The Social Imaginary of Science and Nonreligion: Narrating the Connection in the Anglophone West

Catto, Rebecca; Shillitoe, Rachael; Jones, Stephen H.; Kaden, Tom; Elsdon‐Baker, Fern

doi:10.5334/snr.163

Secularism and Nonreligion

2023

DOI: 10.5334/snr.163

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The Social Imaginary of Science and Nonreligion: Narrating the Connection in the Anglophone West

Rebecca Catto

Rachael Shillitoe²,

Stephen H. Jones

et al.

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2024

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Cited by 2 publications

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References 19 publications

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“…2023: 151; seeCatto et al 2023). Van Mulukom et al's analysis helps flesh out the variety of beliefs that nonbelievers might hold, such as centering the individual human as the primary knower or placing the pursuit of knowledge by humans into a progress narrative.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Beliefs of Nonbelievers: Exclusive Empiricism and Mortal Finitude Among Atheists and Agnostics

Blankholm,

Cragun,

Hawley Suárez

et al. 2024

Sociology of Religion

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This essay argues that “atheist” and “agnostic” are not merely negative labels that indicate a person lacks belief in God or is not religious. Relying on a new survey of very secular Americans and the General Social Survey, we demonstrate a statistically significant and substantively meaningful relationship, in both predictive directions, between identifying as atheist or agnostic and holding certain beliefs about how best to know the world and what happens when we die. We can reliably predict that most people in the United States who trust science, reason, and evidence and do not trust religious sources will identify as atheist or agnostic—and vice-versa. We find the same bi-directional relationship with belief in mortal finitude, i.e., that death is the final end. Our findings suggest that exclusive empiricism and mortal finitude are positive tenets of belief systems that those who identify as atheist or agnostic are likely to hold.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Beliefs of Nonbelievers: Exclusive Empiricism and Mortal Finitude Among Atheists and Agnostics

Blankholm,

Cragun,

Hawley Suárez

et al. 2024

Sociology of Religion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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After Restructuring: Understanding Religion, Nonreligion, and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century

Edgell

2024

Sociology of Religion

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The Restructuring of American Religion (1988) provided a still-influential framework for the study of American religion that centered the emergence, after World War II, of a left–right religio-political divide driving mobilization around conflicts understood as moral. But in the last 30 years, the landscape of American religion has been transformed by decline in commitment to mainstream religious institutions, especially white Christian ones, and by the emergence of large groups of Americans who are religiously indifferent or who embrace spirituality or nonreligion. A new framework is needed to account for this transformed landscape. This framework must avoid problems characteristic of earlier approaches by conceiving of morals and interests as mutually constitutive, centering whiteness, racialization, and the defense of heteropatriarchy in explaining religio-political conflict, integrating the study of nonreligion and spirituality and religion, and analyzing not only decline in religious commitment but the changing meaning of religious identity in a transformed landscape.

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The Social Imaginary of Science and Nonreligion: Narrating the Connection in the Anglophone West

Cited by 2 publications

References 19 publications

The Beliefs of Nonbelievers: Exclusive Empiricism and Mortal Finitude Among Atheists and Agnostics

The Beliefs of Nonbelievers: Exclusive Empiricism and Mortal Finitude Among Atheists and Agnostics

After Restructuring: Understanding Religion, Nonreligion, and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century

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