor did they interfere with the school’s duty of religious neutrality. In its reasoning the court drew a line between religious education and education about religion. The students were witnesses of the smudging and prayer; they were not compelled to participate in them. Servatius appealed this decision to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, the highest court in the province. This court dismissed her appeal in December 2022.

Religion or culture?

In its 2022 decision, the Court of Appeal concluded that the hoop dancer’s prayer did not violate the duty of state neutrality. It compared this prayer to that of the Saguenay case, stating: “Unlike the situation in Saguenay, in this case, the one-off prayer said by a school guest as part of his performance of a hoop dance did not amount to the school showing a preference for a faith or creating a preferential space for anyone, Indigenous or otherwise” (para. 233). The Supreme Court of Canada concluded in its Saguenay decision that the prayer used to open municipal council meetings violated state neutrality.

In regard to the smudging, the Court of Appeal focused on determining whether it was a cultural or religious practice. It relied upon the submissions of Indigenous witnesses who made a distinction between cultural events on the one hand, and spiritual beliefs and practices on the other. It stated:

There was a strong evidentiary basis supporting the conclusion that the event that took place was not, as Ms. Servatius asserts, a “religious ceremony” or something akin to it. [The evidence] suggested that some members of the Indigenous community make a distinction between cultural events that they will share publicly, as a matter of community building, and spiritual beliefs and practices that they consider to be inherently private. (para. 186)

The court concluded that smudging in this context was a demonstration of Indigenous cultural practice. This approach rests in part on a conceptual public/private divide with culture belonging to the former. The public/private divide is also evident in arguments that frame majoritarian Christian practices as culture. The Canadian public sphere is viewed in and beyond law as multicultural. Hence if prayer is made to be cultural and not religious, it becomes suitable for the neutral and multicultural public sphere.

As Lori G. Beaman indicates, the defense of Christian practices and symbols in Canadian law has deployed a narrative of ‘us Canadians’ that is ‘singularly Christian’. The Saguenay case demonstrated how this line of reasoning can support the exclusion of the nonreligious. Alain Simoneau, the complainant of the Saguenay case, is an atheist who experienced discomfort and isolation because of the municipal council’s prayer. In its decision the Supreme Court of Canada noted: “Although non-believers could also participate [in the prayer], the price for doing so was isolation, exclusion and stigmatization” (para. 120).  

The association between culture and public space in Alberni is operationalized to different ends. It does not work to erase difference in the construction of an exclusionary cultural narrative. Instead, the association between cultural practice (smudging) and public space (elementary school classrooms) is intended to build community and help Indigenous students feel more welcomed at school. Indeed, the demonstration arose from an initiative of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council to support Indigenous students in schools.

The smudging demonstration is also representative of actions being taken by educational institutions to redress the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. For instance, in its decision, the court referenced Canada’s church-run residential schools:

As part of its assimilationist policy, Canada adopted a residential school program for Indigenous children, separating them from their parents, indoctrinating them in Christianity, and punishing the children harshly if they spoke their own languages and engaged in their own cultural practices. Housed institutionally, without the protection and nurturing of their parents and community, many Indigenous children in these schools were subjected to emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and neglect. Indigenous parents and communities were left grieving and bereft. (para. 102)

The court situated the Alberni case in this sociohistorical context. It also maintained that educational institutions have a responsibility to advance reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The ‘culturalization’ of smudging worked to make the practice appropriate for students at a secular school, and by extension, respond to the ongoing legacy of residential schools. (The court also notes that the Port Alberni residential school did not close until 1973.) In this sense, ‘culture’ was deployed in a way that works to advances the state’s interest in reconciliation. This raises the question of how ‘Indigenous culture’ might appear in cases that do not advance state interests but challenge them.

Conclusion

Although it is framed to not be religious, I hesitate to propose that smudging in this case can be thought of as a form of nonreligion. Viewing the smudging demonstration through a lens of nonreligion may overlook the social significance of the court’s reasoning. This reasoning rests upon the views of Indigenous witnesses, as opposed to a legal definition or conceptualization of religion on behalf of the court.

In Canada, affiliation to institutional Christianity is declining, the number of those who identify as having no religion is rising, and there is heightened awareness among the settler population of the ongoing legacy of colonialism. It is against the sociohistorical backdrop of settler colonialism that the court in Alberni determines what does not count as religion (i.e., smudging). If an understanding of nonreligion in law and society also entails an understanding of religion, then settler colonialism may constitute a relevant part of that picture.

Lauren Strumos is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is currently a visiting student researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society at Uppsala University. Drawing on theories of environmental and ecological justice, her research explores how religious and nonreligious settler activists conceptualize their opposition to an oil pipeline project in British Columbia.