Research Note: Talking about a Revolution: Terminology for the New Field of Non-religion Studies

Lee, Lois

doi:10.1080/13537903.2012.642742

Cited by 139 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…1 Irreligion is the rejection of religion (Campbell 2013(Campbell [1971) and nonreligion is a related, more inclusive concept indicating anything that is identified by how it differs from religion, regardless of whether this sense of difference involves hostility, dismissiveness, curiosity or even veneration (Lee 2012a). Examples of nonreligion include popular cultures like the New Atheism or rituals and practices developed in contradistinction from prior religious ones like many civil ceremonies and seasonal festivals.…”

Section: Background: Positives and Negativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Secular or nonreligious? Investigating and interpreting generic ‘not religious’ categories and populations

Lee¹

2014

Religion

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In research dealing with religious affiliation, generic nonreligious categories -'no religion', 'not religious', 'nonreligious', 'nones' -are frequently used to measure secularity and secularisation processes. Analysis of these categories is, however, problematic because they have not received dedicated methodological attention. Using qualitative research conducted in the UK, this article investigates what nonreligious categories measure and, specifically, whether they indicate nonidentification or disaffiliation as assumed or an alternative form of cultural affiliation. Findings suggest that generic nonreligious categories are sometimes used to express substantive positions and public identities, and that these are diverse. These findings flatten distinctions between religious and nonreligious categories as 'positive' and 'negative' respectively and indicate problems therefore in using nonreligious identification to measure secularity and secularisation. They suggest nonreligious identification is, however, a useful indicator of the advance of nonreligious cultures and the 'nonreligionisation' of societies.KEY WORDS: nonreligion and secularity; quantitative methods; atheist identities; indifference to religion; secularisation; nonreligionisation; religion in Britain; religious identities; disaffiliation The generic nonreligious categories frequently used in survey questionnaires appear to differ fundamentally from other identification or affiliation categories. Whether phrased as 'no religion', 'not religious', 'nonreligious' or 'none', these categories are apparently negative, allowing participants to record that a form of cultural identification lacks meaning or relevance to them or is perhaps entirely absent in their lives. Consequently, social researchers and reporters often describe and interpret the use of these categories as acts of 'disaffiliation' or 'non-identification'. Generic nonreligious categories seem, therefore, distinct from more explicitly positive confessional classifications that are also offered in religious identification survey questions. Selecting a category like 'Christian' or 'Hindu' indicates that a respondent is familiar with this term as a cultural marker and that it is meaningful to them to some degree. Such categories allow respondents to share an emic representation -the one that they would Religion, 2014 Vol. 44, No. 3, 466-482, http use in daily life or a reasonable proxy for the one they might normally prefer ('Christian' instead of 'Anglican', for example). By contrast, generic nonreligious options seem to be etic categories, used to locate the remaining individuals inside an analytical rather than a phenomenological framework. As Pasquale (2007, n.p.) says of the 'none' category, the terms themselves indicate that they are 'a function of survey method rather than a self-description'.In many countries in the world, increasing and large numbers of people are today choosing generic nonreligious categories: in Britain, the empirical focus of this article, 51 percent selected '...

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Section: Background: Positives and Negativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Secular or nonreligious? Investigating and interpreting generic ‘not religious’ categories and populations

Lee¹

2014

Religion

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105

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“…This open, relational approach to understanding atheist subjectivity and identity (Lee 2012c;Quack 2014) looks beyond the rejections of theism and religion that have also governed engagements with the non-religious. In some ways, this approach is broader than the already pliant framework provided for this special issue.…”

Section: Beyond Organized Atheismmentioning

confidence: 98%

Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-religious Culture in Contemporary Britain

Lee¹

2015

Social Analysis

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In Britain, most non-theists and atheists do not identify themselves as such in explicit terms, yet non-theistic cultural threads are interwoven through everyday discourses. This article calls for more extensive ethnographic engagement with these more diffuse-and therefore less visible and less commonly researched-forms of non-religious culture. Based on exploratory fieldwork conducted in South East England, it draws attention to one set of these indistinct non-religious forms: 'authentic' and 'inauthentic' ambivalent atheist and non-religious self-understandings and self-representations. It demonstrates how these identities may be subjectively meaningful and culturally significant and how they may be simultaneously empowering and disempowering. Scrutiny of ambivalent atheist identities points to complicated dynamics between non-religion and power and the value of attending to poorly or unmarked non-religious cultures through ethnographic work.First and second waves of research into secularism, non-religious atheism, and other non-religious 1 cultures have been biased in their interest toward the organized expressions of these cultures. There are two sensible reasons for this. Firstly, organized non-religion (e.g., humanist associations, identifiable cultural movements like New Atheism, or anti-theist governmental policy) is empirically and theoretically significant, increasingly so in some regards (see Engelke 2015). Secondly, part of this significance relates to the high visibility of these forms. This prominence shapes their impact in society and also makes them readily identifiable as subjects for social research. In all likelihood, however, these organized forms present the 'tip of the iceberg' when it comes to social and cultural expressions of non-religion in contemporary societies. There are, for example, several indications that the number of people involved with overt, Ambivalent Atheist Identities | 21 representational modes of atheism is vastly overshadowed by the number associated with implicit, non-representational modes (Lee, forthcoming).In this article, I consider the scope for ethnographies of non-religion and non-religious atheism beyond the most centralized or codified expressions of these phenomena. Drawing on exploratory fieldwork conducted in South East England, I focus on issues of representation and identity, concentrating on the more ambivalent non-religious identities that are easily lost from view. Like other forms of self-representation, these identifications reveal, enable, and determine subjective experiences. Representation makes something of the self available to multiple audiences, subjecting it to the interpretation and interests of others. The diffuseness of these representations, however, prevents them from being recognized and therefore restricts their direct influence in public discussion and space. At the same time, it prevents others from understanding and interpreting these subjectivities-and from misunderstanding and misinterpreting them. Thus, ambivalent identities are ...

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“…See, especially, the work of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, which, though influenced by the seminal text of Campbell (1971), has just been initiated. Religious indifference and "nonreligion" are not identical, the latter is usually taken to imply "a relationship of difference to religion" (Lee (2012), 131) and so far has only been scrutinised in relation to modernity, but there are significant commonalities. It is possible that the reluctance to examine religious indifference in antiquity owes itself, in part, to an understandable reaction to earlier, prejudicial and pejorative constructions of Roman religion as something that had "failed", an interpretative trope common, for example, in past histories of the origins of Christianity that tried to explain its "success".…”

Section: Explaining Indifferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Did Magic Matter? The Saliency of Magic in the Early Roman Empire

Meggitt

2013

Journal of Ancient History

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Magic is usually assumed to have been ubiquitous and culturally significant in the early Roman Empire, something exemplified by Pliny the Elder's claim that "there is no one who does not fear to be spell-bound by curse tablets".1 A variety of written and material evidence is commonly taken to be indicative of both the regular use of magic and widespread anxiety about its deployment. However, this paper argues that if we attempt, having determined a contextually appropriate definition of magic, to gauge the prevalence and significance of magic in this period, it can be seen to have had little cultural salience. Not only is evidence for its presence more equivocal than usually presumed, but magic is found to be strikingly absent from major popular cultural sources that shed light on the presuppositions and preoccupations of most of the empire's inhabitants, and to have had little explanatory or symbolic utility. The paper then proceeds to suggest possible reasons for magic's lack of salience in the early Empire, including the role of various sceptical discourses concerned with the supernatural in general and magic in particular, and the consequence of the largely agonistic context of its use on the limited occasions that it was employed.

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Research Note: Talking about a Revolution: Terminology for the New Field of Non-religion Studies

Cited by 139 publications

References 17 publications

Secular or nonreligious? Investigating and interpreting generic ‘not religious’ categories and populations

Secular or nonreligious? Investigating and interpreting generic ‘not religious’ categories and populations

Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-religious Culture in Contemporary Britain

Did Magic Matter? The Saliency of Magic in the Early Roman Empire

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