The Rise of the Nonreligious Population

THE RISE OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION: THE VIRTUAL GEOGRAPHIES, CREATED COMMUNITIES, AND SOCIO-POLITICAL IMPACTS OF THE RELIGIOUS “NONES” IN THE UNITED STATES ______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

California State University, Fullerton ______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Geography ______

Elizabeth Higgins

Thesis Committee Approval:

Jonathan S. Taylor, Department of Geography and the Environment, Chair Mark Drayse, Department of Geography and the Environment Zia Salim, Department of Geography and the Environment

Summer, 2018

ABSTRACT

This thesis seeks to understand the sociocultural, political, and economic influences of the growing nonreligious population in the United States. This study will be conducted through examining the demographics of the nonreligious population, their socio-political involvement within society, as well as the creation of a community specifically designed for those who do not claim belief in a religious dogma. As the nonreligious do not have formal physical places to congregate such as their religious counterparts do, I argue that the population of those in the United States who claim to be religious “nones” has created a community of their own. This has gained much momentum in the 21st century with the use of social media as a platform, that in turn resulted in the creation of a virtual geography, with a time and a place that exist online for the nonreligious to meet. Once these virtual geographies were established and strengthened, especially in more recent years, this led to the creation of physical communities for the nonreligious population through conventions and regular monthly meetings.

As the nonreligious has grown into an active community of people seeking to make change in the culture around them, they have become more involved in activism, policymaking, and have begun to make impacts in the political and sociocultural sphere.

The extent to which the community is impacting society has been underreported in academia, and this study seeks to inform and fill in some of those gaps.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vi

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE RISE OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ...... 1

2. LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 10

3. THE NONRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION...... 23

Social Media in Creating Communities ...... 26 Conventions in Creating Communities ...... 31 Academia in Creating Communities ...... 33

4. THE FUTURE OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION ...... 40

Diversifying the Nonreligious Community ...... 42 The Possible Global Decline of the Nonreligious Population ...... 46

5. IMPLICATIONS OF THE GROWTH OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION ...... 49

Political and Economic Implications ...... 49 Socio-cultural Implications ...... 66

1. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ...... 69

REFERENCES ...... 74

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my biggest champion, who never gave me an option but to pursue higher education, because he never had the opportunity, my late father William E. Higgins III.

I cannot express enough my appreciation for my eternal cheerleader, my mother, Lynne

N. Higgins, for her support, encouragement, and ever enthusiastic feedback, especially in the moments where I struggled most. To the rest of my friends and family, especially those who would not let me participate in any fun when they knew I should be working, I appreciate them all. The words “Liz go work on your thesis” will be ingrained in my thoughts forever.

A special thanks to the department of Geography and the Environment for providing me a home away from home for my many years at Cal State Fullerton. I want to thank the faculty of the department for encouraging and supporting my generally out- of-the-box learning style especially because I was never able to fit in the general mold of a graduate student. Thank you for allowing me to take a risk on research on a very unexplored topic. Thank you for allowing me to fit the needs of my research into the classes I took. Thank you for your patience and support.

This research would not be possible without those members of society who are willing to break social stigma and push boundaries.

iv 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE RISE OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"An atheist loves his fellow man instead of God. An atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now – here on earth for all men together to enjoy. An atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it, and enjoy it. An atheist believes that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a God. An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He believes that we cannot rely on a God or channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter. He believes that we are our brothers’ keepers and are keepers of our own lives; that we are responsible persons and the job is here and the time is now."

-Madalyn Murray O’Hair (Murray v. Curtlett 1959)

The evolution of progressive thinking relies on the expansion of knowledge, education, science, and the unending advancements and availability of these things. This type of growth is not always visible, especially because societal progress seems to be reminiscent of the story of a frog trying to climb out of a well, where every two steps he gains, he falls back one step, making progress rather onerous. Within today’s society, traditional religious thought has been a major challenge to progressivisms. Contemporary conservative and fundamental religious views bring forth arduous challenges to the nonreligious community, because traditional Gnosticism and today’s theism have

2 emotionalism and tradition/custom on their side as well as the ever-existing battle to link religion as the basis for morality.

The global nonreligious community and its people go by many names, and the meaning behind terms like “atheist”, “agnostic”, “secular humanist”, and “skeptic” does differ and depend on the individual, however for this research I will use “nonreligious” or

“nones” as a shorthand overarching referral for all of these terms. If we look at the popularity of books such as God is not Great by the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard

Dawkins’s books The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth, or Sam Harris’s

The End of Faith, we can see that there is a large audience interested in the consideration and understanding of nonreligious philosophy. Furthermore, the creation and strengthening of national and international organizations like the Secular Student

Alliance, American Humanist Association, and Freedom from Religion Foundation also exemplify a changing religious realm. This presents my research questions: where does the nonreligious community currently stand? Does an increase in the size of the larger nonreligious community signify a movement towards secularism? There has been a correlation between rising scientific literacy, education, and lower rates of religious faith

(Lawson et al. 1992, Schwadel 2011). If science literacy continues to increase, scientific advancements become more readily available, and the population becomes more educated, does this impact religiosity, and how?

A number of studies in the past few years have implied that the amount of nonreligious people in the United States has increased quickly (Kosmin et al. 2009, Smith

2013). At the same time, many of these same studies show that there has been an increasing amount of political influence from mostly conservative religionists (Smith

2013). This hints at a polarization within the political realm in the United States; and projected on a larger scale, a polarization in politics. Where we can look to see the demographics of this contradicting shift seems to come from the population of people that identify as either secular or extremely religious. Many nonreligious view the future optimistically, especially with regards to the growing number of young adults who favor secular ideals.

According to the Pew Research Forum, 25% or one-in-four 18 to 29-year olds are unaffiliated with religion and label themselves as “nonreligious” or “none”. This means that the “millennial” generation (or those born between 1980 and 1990) is the most nonreligious generation to date. While this is significant, it is also noteworthy that 16% of the general population above 18 years of age is nonreligious (Pew 2013). Among those who claim to be nonreligious, 31% are under age 30 and 71% are under age 50. That means just a small portion of the nonreligious are adults over 50. What does this mean in hindsight? According to the United States Census as of 2017 there were 325,719,178 people in the United States of all ages. Of this total population, 209,696,700 people are under the age of 50, roughly 64% of the total population. With 252,0638,00 over the age of 18 in the United States, and 16% of this population being nonreligious, that’s somewhere around 37,530,251 people who do not belong to an organized religion. To put this number in scale, the total population of the state of California is 39,536,653. That means that on top of the population size of the entire state of California there are an additional 270,000 plus people who are unaffiliated with organized religion.

An interesting dynamic will come when the older and more conservative generations are no longer the ones who hold political and economic power; when we see

4 the millennial generation entering into leadership positions on every front, from politics to education, and all those between. The millennial generation has grown up in a

“technological age” in that access to technology has been more readily available than in previous generations. With technologies like smartphones, search engines, and the computer age at the heart of many millennials’ livelihoods, this generation is one of the most technologically literate. Science is also becoming more widely popular within the general public. There has been resurgence, almost a renaissance, of science, in the

Information Age, where there has been a shift from traditional industry to an economy based around information technology, as the demand for jobs in STEM fields grow and as major issues facing Earth (such as climate change) are at the forefront of popular culture. The surge in science-based media and social media has been a response to the growing demand for scientific education (Bowser et al. 2013). There are television shows, web pages, apps for all mobile devices, and many other products that make science easily accessible to the masses. Topics in education like coding, physics, chemistry, robotics, biology, and more, are increasingly more alluring to younger generations. This is becoming more and more visible in the civic sphere and can be witnessed as schools are introducing more STEM based programs and the job market has increased for technology and science jobs (Hilton et al. 1988, Baram-Tsabari et al. 2009,

Hulleman et al. 2009, Ainley et al. 2011, Tyler-Wood et al. 2012).

The Internet paved the way for popular social media sites that have enabled most of the modern development of the nonreligious community. Take the social media website Facebook, for example. If you were to open up Facebook and search for the word

“nonreligious”, there are dozens upon dozens of pages, groups, and profiles where the

5 nonreligious community is flourishing. These pages range in topic from “Atheism and

Politics” to geography-based nonreligious pages like “Nonreligious from India,” to pages for specific demographics like age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, hobbies, and the list goes on. These pages have hundreds of thousands of followers collectively.

Some of the most prominent pages have hundreds of thousands of followers alone. On these pages there is constant communication about issues that affect people across the globe.

In the past, it used to be that in order to have conversations with likeminded people you had to be physically geographically connected to one another. If you wanted to talk about politics or religion or social issues with someone, you would have to meet with them face to face. Now, people from across the globe can sit at home and be just as connected, but virtually. This is why the idea of “virtual geographies” is so important. If the Internet can function much like a traditional meeting place, like a city square or plaza, then it functions as a geography in much of the same way. This network is not just a fleeting moment, either. Conversations turn into friendships, friendships turn into groups, and groups turn into communities. This is how every major community has come to be; it just starts with a small group of likeminded people. Many social media groups have resulted in actual physical meet-ups. These groups can now unite to work more effectively toward growing their memberships as well as working towards the same goals. In order to continue creating a larger, more vivacious nonreligious community, both through physical and virtual communities, a challenge that must be met is how to appeal to the number of non-believers who are not “out” in the community.

The Nonreligious, occasionally mirroring the structural powers of their faith- based opposites, built their community through erecting a dynamic society by ways of uniting and establishing a public awareness through emboldening nonreligious who are not public with their atheism, to come out (Howe 2009). There are reasonable motives for which nonreligious or other non-believers do choose to avoid labeling themselves as nonbelievers. Shunning an association with atheism is predominantly caused by the stigma placed on nonbelievers in American culture. Nonreligious in the U.S. are regarded as a dispensable “other”—an unwelcome, objectionable, even “evil” danger to the moral order of society (McCarthy 2015). This attitude has resulted in discriminations against nonreligious on many different instances. There have been many studies looking at public opinion on nonreligious. The Pew Forum released a study that showed that out of the top

10 religious affiliations in the United States, the nonreligious are the least trusted group

(Pew 2017). A number of studies have placed atheists as some of the most highly stigmatized members of the population (Gervais et al. 2011, Swan et al. 2012, McCarthy

2015). Given that the people’s mistrust of nonreligious is more prominent than their mistrust of any other minority group, including criminals, it is understandable that a skeptic would avoid being labeled as a nonreligious person. The easiest way to bring in more members to any community, especially one so stigmatized by outsiders, is to call attention to the fact that there is already a community out there that is a compassionate communal organization with members who are ready to support new members.

As a nonreligious person myself, I often felt that I was alone in my beliefs. I never felt like I had a support system. My religious counterparts had their church/religious community to fall back on when faced with trials and tribulations. When social media

7 began to gain force as a prominent actor in our society, specifically with blogs like

Secular Women, Patheos, and many others like them, I began to realize that there were many more people out there who were like-minded. I began to communicate with other nonreligious who felt the same sense of being alone. Social media has changed the feeling of solitude based on our beliefs (or lack thereof) for many of us. Many of my closest nonreligious friends today, those who I have physical contact with, and those with whom I only have virtual contact, I made through using social media.

The insinuation that nonbelief is linked with seclusion and stigmatization is apparent when you talk to nonreligious about what it is like to not believe what many do.

The proposition that nonbelievers, missing the inclusion, cultural benefits, and answers offered by religion are made to find their own paths, indicates the key feelings of many nonreligious, and is the reason so many are pushing for a thriving nonreligious community. A newer tool in providing a sense of community for the nonreligious that has been used to draw new members as well as national and international attention is the use of public space. A favorite technique among the nonreligious community is the use of billboards with positive and comforting messages like “Millions are good without God” or “Don’t believe in God? Join the Club!” As to be expected, the appearance of these billboards sparked controversy from the religious and has resulted in the billboards often getting vandalized. However, these billboards are well worth the risk. For example, the

San Diego Coalition of Reason reported that they began gaining dozens of members a month after the introduction of just one billboard (Likckona 2011).

Awareness movements like this help to introduce new members but also serve as a reminder to everyone that the community exists. But movements like these seldom

8 appear just because a few isolated people choose to get together. They must be united on more than one front in order for there to be incentives for a collective to grow. Most nonreligious organizations function under the values of secularism, reason, social justice, and science. Nonreligious and their organizations tend to hold beliefs and opinions based not on custom, authority, or faith, but rather on science and rationality. This scientific and humanistic worldview tends to be unambiguously applied to nonreligious dialog. These organizations are just a small part of the evolving nonreligious community. The spark set by the mass use of social media has prompted bigger movements. In 2012 on the National

Mall in Washington D.C. over 30,000 people gathered for a rally that was likened to

“Woodstock” for nonbelievers. Other events and conventions have begun to happen across the globe. American Atheists, an organization for the nonreligious, holds an annual convention which receives thousands of participants ever year. Such a turnout for such events, as well as the number of people participating in discourse and participating in nonreligious activism, suggests that atheism is almost like a grassroots movement.

The structure of this thesis is as follows: Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature of the geography of religion as it stands, and what is out there currently about the nonreligious community. Chapter 3 concerns the current state of the nonreligious population in the United States, and the growth of the community through the utilization of created communities through the use of social media as a tool. Chapter 4 assesses the implications of the nonreligious population through political and economical lenses as well as the socio-cultural implications of such a community. Chapter 5 focuses on the future of the nonreligious community, how it needs to change to maintain and grow, and

9 what other patterns we may witness in the future. Chapter 6 includes a discussion of the previous chapters, as well as any conclusions that may be drawn from the research.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

Religion has the ability to provide a distinct interpretation of the cultural makeup of worldwide civilization and provides a unique understanding of the Earth’s increasing population (Kong 2001). The subfield of Geography known as the ‘geography of religion’ has largely emphasized charting patterns of faith across the world, on top of looking at the connection between people’s religion, places deemed sacred, and landscapes built for religious purposes (Ivakhiv 2006). As many in the field acknowledge, the focus must go further than these somewhat limited fields of observation

(Brace et al. 2006). For this research, the attention will be placed on the shifting religious composition and the control it has throughout the collective social system, as well as how it may affect politics and the economy (Warner 1993). Further research on the geography of religion, particularly pertaining to the growing nonreligious population in the United

States, should compare the socio-political transformations that may occur, to other already established secular societies, such as those seen in countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands. (Warner 1993, Knippenberg 2007, Autiero et al. 2009).

Within the geography of religion subfield, there has been almost no research focused on nonreligious. Many of the geography of religion studies looking at the nonreligious have investigated the relationship between religion and its secular counterpart (Gokarıksel 2009). The lack of academic study on the nonreligious

11 community as a primary subject is a concern to social scientists seeking to learn more about the community, particularly because the nonreligious community is the quickest growing group labeled within the boundaries of religion, where the fastest growing component of this is the millennial generation, or those between 18-29 (Pew 2013). The

American Religious Identification Survey from 2012, with support from the United States

Census, noted that the nonreligious category grew from over 14 million in 1990 to over

34 million by 2008 (Kosmin et al. 2009). The current literature looking into the growing nonreligious community is primarily hypothetical and does not often take a geographical approach (Smith 2013).

Traditionally, communities were proposed to have been formed based on a common location. Places like cities, towns, or villages served as the conventional arrangement of a geographic community, or one that exists in a physical sense. Shared experiences, however, can also assist in the creation of communities. Those people who experience similar life events, such as collective attitudes of belief and culture may form a community based upon their shared principles. In this sense, a community is created, as it is not simple based upon a geographic location, but rather a shared identity (Poland et al. 2005).

An important dimension to studying the nonreligious is that the community is often not physical; these nonreligious communities are not inherent and thus have to be created, and social media is the current platform for these ‘created communities’ which then begin to form into ‘Virtual Geographies’ (Mersey 2009, Smith et al. 2012).

Papacharissi (2009) compared three types of social media websites; public (Facebook), private (ASmallWorld), and professional (LinkedIn). This study was intended to

12 distinguish the differences in social interactions based upon the basic foundation and designs of each site. Where sites like Linked in and ASmallWorld build a framework of designed social cues and designated ways to present one’s self, Facebook allowed individuals to craft how they presented themselves and how they chose to interact with other people. On the other hand, Facebook and LinkedIn are both open to anyone to join and a profile’s information can be shared to users on the site and even the general public if they so choose, while ASmallWorld is by member invitation only, and within the network interaction between someone’s non-immediate circle is restricted. This creates different architectural boundaries between the networks in how easily accessible they are to the general public (208).

In today’s culture individuals express their taste through the procurement of specific material items. The way people express their tastes online, according to

Papacharissi, is very similar, in that people present a chosen expression of preferences, interests, disinterests, and concepts that each person would like to be associated with.

Some social networks (LinkedIn and ASmallWorld) are systematically tighter, where they have more distinct guidelines for the parameter of the interactions that happen.

Facebook, on the other hand, functions in a looser fashion and allows for more organic thought and interaction, not only between acquaintances, but with strangers as well (214).

The most important aspect of maneuvering within virtual geographies, Papacharissi notes, is that it allows the user a level of control and customization of their environment, just as someone walking within the confines of a physical city, choosing his or her path to their next destination.

Because virtual geographies are founded upon a fluid premise of evolving connectivity, they are situational and not static. Conceiving of them as

static reflects an imperialistic tendency to transfer the familiarity of the offline world online. Because the offline and online worlds operate in synergy rather than in isolation, a flexible architecture permits online social systems to form organically and not as colonies of their offline equivalents (Papacharissi 2009, 216).

Kinsley (2013) looks at how contemporary studies on virtual geographies tend to place cyberspace outside of reality and outside of the material realm. Kinsley argues that while the Internet may not occupy a physical space, virtual geographies inherently shape the material realm. This happens through the accessibility of information we gain from usage of the Internet, such as the way the Internet has allowed certain levels of control of various parts of the physical world, through software and coding, permitting humans to be hands-free from a distance. Kinsley calls this human-technological interaction

“sociotechnical” and states that studying this in contemporary conditions must focus on how this interacts with our spatial knowledge within the field of Geography (366).

Our access to information, and our experiences on the Internet, particularly within the various social media sites that are regularly used by a large portion of the population are based largely on the coded algorithms that we respond to, which in turn respond to us, thus mapping and modelling our behaviors in the cybersphere (368). These “ICTs

[Information and Communicative Technologies] can accordingly be understood as a part of the ongoing development of political arithmetic, population statistics and political economy” and help us to understand the inner workings of the growing population (368).

As far as literature on the nonreligious population within the field of Geography,

Warf (2015) is one of the most thorough. Warf reaffirms the struggle that those studying the nonreligious population through a geographic lens will find: that even though there is a large amount of literature on the geography of religion, there has been hardly any

14 attention to the nonreligious population. This gap is most noteworthy due to the increase in interest in works on the nonreligious population in other fields such as cognitive sciences (Corriveau et al. 2014) and sociology (Galen et al. 2015, Edgell et al. 2016).

Warf’s study looks at the history of secularization. During the medieval period, religiosity regained popularity, and many of the more humanistic people and influential figures were still largely inspired by religion. Warf also notes that following the

Enlightenment period the West has been part of a larger secularization, where the church and state have been separating, and creating secular organizations that the public has access too, such as universities. “As Christianity has incrementally lost much of its ideological power and political clout, it has opened a space for secular and scientific thought. From the Copernican revolution to Darwin to the flourishing of secular social sciences and humanities in the 20th century and today, alternatives to religious worldviews abound in power and popularity” (Warf 2015, 4). The Copernican revolution brought forward the knowledge that the earth was not the center or the universe, and the increase of industry, science, and literacy helped lead to secular institutions like universities. Periods of intellectualism such as the British Enlightenment, Spinoza’s pantheism, and the French Revolution all marked an upsurge of secular thought to their respective societies.

The biggest influencer on secularism in the west, Warf (2015) suggests, is sociologist Max Weber’s theory on the expansion of secularism. According to Warf,

Weber’s theory states that religious ethics plays into the creation of capitalism, where people were to work hard and put off indulgence, in order to amass savings that were representative of the grace of God. Weber notes that this leads to rapid secularization

15 because as people become more involved in capitalism, they become more rational and logical as they try to figure out the easiest and most logical ways to get work done, such as growing the market. Commodities, goods, etc., replace God in being what people seek to achieve, and Weber calls this the “disenchantment of the world.” Weber suggests that this lowers an “iron cage” of rationalism over the very culture that created it, squeezing religion into the domain of the irrational” (Warf 2015, 5).

Notwithstanding of the state-forced secularism found in communist countries, all of the above has led to an increase in secularism, primarily in economically developed countries. The United States, Warf notes, is an exception, as while it is one of the leading economic superpowers in the world, it still has high rates of religiosity, and even more marginalization against nonreligious people in their social and political beliefs.

Kong (2001) has recognized that most studies on the geography of religion concentrate on physical spaces that are deemed sacred, how they have grown and changed throughout history, and pointed out how tricky it can be to take a geographical viewpoint with religion, as it is mostly abstract and theological. The study does note that the geography of religion can highlight individual geographers’ studies on faith, due to the many ways those who research within the field can provide different insights on the importance of religion. This is because geography of religion can be studied from both a physical and cultural viewpoint and impacts people’s lives in different ways. Kong proposes that the ability for religion to be abstract can be a challenge and asserts that studying the geography of religion does require “artificial separation of the sacred from the secular, the poetic from the political” (Kong 2001).

Human geography has been slow to view religious geography as more than sacred spaces, growth, and diffusion of religion, and as a crucial component of identity, in company with other important attributes like gender, sexuality, and so forth (Dewsbury et al. 2009). Brace et al. (2006) examined the purpose, system, and meaning of developing recognized structures of existing religious bodies. Of the previously conducted studies on religious geography there is an insufficient amount of research where a historical context is applied (Tse 2014). Brace et al. (2006) propose that research on the geography of religion has been so unfocused that religious geography is in a particularly unique position to participate in dialog on religion with other research fields like psychology, anthropology, etc. Historically, cultural geography requires an elevated conception of how faith functions with the development of identity, and how faith corresponds with other foundations of identity that are largely molded separate of the religious domain.

Brace’s 2006 study’s emphasis is on how these religious identities are shaped outside the church gates and are interlaced into the day to day lives of common people, and go far beyond space-based individuality that is simply being practiced within the confines of a physical religious institution.

Looking at religion from a sociological stance, Warner (1993) states that those who study religion should broaden their attention to multiple fields and on a multitude of subjects. First, he envisions academic studies on the presence of sacred establishments and their part within social structure, with less emphasis on the conservation of such institutions, and more on their influences. The author suggests that if those researching religion look at the way faith can either constrain or enable certain aspects of societal engagement, through studies that span relatively long timelines, researchers could better

17 understand the effects of collective commonalities based on belief. A long timeline for studies on religion is particularly important because faith is not a fixed ideology, but rather something that can first be established, and then later rejected, or the other way around. It is also proposed by Warner that excessive focus in the literature looks at the established sacred institutions, and he determines that additional investigation needs to be conducted outside of the generally conventional fields of study. This thesis is an example of the way Warner suggests religion be studied, as the research being presented here concentrates on the understudied topic of the nonreligious. Warner also notes that more research should be focused on the political influences religion may have. Knippenberg

(2007) looks at Church and State relations in the Europe and the United Kingdom and the religious shift in the area, as it is undergoing an inflow in ‘immigrant religions,’ as well as an influx of secular thought.

The enormous chronicles of popular religions are well recorded and mapped throughout the timeline of human history. The UK and many regions in Europe

(particularly Western Europe and Scandinavia) have witnessed the shift towards secularism, generated firstly by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution during the

17th and 18th centuries, respectively, and then again by the major global social uprisings of the 1960s (Smith 2008). The United States also saw a shift in dynamics in the 60’s, when there was a drive for civil rights, often intertwined with conflict from radical religious beliefs (Zelinsky 2001). Theocratic influences have persisted as prominent influences behind many governments worldwide. A shift in the direction of secularism has principally been connected with development as well as scientific progressions within nations (Smith 2008). Nevertheless, even with scientific progress in some places in

Africa as well as South America, the power of numerous faith-based institutions has not been reduced, and there has not been a shift towards secularism, as was determined by

Autiero et al. in a 2009 study. As such, our familiarity with the changing landscape of religion is still full of gaps.

Gokarıksel (2009) focused on how this gap in academia is exceptionally obvious when the emphasis changes from the religious geography as it relates to the religious, or those who have faith in a deity, and towards non-believers, or atheism. Especially notable with regards to the lack of research is the relationship between nonreligious and religious communities, and the influences that these viewpoints can have on society.

Looking at the general global population of nonreligious from a geographical standpoint, there is quite a bit of research dedicated to the topic; however, the same cannot be said for the United States. The number of nonreligious was recently estimated at somewhere near sixteen percent of the world’s population (Warf 2015). The geography of the global population of nonreligious people denotes a number of lasting historical influences, from the way wealth has been circulated to the effects of enforced atheism within certain Communist countries (Warf et al. 2008). A study conducted by Diener et al. (2011) looks at the subjective well-being of religious people and nonreligious people in nations where public life is impeded by difficult circumstances (lack of access to education, high rates of poverty, etc.), versus those nations with relatively less difficult circumstances and found:

The findings reveal that a strong predictor of an individual’s religiosity is the conditions of the society in which he or she lives. Many nations are relatively homogeneous in terms of religiosity. People living in nations or American states with more difficult life circumstances were substantially more likely to be religious. In prosperous nations that have achieved high material and social well-being, religiosity is less prevalent. Difficult

individual circumstances also were associated with religiosity, although not as strongly as societal circumstances. (1288)

This being said, the Muslim-dominated Middle East region has the lowest amount of nonreligious people (Sunier 2005, Lewis et al. 2009). Parts of Europe have developed to be largely secular, with exceptions in some southern and countries, where Catholicism is still the largest religious population. In Eastern Europe, still recovering from the hands of the Soviet Union which featured government- implemented atheism, many are still nonreligious; there is, however, a return to

Orthodoxy happening, and there are some religious strongholds in the East that survived these attempts at suppression (Arnason et al. 2014). The Scandinavian nations, with high levels of overall happiness, and less societal difficulties are relatively nonreligious and secular countries comparatively (Harding 2014).

Those Western nations that do still feature state-church governments, such as

Britain and Wales, are struggling to gain more followers of the religion and members in churches (Wilson 2003). This could be due to the idea that as the governments have been cosseting the church for so long, the religious establishment has gotten indolent, corrupt, and poor at enticing and drawing in more people, especially the younger generations

(Stark et al. 1994). The education systems in more secular nations versus those that are less secular may play into the amount of youth who turn to religion. In Europe there are nationalized school systems with very set rules as to what is taught, where the United

States has certain federal standards but still much more localized school systems. This means that while localities have to abide by certain federal guidelines, they still have the ability to dictate certain schools of thought, such as including religious studies as part of curriculum, or declining to teach evolutionary studies in science classes (Berger et al.

2008). Those highly secular nations in Europe have experienced the turn towards secularization not only based on modern day influences, but rather because the lengthy historical timeline and centuries of changing influences within the region have allowed a slow progression of changes, a timeline the United States simply does not have. The

United States was formed on the very back of religion to an extent and breaks the mold of the Weberian secularism theory that essentially states that countries that are wealthy and post-industrial will begin to become more secular (Pierucci 2000).

When the Pilgrims came to the United States they viewed it as a New World where they would be able to create a new religious society outside the control of the

Church of England (Hetzke 1988). While devout religious will declare that the Founding

Fathers of the United States were Christians, many were Deists which was a religion that was imprecise in its actual belief set and attempted to lessen the strength of institutionalized religion (Holmes 2006). The Founding Fathers used this influence in the creation of the Establishment Clause, i.e. introducing a “freedom of religion” to all people in this country, so that the government does not experience the same level of overarching religious influence that the Church of England had. The United States as a whole is one of the most diverse countries, faith-wise, in the world. Without a state- enforced religion, many different faiths are found freely across the country, and the religious diversity comes from a historically immigrant-based population. Religious fundamentalism has been a powerful and effective approach at which political gains can be made both globally, and in the United States (Wylie et al. 1992, Westerlund 1996).

And with these gains in political power from the religious right comes a much harsher criticism of those who are not of faith. Politicians, the media, and news agencies have

21 portrayed those of nonbelief as angry, nihilistic sociopaths. The level of distrust has led to political actions against nonreligious (Edgell et al. 2016). For example, some states have laws that do not allow atheists to hold office or will use nonreligious belief as ammunition in custody hearings (Schwarz 2014).

The Pew Research Forum (2013) noted that in the former five years in the U.S., the percentage identifying as nonreligious has increased from 15% to almost 20%, with over 30 million people identifying as nonreligious, and over 30 million who say they are not affiliated with religion. In the United States one-fifth of the general public, or nearly a third of adults 29 and under, are claiming to be unaffiliated with religion (Pew 2013). The

U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States, working in partnership with the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College’s

American Religious Identification Survey (2012), verified these numbers, estimating that from 1990 to 2008 the nonreligious population grew from 14.3 million people to over

34.1 million people, and while this number is growing, so is the population of people of faith, as more immigrants enter the country.

With the amount of religious diversity higher than it has ever been, and more immigrant geographies in many nations, globally, it is thought-provoking to fathom that according to the Templeton Global Religious Futures Project (2014), the global nonreligious population reached a record high of 16.3%, meaning there are approximately 1.161 billion nonreligious people across the globe. These numbers prove that there is a larger population of nonreligious people that today’s society seems to ignore. The fact is that there have always and will always be people who are viewed as nonreligious. Today’s myths and legends were yesterday’s religions and Gods, and this

22 has played throughout history in the same way. All people are nonreligious in respect to one God or another. Throughout history there have been those select few who have spoken out against religion, but those people have been largely stigmatized as heretics.

What has been lacking from the global nonreligious community is a more outright representation in mainstream culture, that is symbolic of the diversity within the community. It has only been in the last few decades that a voiced population of nonreligious has been heard, or even acknowledged. Smith (2013), states that starting in the early mid-1900s, organizations like the American Humanist Association (AHA) began to form. Other groups like American Atheists, founded in the 1960s, followed in the footsteps of AHA. These groups, no matter how small and rare, managed to create a community for people of similar beliefs.

Even with these select few groups, there wasn’t a wide community of nonreligious connected globally; this is because community has largely been a geographically binding notion (Cimino 2014). Recent technological advances have proven this to be an ever more connected world than was ever thought to be possible, with social media serving as a leap forward to a more linked world. Mersey (2009) suggested that a ‘community’ should be well defined as any social relations that are linked together through a ‘sense of community’, and this allows online cultures to fall under the category of a “created community”. The current nonreligious community has become a growing network of people from across the globe, and social media has allowed a rapid expansion of communication between the nonreligious, and this, in turn, has led to the creation of physical nonreligious communities, globally, by use of conventions, conferences, and organizations (Smith et al. 2012).

CHAPTER 3

THE NONRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Within Human Geography and the ‘Geography of Religion’ subfield, investigations on nonreligion and the larger social movement that may be forming as a result, provides insight as to how large of a gap in research there is on this subject. As noted previously, very few academics in Geography have examined the subject, let alone through the lenses of nonreligion as an active social movement. The idea that nonreligious are part of a larger cultural undertaking is a vital component in the creation of nonreligion as an identity. Whether or not nonreligion would be defined a social movement within the confines of traditional approaches, the community’s emphasis of political ambitions fuels the idea that nonreligion is, indeed, a social movement. For successful social movements, focus is not limited to only changing the political sphere, but rather, accomplishment can arise in altering traditional depictions and cultural standards on how groups are perceived. Within social movements an importance must be placed on both individual’s identities within the movement and the overall collective identity of a movement (Lee 2016). An apparent starting point to begin looking at nonreligion as a social movement would be to look towards establishments that have structured nonreligion into a communal whole, a collective identity, a community.

For as long as history has been recorded, there have been many who have been

24 labeled under the word “heretic” or “infidel” or any of the various terms representative of those whose opinions have been opposite of traditionally held religious beliefs. A large nonreligious presence in the United States has only appeared as an outspoken group of people in the past seventy years. Even with the longstanding traditional religious beliefs and the prevalence of those faiths in American society, many organizations have become established that endorse a nonreligious view of life.

In 1941 the first nonreligious organization appeared in the United States: The

American Humanist Association (AHA), whose slogan is “Good Without God”, currently has 200 affiliated chapters, with 21 chapters in California, and 11 of these chapters are in

Southern California alone (‘AHA Affiliates and Chapters, n.d.). According to the AHA’s website, the organization strives “to bring about a progressive society where being good without a God is an accepted and respected way to live life. We are accomplishing this throughout defense of civil liberties and secular governance, by our outreach to the growing number of people without traditional religious faith, and through continued refinement and advancement of the humanist world” (‘About the AHA’, n.d., para. 1).

For a long time, AHA was the only outspoken and overtly public group for the nonreligious. This changed during the civil rights era, as many Americans turned away from traditional religion. Leading this movement was Asa Philip Randolph, a key leader in the African American civil rights movement, and the head of the March on

Washington, best known for the rally where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I

Have a Dream” speech (Taylor 2006). A. Philip Randolph was also an outspoken nonreligious person and the author of the “Humanist Manifesto II” (1973), a document that called for transcendence from religion towards a society that recognizes the shared

25 humanity of all people and a world that uses reason and compassion to create a future of peace, freedom and prosperity. This document was signed by dozens upon dozens of people in high-ranking positions, from business executives to educators (AHA Humanist

Manifesto II, n.d.).

Another important nonreligious public figure to come out of civil rights era

America was Madalyn Murray O’Hair who founded American Atheists Inc., in 1963 as a movement that defends the rights of nonreligious and “fights to protect the absolute separation of religion from government and works to elevate atheists and atheism in public discourse” (Goeringer 2006). O’Hair was first known to the public for a lawsuit known as Murray v. Curlett (1963) that ended with a Supreme Court ruling that terminated mandatory Bible recital in public education (Seaman 2005). O’Hair went on to create a popular radio show (1988), as well as the television show American Atheists

Forum (also 1988) that was transmitted on over one hundred cable systems (Seaman

2005). The creation and popularity of nonreligious-focused media is not the only legacy

O’Hair left behind following her murder in 1995. American Atheists Inc. is still thriving.

The organization holds an annual conference in the U.S. at different locations, the aim of which is to “bring together members of the nonreligious community from all over the nation and world to celebrate reason, rationality, and nonreligion” (“National

Convention”, n.d.). Even further, American Atheist Inc. releases a quarterly newsletter called the American Atheist Magazine, which is available in over 31 locations in

Southern California alone (‘American Atheist Magazine’, n.d.). Aside from American

Athesists and AHA, the United States didn’t see another large national nonreligious organization until the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) was founded in 1978.

The FFRF has gone on to work with other nonreligious organizations to create a welcoming community for those nonreligious new and old. In 2011 FFRF along with the

Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science began an undertaking known as

“The Clergy Project.” This project is an intimate and private online community for members of the church and clergy as they move away from religion and towards nonreligion. Groups like those mentioned above have shaped a community for likeminded persons. Together with the previously mentioned organizations numerous additional organizations have formed throughout recent decades. These establishments have developed into a larger network, and built the framework for a larger nonreligious community in the U.S.

Social Media in Creating Communities

Regardless of the efforts of the various organizations mentioned above, there has not been a consistent community of nonreligious linked across the globe, or even on more local levels; this being primarily related to the perception that community is geographically binding. Nevertheless, within recent years, the world has shown itself to be more linked than many ever imagined. This is due to technological advances such as the Internet, the use of social media, and other networking methods. These methods have enabled the rapid growth and expansion of the nonreligious community. Facebook, a popular social media website, is a fine example of the visible nonreligious community.

On Facebook there are different types of webpages that a member can follow or join.

“Pages” are official profiles for public figures, businesses, and organizations. “Groups” on the other hand, are a place for small group communication, and form from the desire for expression and communication of common interests. If I were to log into Facebook

27 and type “nonreligious” into the search bar at the top of the page I would find over 400 pages with “Nonreligious” in the title. As far as groups on Facebook, there are over 1,200 with the word “Nonreligious” in the title. For both groups and pages there would be countless more if we replace “nonreligious” with other nonreligious keywords like

“atheist,” “agnostic,” “free thought,” or “secular” in the title. These pages and groups provide an interesting insight into the diversity of nonreligious. Page and group titles range from “Nonreligious Youth” to “Nonreligious Farmers,” and “Nonreligious of

India” to more local groups like “Nonreligious of Kern.” There are even a number of

Southern California Nonreligious pages, selectively for those in Southern California.

Collectively these nonreligious pages have hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of followers. These groups and pages are home to endless communication; with discussions regarding subjects that impact people all across the world. Through the use of these groups and pages, nonreligious have come together to form a virtual community.

Besides these virtual communities, many people have taken their connections on the Internet as opportunities to link with other nonreligious in real life. Another social media site where the nonreligious have turned to create communities is the website

Meetup.com. With more than “9,000 groups [getting] together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities,” Meetup’s mission statement provides an insight into why so many turn to the organization to assist in finding like-minded people in a localized area. Their mission “is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference” (‘About Meetup’, n.d. para. 1 &

2). All one has to do is type in a topic of interest to their search bar and set a location, and the website will provide any available groups with that keyword. For example, in San

Diego County there are approximately 42 Meetup groups with the “nonreligious” keyword, in Los Angeles there are 30, in Santa Barbara County there are 46, in Orange

County there are 11, and in San Bernardino and Riverside counties there are 10. In total, this comes to 139 groups in Southern California, with thousands of members. Where

Meetup differs from other social media platforms, is that it is a website aimed directly towards creating events and getting people together in physical locations. After looking through dozens of these groups for any sort of patterns, one specific repetition appeared amongst them. Many of the nonreligious groups on Meetup focused on outreach and philanthropic events. Previous to inventions like the telephone and social media, if you wanted to have a conversation with someone, you had to be geographically linked. In order to discuss social issues, political issues, etc., people had to see each other in person.

With global access to the Internet, individuals from across the world can be relaxing in the confines of their own homes, and be just as geographically connected to one another virtually, as they would if they were face to face. This promotes the idea that

“virtual geographies” are just as important as physical ones, as realistically they are networks of physical spaces being connected through technology (Papacharissi 2009,

Kinsley 2013, Bauer 2014). If social media can become as much of a gathering place as traditional physical geographies like city squares, then it would seem that the Internet functions as geography as well. While some conversations on the internet go no further than a brief moment, the creation of this network of people appears to be more lasting.

Discussions on the Internet can turn into companionships, companionships can form with

29 other companionships to create groups, groups link with other groups to create communities, and within an instant, communities turn into societies. This is how many societies began; all a society needs to form is an initial group of people with the same opinions and beliefs. The most obvious way for the nonreligious community to continue growing, both through virtual and physical created communities, is to attract the attention and confidence of the nonreligious population who are not currently “out of the closet” with their nonreligion. Unfortunately, though, there are many reasons for nonreligious to reject the title and keep him or herself away from being identified as a nonreligious.

_____Avoiding an involvement with nonreligion is primarily triggered by the stigma assigned to nonreligious by American society. Nonreligious in the U.S. are considered to be a key “other” in the demographics of society but are often regarded as an undesirable

“other” to the ethical order of culture. Unfortunately, from this stigma, distaste for and bigoted attitudes against nonreligious has existed in the past and continues to occur

(Gervais et al. 2011). This acknowledgement of such a stigma has not only been accepted but it has also been studied. Out of the top ten religious associations, nonreligious are ranked as the least trustworthy and least trusted group (Pew 2012). Another study showed that nearly half of all Americans said they would never vote a nonreligious into office as president of the U.S. (Jones 2012).

A third study, and arguably the most damaging to nonreligious reputation, is one that found that members of the general population would rather trust rapists and pedophiles over atheists/nonreligious in proposed social situations (Gervais et al. 2011,

Swan et al. 2012). If members of the general public would rather trust criminals over

30 nonreligious, it is justifiably anticipated that nonreligious would prevent themselves from being openly branded as a nonreligious.

The simplest method to appeal to those who are not members of a specific community, in order to break harsh stereotypes, is to make sure that the community is noticed as a functioning part of society, one that is an ethical, collective group of people who are compassionate and welcoming to new members. In order to do this, nonreligious people must begin to break apart the aforementioned social stigmas that set the community back as a whole. As a nonreligious, I have regularly experienced the feeling of being alone in my opinions. Unlike the many friends I had who regularly attended religious services and experienced the sense of community that came along with organized religion, I often felt like an outcast in my beliefs and lacked a support system.

It was not until college, when I began to utilize social media as more than a way to communicate with current friends, that I found that there were thousands of people, an entire community of people, who shared similar opinions. I joined one Facebook page titled “We Fucking Love Atheism” and through conversations on postings by this page, I begin to have regular contact with other nonreligious. Many of these nonreligious I now gladly call friends, and I have been lucky enough to meet many of them in person.

However, what I discovered after communicating with so many other nonreligious was that most of them had felt the same loneliness that I had experienced myself. The idea that being nonreligious is associated with a feeling of being excluded along with fear of being stigmatized is fairly obvious when nonreligious are asked about what it is like to go against popular opinion. Because the nonreligious population do not have a standard set of morals and ideals as those presented in religious belief, they must seek social

31 inclusion, philosophical justifications, and answers for themselves. This desire for inclusion is the main motivation for a widespread, active, and accessible nonreligious community.

One method for making the nonreligious community more visible that has been the center of controversy in the past few years, across the nation, and more locally in

Southern California, is the use of public space by nonreligious organizations. Many organizations have turned to the utilization of billboards as a prime marketing strategy to raise awareness of the existence of such organizations. The billboards, accompanied by warm messages like “Don’t believe in Jesus Christ, you’re definitely not alone,” acknowledge the existence of nonreligious and direct attention towards the fact that there are organizations and a community supporting them. As mentioned, these billboards are often the center of controversy; these billboards are frequently vandalized and people often appeal to have them removed altogether. Even with the controversy and the costs of refurbishing vandalized billboards, the strategy seems to work. One Southern California nonreligious group called the San Diego Coalition of Reason (SDCoR) has had billboards up on major freeways for years (Jones 2012). SDCoR reported seeing an increase of members after their first billboard was placed, acquiring masses of new members (Jones

2012.).

Conventions in Creating Communities

Outside of the realm of social media the nonreligious community is beginning to form a concrete, physical community. As the population has become more visible, the outcry for physical meetings has become more apparent. This has led to the creation of a number of annual conventions and conferences for the nonreligious in the United States.

In addition to the conferences and conventions, many local nonreligious groups hold regular meetings for their constituents, creating physical communities from virtual ones.

There are dozens of various conferences and conventions across the country that occur on an annual basis. Some are specific to a certain group like SkepchickCON, a conference for secular women. Others, such as the American Atheists convention, are much larger and more representative of all.

One of the biggest regular physical meetings of nonreligious people started as a joke by two comedians in the United Kingdom. Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans both sought to create an event that was like going to church for people who did not believe in

God but did believe in spreading good. The idea was to bring nonreligious people together to talk about important matters to them, with educational and philanthropic aspects. The mission statement of the Sunday Assembly is as follows:

We’re not here to tell you how to live your life—we’re here to help you be the best version of you you can be. The Sunday Assembly:

1. Is 100% celebration of life. We are born from nothing and go to nothing. Let’s enjoy it together. 2. Has no doctrine. We have no set texts so we can make use of wisdom from all sources. 3. Has no deity. We don’t do supernatural but we also won’t tell you you’re wrong if you do. 4. Is radically inclusive. Everyone is welcome, regardless of their beliefs— this is a place of love that is open and accepting. 5. Is free to attend, not-for-profit and volunteer run. We ask for donations to cover our costs and support our community work. 6. Has a community mission. Through our Action Heroes (you!), we will be a force for good. 7. Is independent. We do not accept sponsorship or promote outside businesses, organisations, or services. 8. Is here to stay. With your involvement, The Sunday Assembly will make the world a better place. 9. We won’t tell you how to live, but will try to help you do it as well as you can.

10. And remember point 1… The Sunday Assembly is a celebration of the one life we know we have (Sunday Assembly Public Charter 2018).

The Sunday Assembly began in 2013 with 30 groups and has now spread to 92 assemblies across the globe with regular meetings occurring on five of the seven continents. In the United States there are 47 Sunday Assembly groups (in the following states: CA, TX, GA, NM, MD, WA, IN, ID, MA, NC, IL, OH, CO, MI, FL, WI, MN,

TN, NY, PA, AZ, OR, DC) that boast thousands of regular attendees.

As for larger annual conferences and conventions, there are a number of events for the nonreligious. Skepticon, which takes place in Springfield, MO, is an annual conference that began in 2008 and is on its 10th year as a growing event. The first conference had just under 250 attendees. The conference now draws thousands to its annual event. The Secular Student Alliance, which will be discussed again later in this chapter, is an organization specifically for nonreligious students that holds an annual conference. The organization was founded in 2000 by eight student leaders of Secular

Societies on college campuses, as a way to help educate and help students and student communities who were interested in the basis of science and critical thinking, secular beliefs, and humanist based ethical systems. What began as eight groups in 2000 has spread to over 400 groups globally on the high school and college levels. Every year since 2000 the organization has held an annual leadership conference with the goal of educating students on the subjects of organizing grassroots campaigns, political leadership, and scientific literacy.

Academia in Creating Communities

In the United States the presence of the number of young adults who identify as nonreligious can be somewhat measured by the amount of new college students who

34 identify as “none”. Academics have wagered that this is due to the societal unrest and cynicism of the youth towards religious socio-economic conservatives and the way conservative religious values are affecting the country (Campbell et al. 2012). Many colleges in the United States have ties to religion, both in the past and currently, so this will be a challenge to the colleges and universities as more nonreligious students begin attendance (Hafiz 2014). Of the challenges facing nonreligious in academia in general, the notion of Christian privilege will be the hardest to overcome (Fairchild et al. 2007,

Edwards 2014). Christian privilege is the idea that in the United States, the people, and culture are inclined towards favoring those Christian influences in daily life (Fried 2007).

Christian privilege can be observed on college campuses in a number of ways. For example, this privilege is apparent through the observance of Christian holidays as the layout of the calendar year- with emphasis on breaks during Christian holidays, but not for holidays of other major religions. Many campuses have active ministries with chaplains being involved in both the administration and campus organizations

(Blumenfeld 2006).

Regardless of the increasing number of nonreligious students, many have reported feeling silenced and ostracized on campus when they are open about their nonbelief

(Liddell et al. 2011). This is especially true in situations that may either outright or indirectly highlight religion as priority, whether Christian specific or religion in general.

In some situations, nonreligious students choose to withhold sharing their lack of belief because of the stigmas aligned with nonreligious points of view. Other challenges on campuses come from the etymological implications of emphasis on religious diversity and open interfaith dialogue which often do not include the large number of students

35 without religious belief. Those efforts that are meant to capture the inner dialogue of students generally still do not dive deep enough into the involvements of nonreligious as they generally are still insights from a majority religious population.

Hurtado et al. (1999) set a foundation for studying diversity, religious, and inner- dialogues of students on campus. The study, titled “Perceptions of the Campus Climate for Nonreligious Students” Rockenbach et al. (2015) suggest that improving the climate for diversity in higher education should focus on the intertwining factors of culture on college campuses through:

(a) structural worldview diversity (perceptions of the proportional representation of various religious and nonreligious groups on campus)

(b) the psychological climate (perceptions and attitudes between and among different worldview groups)

The study presented the idea that students on campuses that hold identities that are marginalized, in this case nonreligious students, experience a more adverse environment in college differing from their religious counterparts.

While studying the nonreligious in colleges and universities, a number of patterns have emerged. Multiple studies have shown that how strongly religious students hold to their belief systems increases their perception that all students experience a positive environment on campus for students to be open with their worldviews, particularly among those of the Christian religion (Frankel et al. 1994, Blumenfield 2006). It could be that religious students are exceedingly hopeful that the climate on campus is open because they are not marginalized in their viewpoints. It can be rather challenging to perceive the world from any other viewpoint than one’s own. The privilege as mentioned

36 previously, specifically if it goes unnoticed, may further cloud how the marginalized are understood by society (Blumenfeld 2006).

On the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps those students who ascribe to

Abrahamic religions feel unwelcome in academia because education traditionally ascribes to secular worldviews for nonbiased purposes (Bryant 2010). This may mean that religious students themselves feel that they do not fit into the customs and traditions of academia. The idea that they are not accepted at school may mean that they view those who are nonreligious as the accepted group. Regardless, the fact that studies have shown that students of the Christian faith view the climate as more welcoming to the nonreligious students than nonreligious students do, furthers the necessity of focusing on more dialogue between the religious and nonreligious populations on campuses

(Broderick et al. 2017). While the parties on either side will not ever be in complete agreement, highlighting and increasing their cognizance of the experiences faced by one another could lead to a more welcoming environment for all involved.

Another pattern that became apparent in the involvement of the nonreligious in academia was the stigma associated when students go beyond identifying as simply nonreligious or “none” to labeling oneself as an atheist. Students who are openly atheist note a more negative campus experience than those who are nonreligious, none, etc.

(Goodman et al. 2009). Students who fall into the nonreligious category are often seen in more of an agnostic view, being that they neither believe nor disbelieve, and are more associated with religion than without. When students ascribe as atheists, they generally hold a staunch viewpoint that they do not believe in a higher power, and because of this they are often more attuned to the power of what they view as religious privilege on

37 campus relative to their more theistic counterparts (Blumenfeld 2006, Goodman et al.

2009).

The relative lack of studies that focus on the various levels of nonreligious belief highlight the need for research on diversity within the nonreligious population. This research, which should be aimed at unraveling the perception, experiences, and accounts of the nonreligious population as a diverse group, would help break the expectations that those of nonreligious belief are a homogenous group lacking in diversity. When campus experiences are broken down even further beyond religion, with emphasis on other identity influences, like race or gender, studies show that the way students perceive the social environment on campus is influenced by how welcoming the campus and its students are to multiple levels of diversity (Santos et al. 2007, Harbour et al. 2011). This emphasizes the need for studies that focus on the intersectionality of diversity on campus because the campus climate experienced by a student who is marginalized by race, or gender, on top of being nonreligious would differ from those who do not face the same level of marginalization.

How can the marginalization faced by nonreligious students be alleviated on college campuses in order to better address their needs? This can be done by creating nonreligious organizations that are open to all by highlighting their inclusive nature. One such demographically based organization that has been created to appeal to a certain populace is the Secular Students Alliance (SSA) founded in 2001. Given that one in four adults ages 18 to 29 is nonreligious, it seems to make sense that an organization would be wildly successful if aimed towards the high school and college aged population. The SSA currently has 271 affiliated groups on college and university campuses, and 28 affiliated

38 groups at various high schools (‘Affiliated Campus Group List’, n.d.). Of these affiliated groups, 21 are located in California, and 11 are in Southern California alone (‘Affiliated

Campus Group List’, n.d.). Because students can join the SSA for free, this allows accessibility to the SSA community by students from all economic backgrounds and allows them to become engaged with the larger nonreligious movement. The SSA also holds an annual conference that allows students to make connections and learn from each other. According to the Secular Student Alliance’s website, their mission statement is as follows:

The mission of the Secular Student Alliance is to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human-based ethics. We envision a future in which nontheistic students are respected voices in public discourse and vital partners in the secular movement's charge against irrationality and dogma…. As valuable as a national community is, there’s nothing like a local community. Campus groups play an enormous role in shaping student life. Campuses usually financially support these groups, as campus groups are a key component of student life at high schools and colleges (SSA Mission Statement, n.d.).

SSA campus affiliate groups provide a powerful way to normalize secular identity and advance secular values on campuses all over the country. By providing the student leaders of these groups the tools they need to strengthen their groups, they can be empowered as activists and enabled to make lasting change to the inclusiveness of groups on college campuses. These groups give community to secular students, allowing them to advocate for secular issues, engage in service projects, and educate their campuses on the positive aspects of secularism. They also provide student leaders with the experiences necessary to be outspoken secular leaders for the rest of their lives.

In this chapter I have presented how social media, academia, and conventions have helped create a community for the nonreligious population. The use of social media sites such as Facebook and Meetup.com have allowed virtual geographies, such as pages and groups, to turn into physical communities, by way of connecting the nonreligious with people of similar opinions in the real world. Using billboards as a way to advertise has been a proven method to bringing in new members to nonreligious groups, as shown by the successful billboard campaign by the San Diego Coalition for Reason. The increasing rates of attendance at the dozens of nonreligious conferences and conventions that occur annually across the country, as well as the creation and growing membership of student-based organizations, underscores the significant desire of developing a physical community for the nonreligious population.

CHAPTER 4

THE FUTURE OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION

Once progress has disconfirmed most general religious explanations, once alternative social and cultural systems are firmly institutionalized, once a pattern of free and frequent disaffiliation by individuals has become accepted, it is hard to see how the process can be reversed. - Frank Lechner (1991, p. 1111)

A 2002 study published in the American Sociological Review conducted by Hout et al. showed that changes to religious beliefs were affected by political preferences, especially in the increase of the nonreligious population. The study showed that some political liberals and moderates experienced changes in religious belief and would go from being religious to being nonreligious, while the views and religious ideologies of conservatives did not change. The rapid increase of nonreligious within the moderate to left political spheres may be viewed as an assertion against the Religious Right. Because many conservative politicians run on the platform of faith-based reasoning, many nonbelievers feel the need to become activists to combat the idea that religion is becoming exceedingly political, and has resulted in religious based culture wars such as attacks on women’s rights, identity politics, and so forth (Cimino et al. 2011, Cimino et al. 2014, Classen 2015).

Studies have shown that those places where there is still economic, physical, and humanitarian unrest tend to be more religious (Sunier 2005, Lewis et al. 2009, Bettendorf et al. 2011). On the other hand, places that experience a greater sense of security in the

41 economy, physical environment, and humanitarian efforts, tend to be less religious. It is interesting to note that the Pew Research Forum’s Global Attitudes Project (2012) showed that countries with a high Gross Domestic Product are inclined to be much less religious, whereas those with lesser GDPs are more inclined to be religious. The only country that does not follow this general pattern is the United States, with both a high

GDP and high rates of religion. But the increasing amount of unaffiliated hints at the idea that the U.S. will continue along the path of secularization. This suggests a gradual shift towards the secular.

Something to note about the gradual shift towards secularism, is that these types of advances are happening much quicker than expected. According to Ray Kurzweil’s

“Law of Accelerating Returns” the rate at which these methods and technologies that will aid in overall well-being will appear will continue to accelerate over time and will become more widely available. The rate at which this will happen, and the composition/ possibilities of what will come to be is beyond what has been and could be predicted today (Kurzweil 2005). Studies have tested the relation between intelligence and religion and have all found that intelligence is pointedly negatively associated with religious belief, meaning that those with lower IQs are significantly more religious than those with high IQs (Lynn et al. 2009, Reeve 2009).

With nanotechnology and the development of other highly sophisticated technology in the works, combined with how quickly technology is moving forward, our understanding of human genetics and the brain will help us to become smarter, stronger, and more skilled. With this will come more knowledge and control of ourselves, and the world around us. Ideally, as long as such technology does not wind up in the wrong hands

42 or out of our control, this will make us better able to improve human lives and makes our potential and ability to grow exponential. If we are able to make humans more intelligent, and intelligence and non-religiosity are linked, does this mean that as these technologies become more available the rate at which we disbelieve will become higher? There are many questions yet to be answered with regards to the future of atheism and the movement towards secularism. If those nations that are primarily unaffiliated hold the highest GDPs in the world, could we conclude that if secularism and atheism continue to increase in power globally, this pattern will continue? Does national prosperity come first followed by secularism, or secularism followed by prosperity, and are the two mutually dependent? Hopefully with enough time and research, these are questions that will be able to be answered.

Diversifying the Nonreligious Community

There are a number of notions as to why persons become nonreligious, especially in the rapid way that has been observed here in the United States. Many demographers link nonreligion in society to monetary strength, which helps to clarify why many countries outside of the United States, featuring sturdier community safety nets, are largely more secularist than the United States. Nonreligious skepticism is also linked to academia and can be shown through looking at educational accomplishment among the nonreligious. For instance, in the United States, those who are more educated are linked to less religious responsibility, such as belief in God (Pew 2017).

Evidence has shown that areas with official religions tend to push people away from religion in general, as in today’s pluralistic societies where many people hold various different beliefs and different religions are able to coexist, a singular religious

43 foundation for governance is not representative or welcoming to all its constituents

(Fox 2004). The lack of an “official” state religion in the United States could explain why this country is more religious than many of the other Western nations. Where countries with official state religions can be limiting to other dogmatic beliefs, the freedom of religion in the U.S. has allowed the Abrahamic religions to flourish. This also opens the door to many of the domestic churches created here in the United States, such as Mormonism, Scientology, and those similar, that are often the home for those who are dissatisfied by traditional religions but are not of nonreligious beliefs.

Nearly 70 percent of the nonreligious community are men, and almost 80 percent are white (Pew 2016). This leaves 30% of the community who are women and/or people of color. As in any community, members wish to see representation of themselves in the leadership and public portrayal, and many of those who have taken on leadership positions in the nonreligious community are not representative of the diversity within the community. The imbalance with both race and gender is obvious when we look at things like speaking slots at nonreligious conventions, the biggest created physical geographies the community has to offer (Hassall et al. 2014). As someone who frequents the social media community of nonbelievers, I regularly come across pleas for diversity within the nonreligious community (MacDonald 2011, Shaha 2014, Lee 2016). Talking about diversity can be a contentious issue. It can further point out our differences instead of celebrating what makes us unique as a people. Bringing diversity to the forefront of a movement is not only about evading the adverse effects that come from not doing so.

Diversity, even within an already marginalized group like the nonreligious community, pushes us to see our own preconceptions.

Atheism is an incredibly liberating worldview, one with the potential to transform the world for the better, but it will fail to do so unless atheist communities welcome those who are marginalised elsewhere in society. If, as atheists, we truly want to live in a more just world, a world where there is less inequality, we must actively pursue diversity (Shaha 2014,).

A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center titled “the Gender Gap in Religion Around the World” found that women are in large part more likely to have religion as a key factor in their life. They are much more likely to pray regularly and have religion as a main aspect in their day to day happenings. The study showed that women who are presented with more opportunities in education and the workforce are less likely to be religious than their non-working counterparts, and the study suspects that this may be linked to the idea that certain religious tenets implement the idea that women belong at home, as it is where they are able to do the best work.

Within the nonreligious community, more focus and inclusion with African

Americans could help promote diversity, as they represent the smallest racial and ethnic percentage of nonbelievers. The African American community places pressure on those who are nonreligious, as only one percent of the community are nonreligious

(Hart 2013). The stems from the significance of religion, primarily Christianity here in the States, in African American history and its discourse. Churches during the civil rights era became a stronghold for many black Americans, to the point where the

African American community almost became synonymous with the church. The Civil

Rights movement was largely run by religious leaders. In this aspect a number of black atheists have expressed that rejecting the church felt in a way like they were rejecting their race. In an article in the Washington Post, titled “Atheism has a big

45 race problem that no one's talking about,” Black Skeptics founder Sikivu Hutchinson notes:

Just as cliché holds that there are no atheists in foxholes, it’s commonly believed that there are no atheists in overwhelmingly Christian black America. African Americans are the most religious ethnic group in the nation; nonbelievers make up just 1 percent of the population. That’s a problem, and not just because atheists face discrimination in their own communities. African Americans still live in disproportionately segregated neighborhoods, with few living-wage jobs, parks, accessible public transportation and healthy grocery stores. We make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, but nearly 40 percent of its prison and homeless populations. This disparity has only deepened in the Obama age. Faith- based institutions provide resources to these poor and working-class families. They also fight racial discrimination, offer a foundation for community organizing and create access to social welfare, professional networks and educational resources. These are essential issues, and atheists of color often find themselves allied in these missions. White atheists have a markedly different agenda. They are, on average, more affluent than the general population. Their children don’t attend overcrowded “dropout mills” where they are criminalized, subjected to “drill and kill” curricula and shunted off to prison, subminimum-wage jobs or chronic unemployment. White organizations go to battle over church/state separation and creationism in schools (Hutchinson 2014).

Hutchinson makes the point that she feels that on the whole, the nonreligious community disregards the idea that African-American members face a larger divide caused by the

“rollbacks on affirmative action, voting rights, affordable housing, reproductive rights, education and job opportunities” (Hutchison 2014). With the current trends that we are seeing “only one in twenty African American students in the state of California will go on to a four-year college or university” (Hutchison 2014). Similar figures can be applied to all youth of color. The lack of opportunity leads to lesser economic prospects, less experience with outside worldviews, especially those that do not involve the idea of God.

Because the nonreligious community is so largely composed of white males, people of color and women have begun to create their own organizations to see

46 themselves represented in the nonreligious community. For African Americans the prominent groups are African Americans for Humanism, Black Nonbelievers, Black

Atheists of America, and Black Freethinkers. For women, Secular Woman, Skepchick, and Butterflies and Wheels are among the few.

If people of color and women do not see the nonreligious community as inclusive, with focus on issues directly impacting them, they will be less likely to be involved.

The community is changing and recognizing these gaps. There are many women, and people of color involved in running major organizations, and I suspect the demographics are not totally accurate with regards to the actual composition of the community, as these may only represent those who are comfortable enough with their nonreligious beliefs to say it out loud. As the younger generations begin to age and get involved with the internal politics of the community and the nation, perhaps will we see more effort for inclusion. Religion has always had a place for the poor, women, people of color, society’s

“others.” Secularism and nonreligion is accepting of everyone, but not quite as hospitable.

The Possible Global Decline of the Nonreligious Population

The number of Americans who identify as nonreligious is still growing and has mirrored trends being observed in other nations. Regardless of this growth, Pew Research suggested in a 2017 study that in the future, the world population of religious nones is expected to decline in percentage. To clarify, the population of nonreligious will continue to grow, however it will occur at a much slower rate in regard to the growth of other religious groups (Pew 2017). The study, which includes demographic influences like age

47 and birth rates, shows that the nonreligious, who currently are predicted to make up 16% of the world population, will be nearly 13% by the midcentury. The study states that

The religiously unaffiliated population is projected to shrink as a percentage of the global population, even though it will increase modestly in absolute number. In 2015, there were slightly fewer than 1.2 billion atheists, agnostics and people who did not identify with any particular religion around the world. By 2060, the unaffiliated population is expected to reach 1.2 billion. But as a share of all people in the world, religious “nones” are projected to decline from 16% of the total population in 2015 to 13% in 2060. While the unaffiliated are expected to continue to increase as a share the population in much of Europe and North America, people with no religion will decline as a share of the population in Asia, where 75% of the world’s religious “nones” live (Pew 2017).

While in the United States the nonreligious population is mostly composed of 18-29 year olds, in a global setting the average age of nonreligious population is nearly 40 compared to 29 for the average age of religious constituents. Further, the Pew study noted that

“between 2010 and 2015, adherents of religions are estimated to have given birth to an average of 2.45 children per woman, compared with an average of 1.65 children among the unaffiliated.”

In recent years, the nonreligious population has been experiencing more births than deaths, which is heavily impacted by Pacific Asian areas, which feature the largest count of nonreligious/unaffiliated people. In the future, around 2030, deaths will outrank births for the nonreligious, as an aging population and low rate of fertility combine.

The study also took into account the amount of people who will leave faith in favor of nonreligious belief. In the United States the amount of previously religious who have switched to nonreligious belief is fueling the growth of the nonreligious population.

This is also true elsewhere in the world. Pew suggests that by mid-century the nonreligious population will grow by over 50 million from those leaving faith. These

48 numbers, while impressive, will still be no match for the negative influences of death and lower fertility rates (Pew 2017).

Several scholars have proposed that as more nations become financially advanced, their populations will tend to become less religious over time, as has been observed in Europe (primarily in the Scandinavian region). China is the biggest obstacle in relation to our ability to predict the future of the global population; this is because the data coming out is not totally reliable especially with regards to those who once had faith and then become nonreligious. Of the 16% of the world who currently do not claim religious belief, it is estimated that nearly 60% of that number comes from China alone.

However, it has been suggested that the nonreligious population is in decline in China, and the population in China who are religious is growing rapidly. Because of this the global decline of nonreligious may be much more than can be currently projected.

The decline of the nonreligious community globally, as it stands, is based strictly upon predicted changes in demography. It will need more research as time passes to see if there are any further triggers that may play into population size.

CHAPTER 5

IMPLICATIONS OF THE GROWTH OF THE NONRELIGIOUS POPULATION

Political and Economic Implications

The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, and arguably the most important, reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This Amendment begins by setting clear boundaries between the function of the government and the many, various religious institutions that exist within this country’s borders. This serves multiple purposes, one being that it does not allow the government to give favoritism to one religion over the other. Another purpose is that religious influence does not give way to a theocratic government, as this was what many who left England in search of the new world were seeking to escape. While many claim the United States to be a Christian nation, the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified in the late 18th century by

President John Adams, made clear that it is not. It states:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries (Treaty of Tripoli 1797).

By doing so, the Founding Fathers of this nation explicitly put forward that their focus was religious freedom, and not the idea of a state religion applying to all Americans.

Each person would have the right to choose whichever religion they followed, and the government would have no hand in this. The forefathers of this country made clear in an unambiguous sense that the United States was not a Christian nation. This treaty, which came to be just 10 years following the creation of the Constitution, guaranteed to the people of the United States, as well as the rest of the world, that this nation would be a secular state. This action said to the world that the proceedings of the government would not be dictated by the Christian faith, but rather would follow the rule of law.

Nonreligious Institutions versus Government in the United States

Nonreligious organizations have historically been portrayed in a negative light to the public eye, this being because the population of nonreligious in the United States has been miniscule at best, and a majority of the population adhere to religious belief systems. Chapter 3 briefly described a number of nonreligious organizations as a form of created community, however more significant than what they have done for the community, is how they have impacted American politics for the nonreligious population. The most widely known case of the negative public perception of nonreligious would be of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and the organization she founded,

American Atheists. O’Hair would become better known as “the most hated woman in

America” following a lawsuit against the Baltimore Public School system, where she challenged prayer in public schools. The lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court and in 1963 did end prayer in public schools (Murray v. Curlett 1962). American Atheists went on to challenge many of the various ways religion is imposed into public life, from

51 trying to have “In God we Trust” removed from currency to “One Nation Under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. O’Hair and the American Atheists were like an out of control train barreling into the conservative world of the 1960s and 70s. O’Hair liked the controversy and she liked to challenge the status quo in nearly theatrical ways, and this landed her on television on many accounts, providing atheists in America at least some, however negative, visibility.

In more recent years, other organizations have formed which follow in O’Hair’s footsteps regarding the shock factor value in making change. One organization is prominent in this category: The Satanic Temple. Contrary to the name, the Satanic

Temple is not a religious satanic organization, but rather uses its religious standing, and

Satan as a figurehead, to represent the tenets that Christianity rejects. Within the temple

Satan is not a deity or a literal figure, but rather an abstract representation for skepticism, rational thought, and for the power in truth within the organization. While the temple does have certain tenets it is not religious past the point of following a belief system focused on individuality. Many members of the church identify as atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious but spiritual (Satanic Temple “FAQ” n.d.). In this aspect the Temple is somewhat a faux-religious organization that seeks to exploit the power that religious organizations are given, with the following mission:

The mission of The Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will. Politically aware, civic-minded Satanists and allies in The Satanic Temple have publicly opposed The Westboro Baptist Church, advocated on behalf of children in public school to abolish corporal punishment, applied for equal representation where religious monuments are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women's reproductive autonomy, exposed

fraudulent harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners and claims in mental health care, and applied to hold clubs alongside other religious after school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations (Satanic Temple n.d.).

The Satanic Temple has been in the news on various occasions since its founding, most notably for challenging the state of Missouri in 2015 with both state and federal lawsuits on behalf of a pregnant woman who was seeking an abortion. Missouri passed a law that states that in order for a woman to lawfully have an abortion, she must be given reading material backing the religious ideology that a baby’s life begins at the moment of conception. In addition to the reading material, the woman, between her initial appointment and termination, must wait a 72-hour period. Lawmakers believed that this period would give the woman time to contemplate her decision before making rash choices. The Satanic Temple is in objection to this on what they claim is “religious grounds” because it violates one of their religious tenants that is of the inviolability of one’s body.

The Temple attempts to draw attention to the duality within the freedom of religion through irony. For example, another event that caught the eye of the public with the Satanic Temple was in 2013 when Florida’s governor Rick Scott signed a bill, Senate

Bill 98, allowing students to lead prayers at/during school assemblies at public schools.

The Satanic Temple showed up to lend their approval of the bill, as allowing students to pray in school meant they could pray to any religion, including Satanism. The temple also created a group called After School Satan which is an afterschool program created as an alternative to the publicly funded Good News Club, which is a Christian after school club.

The Satanic Temple has also challenged religious icons and statues on state and federal property. In 2012 Oklahoma state representative Mike Ritze was responsible for the erection of a monument of the Ten Commandments on the Oklahoma State Capital

Property. As a response to this the Satanic Temple began a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to build a monument of Baphomet next to the Ten Commandments.

Baphomet is a goat figure with both male and female anatomy, generally portrayed alongside symbology representative of the balance in opposites such as good and evil and has largely been aligned with the occult and Satanism. The Satanic Temple received enough money in crowdfunding to build the statue however the state refused the Satanic

Temple’s petition to build the monument on state ground. It seemed as though the pressure from the temple worked because not even a year later the Ten Commandments monument was removed after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that it violated the

United States constitution. The Baphomet statue, however, did wind up being built outside of the Detroit headquarters of the Satanic Temple, much to the protest and dismay of some members of the public (Jenkins 2015). The issue surrounding the statue presents this interesting challenge: at what point do religious statues become a pressure test in religious freedom making people feel uncomfortable?

The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a more forward and professional secular organization with a mission that stands on the foundation of

“protecting the constitutional principle of the separation of state and church.” The

Foundation was founded in 1976 by mother and daughter duo Anne and Annie Gaylor and has grown to include nearly 25,000 members. FFRF published a near monthly newspaper called Freethought Today which is the only nonreligious newspaper in North

America. The topics range in subject but attempts to open the communication the nonreligious community with articles like “Calling All Nonbelievers Out of the Closet.”

The newspaper features ads with statements such as “morality comes from reason, not dogma” “Which God do you not believe in? Me too!” to “this is what an atheist looks like” with an aesthetically pleasing young woman shining a bright smile (Barker 2011).

The organization has opened doors to other ventures such as the Clergy Project which has formed a support community for members of religious clergy as they step away from religion, as well as the philanthropic Nonbelief Relief which is an organization that brings nonreligious together to improve the planet through ending suffering and injustice. Their humanitarian efforts cover anything from natural disaster relief assistance to fighting for social equality. In 1999 the Freedom From Religion

Foundation incorporated the “Emperor Has No Clothes Award” which is based on Hans

Christian Anderson’s story of the emperor with no clothes where an emperor is told by tailors that the clothing they were selling was so fanciful that it could only be seen by the wisest people. The emperor bought the false story and purchased the ‘clothes’ and paraded around in public before he was called out by a child for not wearing clothing. For the award the organization choses people like the child who are not afraid to “tell it like it is.” Annually the award has gone to comedians, politicians, scientists, journalists, artists, and all types in between. Charity Navigator, a website that provides overall statistics and ratings for global charities, rated the Freedom From Religion Foundation at a 97.17% overall approval rating and four out of four stars. Nearly 90% of the money raised goes directly into the programs and services it delivers with just 10 percent going to the program expenses (Charity Navigator 2017).

Because of its mission to protect the constitution, the Freedom from Religion

Foundation has been involved in many legal battles, many with success but some without. This Foundation has been the center of a majority of the non-religious based lawsuits in the United Stated. According to the Legal Challenges Section of the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s website, the following are some of its more important victories:

1) Winning the first federal lawsuit challenging direct funding by the government of a faith based agency 2) Overturning Good Friday Holiday 3) Winning a lawsuit barring direct taxpayer subsidy of religious schools 4) Removing Ten Commandments monuments and crosses from public land 5) Halting the Post Office from issuing religious cancellations 6) Winning the first court order to a U.S. Cabinet revoking federal funds to a pervasively sectarian agency 7) Halting a government chaplaincy minister to state workers 8) halter prayer at public schools, institutions, and public financing or nativity pageants and Easter services 9) Stopped direct subsidy to religious schools 10) Stopped Job Corps trainees from being assigned to work on Catholic shrines 11) Ended a 122-year abuse of commencement prayers at Top Ten University 12) Declared unconstitutional the creation of a state post to “assist clergy” 13)Winning a legal challenge ending 51 years of illegal Bible instruction in Rhea County (Dayton, Tennessee) schools 14) Declaring Unconstitutional the creation of a state post to ‘assist clergy’ to save marriages 15) Stopping school subsidy of child evangelism 16) Removing a nativity scene from an entrance of a city hall 17) Forcing a mayor to suspend sponsorship of a Day of Prayer (FFRF n.d.).

The above represent some of the various cases that the Freedom From Religion

Foundation have succeeded with in making the United States a more secular nation.

However, the more important cases that have set precedence for an increase in

Establishment Clause lawsuits will be discussed further. All of the following has been found through the Freedom from Religion Foundations’ Legal Archives. In 2007 the

Freedom from Religion Foundation faced off in a lawsuit with the White House Office of

Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The organization argued that this was not a

56 constitutionally protected office, as the use of federal money to promote faith-based initiatives clashed with the Constitution’s First Amendment. The organization and its lawyers argued that conferences being put on by this office chose which religious organizations would be worthy of federal funding and while doing so the constituents of the office traveled the country promoting the funding of faith-based institutions (The

Hein Decision n.d.). The case, Hein v. FFRF, ended with a 5-4 ruling that stated that taxpayers do not have the power nor the right to contest the constitutionality of the executive branch in how/where it spends taxpayer money (Supreme Court 2007). Shortly after the closing of this case the Freedom from Religion Foundation found a victory in the courthouse when they contested the founding of an Indiana state funded chaplaincy pilot program provided through the state’s Social Services Administration. The state hired a Baptist minister to run the program and encourage a faith-based environment in the workplace. The Freedom from Religion Foundation’s chief concern was that this was quite literally a government funded program strictly involved in religious activities, for

Christians. Following the filing of the lawsuit, the state ended the chaplaincy pilot program, however it did not stop paying the minister who ran the program. The minister was placed on disability payroll until the FFRF made clear that it would not stop pursuing the lawsuit until the minister was removed from payroll, which happened just two months after the program ended (Banerjee 2007).

The Freedom from Religion Foundation has also been involved in the healthcare sector. In 2003, the FFRF sued the state of Montana’s Office of Rural Health, the head of the branch, David Young, the Montana Faith-Health Cooperative and Montana State

University in Bozeman. The lawsuit stated that Young gave preferential treatment to

57 religious nursing and medical programs in the disbursement of state funding. The state’s

Supreme Court found that Young, the Office of Rural Health, and the organizations named were in fact favoring and giving funding to religious programs which sought to integrate spirituality in the the health services sector. The court settled that “Young's actions on behalf of the MORH and MSU-Bozeman, in (1) direct and preferential government funding of parish nursing; and (2) subsidizing and endorsing the activities of the MFHC, violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution” (Freedom From

Religion Foundation 2004). Similar to this suit, the FFRF made a lawsuit against the

Department of Veteran Affairs after multiple complaints relating to the department questioning patients about religion and preforming assessments relating to spirituality.

The department also used rehabilitation programs that were faith based, and had chaplains treating patients. According to Nicholson v. FFRF (2008) this lawsuit was dismissed on the standing from the Hein case, that taxpayers could not challenge executive decisions.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation began to look to representing young people and students in the public-school systems. In the first case, in 2001, FFRF, acting for anonymous petitioners, placed a lawsuit against the Rhea County School District in

Graysville, Tennessee. The lawsuit stated that the public school was holding weekly bible classes that all students attended. After nearly three years the Court of Appeals (Sixth

District) found that this had been taking place, and was, indeed against the Establishment

Clause, as the school was teaching the Bible as truth to children as young as five years old (Doe v. Porter 2004). Another case, against the U.S. Department of Education, occurred due to the discovery that the federal government had been distributing funds to

58 the Alaska Christian College, one where students take strictly biblical schools in their first year and earn a certificate in Biblical Studies. Yearly, the school had been receiving nearly half a million dollars from the government. The lawsuit was settled that it was unconstitutional for the school to receive funds from the government, and the FFRF won the case (Lederman, 2005). Within the criminal justice system, in the case of Towey v.

Freedom from Religion Foundation, the FFRF sued the federal government for giving federal grants to MentorKids USA. This was a program that gave the children of prisoners mentors. It was alleged that the organization only hired Christians and would give reports on the children’s spiritual undertakings on a monthly basis. The lawsuit ended when the court found that the program did indeed violate the First Amendment as they were using government money to further religious influence.

Within the public sphere is where Freedom from Religion Foundation has had most of its combat. One of the biggest cases in the public sphere occurred in 1995 in

Wisconsin. At this point the state had mandated that Good Friday was a state legal holiday. The FFRF challenged this because it designated Christianity as the focus of the law, over abiding by the secular aspect of the First Amendment. The courts stood with

FFRF and the holiday was removed (FFRF v. Thompson 1996).

Most of the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s lawsuits have been related to the use of public property for religious displays. In Green Bay, Wisconsin in 2007 the

FFRF filed a lawsuit against the city due to the display of a nativity scene in front of the city hall. The Foundation got involved after it was approached by a group of citizens expressing their discomfort with a religious display on public property. Before the lawsuit got to trial the city took down the display and placed a moratorium on religious

59 displays on public land in the future. Because of this, the judge terminated the lawsuit due to lack of jurisdiction. As the display had already been removed, and the city put in place legislature to make sure it did not happen in the future, there was no longer a need for the suit (FFRF v. Green Bay 2008).

In 2011 the Freedom from Religion Foundation joined teams with the ACLU

(American Civil Liberties Union) in a lawsuit against Giles County School District in

Virginia. The suit was placed after the district placed a painting of the 10

Commandments of the Bible at schools in the district. The ACLU and FFRF both attempted to contact the schools a number of times before the lawsuit. At the point where the organizations began reaching out about the issue, the superintendent of the district ruled that the displays would be taken down. The school board met and overruled his decision and made the decision to leave the displays up. However, shortly after the lawsuit began, the district removed the Ten Commandment displays (Does v. School

Board of Giles County, 2012).

As the population of openly nonreligious people has continued to grow, so has the amount of upheaval in the public sector as far as issues concerning the Establishment

Clause. In 2017 alone, the Freedom from Religion Foundation has been involved in over

100 legal cases in the United States, ranging from removing religious promotion in schools to prohibiting creationism being taught as fact in the classroom (FFRF 2017).

Nonreligious Representation in the United States Government

As the non-religious are not well represented in most aspects of American life, it goes as such that they would be lacking representation in politics as well. The amount of openly-public non-religious and secular politicians is miniscule in comparison to the size

60 of the population they would represent. Speculations about religious affiliations have been made about politicians throughout the decades, specifically those who remain relatively silent about their personal lives including their religious beliefs. The reason to withhold this information is not completely unwarranted. A 2015 Gallup Poll looking at the population of the United States’ willingness to vote for presidents of certain background showed that atheists followed by socialists (which came in last) were the least likely to get voted into office. Atheists were only 57% likely to receive votes.

Interestingly, when this percentage is broken down into categories, Democrats (64%) and

18-29-year-olds (75%) were the most likely to show willingness to vote an atheist into office, which is representative of the growing nonreligious population (McCarthy, 2015).

Some of those nonreligious who do manage to make their way into office, not without the appropriate qualifications to do so, use their position to attempt to strengthen the separation between Church and State.

Out of the 535 members of Congress in 2017, only two members are unaffiliated.

With these numbers, not even half of a percent of Congress is nonreligious. The first openly unaffiliated member of Congress, Krysten Sinema, a 40-year-old Democrat from

Arizona, has not come forward outright as nonreligious, and keeps her beliefs private

(Sandstrom 2017). The second, Jared Huffman, a congressman of California, declined to state his religious affiliation for many years. He has stated that he believes religion is not an important part of the political process and that religion holds too much influence already. In 2017 in an interview with the Washington Post, Huffman shared that he is a humanist, and believes in living a life free of the supernatural where mankind works to better the world with ideals and morals based on reason. Huffman is only the second

61 congressman in history to openly announce they do not follow a God-based belief system. He follows in the footsteps of Pete Stark, a Democrat from California who, over a decade before, openly announced himself to be an atheist (Boorstein 2017).

Where the unaffiliated represent less than a percentage of the makeup of

Congress, representing nearly a quarter of the country’s population, over 90% of

Congress identify as followers of the Christian religion, while representing 70% of the country identifying as Christian (Burgess 2016). So, why is there such a large misrepresentation of the nonreligious in Congress and in politics in general? I suggest that this is due to the fact that while the entry age in the house is 25 and 30 for the senate, the nonreligious population is made up of a majority of young people, and the government does not reflect this as the average age is 57 years old in the House and 61 in the Senate (Manning 2016). It can be predicted that as the millennial age group begins being voted into office, there will be more nonreligious people entering politics.

Looking into voter age statistics, young people have lower rates in voting than their senior counterparts (Hopkins 2007). While few assumptions are made here, one could reason that with fewer young people voting than the older generations, and the nonreligious being more likely to vote for nonreligious politicians, this could provide the logical reasoning for a lack of representation in Congress. The opposite would be true as well: with older more religious populations more apt to vote, especially for religious candidates, there is less space for unaffiliated politicians. If we move from “nonreligious” to focus more narrowly on “atheists” the field gets even more narrow for politicians. In a

2014 poll by Pew titled “For 2016 Hopefuls, Washington Experience Could Do More

Harm than Good” polling found that just 5% of those who responded would be more

62 likely to give an atheist Presidential candidate their vote based on the candidate’s lack of belief, while 41% who said it wouldn’t matter. 53% of Americans who responded stated that if they discovered a Presidential candidate was an atheist, they were less likely to give that candidate their vote. While the presidential race and atheism are both more specific details, it provides an interesting look into the state of nonreligious politicians in the United States (Pew 2013). If people are statistically less likely to choose a candidate who is nonreligious based strictly upon his/her lack of belief, it is no surprise that candidates who are nonreligious would keep their disbelief a secret, or at least not be outright with it.

The challenges that have faced the nonreligious in the political sphere have not stopped some from both attempting and gaining political office over the years. In 2009

Cecil Bothwell of North Carolina’s Buncombe County became the first openly nonreligious member of Asheville, North Carolina’s city council. Shortly after he entered office, his legitimacy in the position was challenged by an opponent, as North Carolina’s

Constitution disallows atheists from holding public office. This was found to be in direct opposition to the Establishment Clause, as the Constitution does not allow religious tests for holding public office. Bothwell reasoned that his religious backing had no weight on how he would handle the office, as he was a strong believer in the morality of the Golden

Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In 2010 American Atheists bestowed Bothwell with the honor of being labeled as the most courageous elected official of the year, and Bothwell began frequenting non-religious organization conferences. Bothwell was reelected in 2013 to an overwhelming victory (Burgess 2016).

Ernie Chambers of the Nebraska State Senate was first elected in 1970, and then again successively for 35 years until the 2004 election when he was ineligible due to a law that passed in 2000 disallowing legislators in the state to run for more than two consecutive terms. A loophole in the bill, allowing senators to run for re-election after sitting out for a four-year period, allowed Chambers to run again, when he was reelected in 2012 by a landslide. Chambers, an open atheist, has used his lack of belief to challenge certain held practices such as “swearing to God” in oaths to office, and state funded chaplain programs (Chambers 2016).

Sean Faircloth is an openly secular and nonreligious activist, writer, and politician from Maine. He has served as a member of Maine’s House of Representatives from

1992-1994, the state Senate of the 9th District from 1994-1996, and again in Maine’s

House of Representatives from 2002- 2008. While he was serving in the legislative branch he worked on the Judiciary Committee and the Appropriations Committee, he sat as the mayor for Bangor, Maine until 2016 and now sits as a Bangor City Councilor.

Faircloth also served as the director of the Secular Coalition for America. The organization is a national lobby for nonreligious, humanists, freethinking Americans. His book, “Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All - and What We

Can Do About It” challenges the religious right’s attempt to influence the population with religion1. In an interview in 2012 on the podcast Skepticality, Faircloth stated "we can believe rationally all we want. But we have to face up to reality: in the last thirty years we have seen the rise of theocracy in this country like we've never seen before.

1Something deserving mention here is that Faircloth published a book called “The Enchanted Globe” in 2016. It is a fantasy fiction novel aimed towards educating children and young adults on the study of Geography.

They've been tremendously successful on the religious right” (Skepticality 2012). In this quote, Faircloth was seemingly putting out a call for other nonreligious Americans to become more involved in the political realm.

The politicians acting above, along with the likes of Rep (D) Pete Stark (1973-

2013), the first openly atheist member of Congress, governor Jesse Ventura (1999-2003), who announced in 2011 that he is an atheist, and a number of others, have advocated for nonreligious people in this country and have been champions for the Constitution. The nonreligious want more representation. According to the Huffington Post (Wing 2013):

On Wednesday [September 9], the Center for Humanist Activism launched a political action committee, hoping to turn the tide. The Freethought Equality Fund PAC is being billed as the first non- theist PAC with a full-time paid staff. The PAC will back humanist, atheist and agnostic candidates at all levels of government. Freethought’s coordinator, Bishop McNeill, told The Huffington Post that it would also be open to supporting candidates who identify with a religion if they are committed to protecting the separation of church and state and defending the civil liberties of secular Americans. Nonbelievers have expressed concerns about religious lawmakers who are hostile to legislation based on scientific research because it conflicts with their faith. “Whether we recognize it or not, Americans are held captive to the will of Religious Right leaders who remind us of our inferior position by using the power of government to enforce laws that put truth claims about religion in front of us at every turn,” Maggie Ardiente, Freethought’s director of development and communications, said at the group’s press conference Wednesday morning at the National Press Club. “We have to spend our tax dollars on schools in most states where educators refuse to teach that the evidence massively supports a theory of evolution that unites everything we know about biology” (Wing 2013).

Moving into the economic impacts of the nonreligious community, the so-called

“economic sphere” effectively designates that economic undertakings throughout time are distinct from other societal undertakings and because of this tend to function by their own governing rules/laws. This would imply that societal morality should be in a different sphere than that of the economy and economic development. Secularism in the

65 economy takes shape in many forms: from disallowing religious organizations the ability to make political donations, to taxing religious institutions, both things that are not currently happening in the United States. These are just the very basic influences of secularism in the economy. According to the Pew Research Center survey, the nonreligious population view religious organizations as concentrated on money, politics, and power (Pew 2012). As we see the nonreligious population participating more in the political arena, I expect we will also witness their effect on the economic sphere as well.

Registered religious organizations in the United States function as tax-free institutions, meaning that all of the income is not being taxed. The economic value of religion in the United States is monumental at over $1.5 trillion annually, according to a study conducted by Georgetown University (Brown 2016). When we figure taxes into these numbers, the United States is losing about $78 billion in tax revenue annually from religious organizations including places of worship, charitable organizations, and educational institutions.

In a more global look at secularism in the economy, a study by biopsychologist

Nigel Barber found that religion assists people in managing, psychologically, unsafe or erratic circumstances. Barber predicted that the nonreligious population would grow as the population gains a better ability to endure some of the more unforgiving aspects of inequality that humans experience, through enhanced scientific comprehension, rapid growth in technologies, increases in personal wealth, access to food, access to education, and a focus on the rule of law, with more unified governments at the center. Barber noted that religious faith would weaken in countries with stable economic growth where the population feels more “existential security” - a combination of economic well being and

66 improved health of the population. Barber tested this theory in the analysis of nearly 140 countries. The study found, as predicted, that less people reported belief in God as they began to feel more existentially secure (Barber 2011).

Socio-cultural Implications of the Nonreligious Community

The use of the term nonreligious in this paper is a blanket and flexible term as the population of religious “nones” is not explicitly one category (i.e. atheist or agnostic), but is filled with a wide range of nonbelievers. The use of a more static term would leave out the varying elements of culture within this group. Nonreligious is a term that can describe the atheist or the agnostic, but also can apply to humanists, secularists, and other nonreligious categories that individuals may apply to themselves. In this way the nonreligious are simple Godless people who are reluctant to believe in dogmatic theory or religious ideologies. Too many studies focus on the way in which atheists reject religion, and how they are moving away from faith, and not, rather, the fact that they are simply irreligious and moving toward a nonreligious culture with experiences that can be constructive and tangible. On the study of the nonreligious as a culture, previous research has been focused on a narrow field. Blanes et al. (2017) notes

First and second waves of research into secularism, non-religious atheism, and other non-religious 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 Engelkes 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, representational modes of atheism is vastly

overshadowed by the number associated with implicit, non- representational modes (Lee, forthcoming). I argue that although they are often less tangible or explicit, these more diffuse forms of symbolic representation also shape social life and require scholarly attention (Blanes et al. 2017).

The notion of a nonreligious presence has a noteworthy but off-center manifestation in popular culture in the United States. As mentioned previously in this paper, the nonreligious are becoming more visible through work in politics and in other ways such as popular blogs, billboards, and so forth. These instances exemplify how depictions stemming from nonreligious groups are circulated more extensively in socio-cultural space. Within the nonreligious field there are many ways people self-represent themselves. As mentioned throughout this paper, humanists, secularists, Satanists, atheists, agnostics, and spiritual but not religious people all fall within this nonreligious category. Creating well-defined systems of self-representation is not the only means of being heard, because refusing to acknowledge a form of representation can also be used as a way of making an otherwise unusual position seem usual. However, being represented is nonetheless a substantial technique of gaining visibility, and it can be exceptionally effective in certain settings and situations. Thus, the lack of a notable amount of representation in popular culture as well as in academia can be both encouraging and discouraging.

Within multi-faith societies, inadequate understanding of the images put forth by the nonreligious culture, whether upfront, or less clear, is one of the biggest issues within the socio-cultural boundaries of the religious and nonreligious discourse. Regardless of whether or not the “faces” of the nonreligious movement (politicians, heads of organizations, outspoken nonreligious, etc.) are influential or not, one issue facing the

68 socio-cultural status of the nonreligious community is that they do not have the historical deeply cultural identities and shared traditions that the religious communities do. In the cultural landscape this presents inequalities to the nonreligious population in terms of representation in socio-cultural studies.

Future studies have the ability to make major leaps in contributions to the study of the nonreligious community, such as focusing on diversity, inclusion, and the continued creation of a community that began mostly through social media and is now becoming a physical community, because they could focus on the indirect social systems that are often unseen, even to those who live within the community itself. Other researchers in various fields have called for more comprehensive studies on the study of the nonreligious populations (Blanes et al. 2017). The future study of largely ambivalent nonreligious culture puts forth several challenges, including the necessity for future research to look at this community as the unique and elastic form it takes.

For this thesis, the socio-cultural impacts of the nonreligious, beyond that of their political influence, remains an area that needs more focus as the population continues to grow and their influence continues to spread.

CHAPTER 6

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Geographers have a rich history of studying religion across the globe. Human geographers often study the spatiality of religion through pilgrimage and migration paths, sacred spaces, religious landscapes, the diversity within religion, and the ways that religion molds society and is thus molded by society (Park 1994). The study of those who are not of religious belief, the nonreligious or “nones,” has been largely understudied, especially within the field of geography. The lack of research conducted on the nonreligious population speaks to the normalization of religious belief in society, likely because the nonreligious represent a somewhat minor and stigmatized, though growing and active, percentage of the population. The deficiency of research on the nonreligious population in the human geography subfield is unexpected as geography is largely a secularized field. This does not mean, of course, that all geographers are nonreligious, because that would be a generalized untruth.

Over the past decades there have been projections that religion would dissipate from relevancy due to globalization and modernization. More recent surveys show that this is happening at a much higher rate than expected. Globally, some nations in Europe such as the United Kingdom, Netherlands and France are on the brink of becoming mainstream secular societies, as are other nations like Australia and New Zealand (Davie

2002). In countries where faith has influenced nearly every aspect of life, from art and

70 architecture to political leaders, religion is losing its influence. The United States is witnessing this population growth as well, though at a slower rate than other areas. Much like the divisions among religion, those amongst the nonreligious population are just as intricate, with some identifying as atheist, agnostic, nonbelievers, unbelievers, skeptics, and so forth. With a focus on skepticism, scientism, and materialism, the nonreligious nones have created a community that unifies them.

Nominally, throughout the history of the United States, the majority of Americans identified themselves as followers of the Christian religion. In certain areas, such as the so-called Bible Belt of the American South, the demographics of religious to nonreligious have not budged much. In fact, in a third of the states the religious nones make up a majority of the population (Jones 2017). The Public Religion Research Institute took a sample of a hundred thousand American adults and created a state to state demographic study of religion and nonreligion. Religious nones, while there are patterns, come from a varied background with respect to education, income, and race. The study showed that the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast leaned heavily towards secularism. Christianity still represents the largest demographic of religion in the United States, but the unaffiliated are starting to make their mark on this era of American history.

In the United States, the nonreligious population has been in the process of forming its own community since the mid-20th century. The creation of organizations such as the American Humanist Association and American Atheists in the mid-1900s helped make the nonreligious population more visible in mainstream society. These organizations laid the foundation for the various ways that the nonreligious have created their own community through use of social media, conferences, conventions, and the

71 many social groups that now exist. The growing population of nonreligious, working together on a united front, such as with the numerous legal battles of the Freedom from

Religion Foundation, are challenging the ways that religion is intertwined within the socio-political sphere.

While the nonreligious population often brings to mind a number of typecasts such as anarchist activists, rich white men, or nerdy youth going to conventions, nonreligious Americans come from a broad range of backgrounds. Due to their growing population and the increasing influence on society, the nonreligious community may need to be more intersectional when it comes to the ability to be more inclusive as a whole.

This means not only being accepting of the diversity within the community, but also making efforts to foster this diversity as a standard for what the community could be. Due of the fact that the nonreligious community lacks the general community building foundations that other groups have (community centers, churches, and so forth), the community that they are creating can be much more challenging to measure and survey.

It has become what feels almost cliché at this point to point out, again, the necessity for more research on the topic of the nonreligious in the United States. The research and studies that do already exist on the nonreligious population only cover a small fraction of what the nonreligious community has to offer those of us who study social sciences. Most of the research in academia on the nonreligious population comes from the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history, but little comes from geographers. Those studies that have been conducted are indeed exciting and offer a good framework for what is becoming a large and diversified community within today’s society.

The acknowledgment of nonreligion as a substantial social, cultural, and political community signifies a major change in the way social sciences should be viewing religion in contemporary society. One of the big issues that needs to be focused on as the study of this population continues to grow is the need for proper terminology. In this study, I chose to use the terms “nonreligious” and “nones” as blanket terms to capture all people who do not claim religious dogma as a part of their life. What I found in my research is that there is no unified terminology among people who are studying this subject, leading to what sometimes felt as inconsistent data as the terms “nonreligious”

“atheist” “agnostic” “nones” and others like this were used interchangeably, but not necessarily being representative of all nonreligious people. For the studies in this field to move forward in a unified manner, the use of “nonreligious” would allow future research to be more detailed and exact in studying the atheists, agnostics, secularists, and so forth as different groups within the larger study of the nonreligious population.

Perhaps with more focused and unified studies being conducted on the growing nonreligious population within human geography, and within other social science fields as well, this marginalized group of people within society will become more visible. With more visibility brings the possibility of eradicating the stigmas associated with being a nonbeliever, and thus the assumptions and negative stereotypes may begin to falter as well. As has been shown from the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey, most people who are out with their nonreligious beliefs have felt discriminated against

(Kosmin et al. 2009). This has led to an unwelcoming and underrepresented climate for the average nonreligious American in the United States. Future research allows the possibility to change the general understanding of the nonreligious population in the

United States from being seen as untrustworthy heathens to a representation much more accurate to a community of people who have often been at the forefront of the fight for religious freedom for all, instead of the few.

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