Contemporary nonreligion in Britain and the USA: theoretical and empirical studies

The eight texts comprising the main body of this PhD submission each address empirical and/or theoretical questions in the sociology of religion and, more specifically, in its nascent subfield of nonreligion.1 This relatively recent academic coinage is a deliberately broad term – ‘a general definition that qualifies it as the master or defining concept for the field’ (Lee 2012a: 130) – that principally refers to ‘Phenomena primarily identified in contrast to religion, including but not limited to those rejecting religion’ (Bullivant and Lee 2016). It thus includes a wide range of social and cultural manifestations of atheism, agnosticism, indifference, nonreligiosity (e.g., religious non-practice and non-affiliation), secularity, and other ‘religion-adjacent’ topics. In more concrete terms, the specific instances of ‘nonreligion’ treated herein include: the various meanings of such core terms as ‘atheism’ and ‘atheist’, by both scholars and the wider public (not least with a view to interpreting social surveys which employ these terms); the socio-cultural causes and reception of the New Atheism, and what clues it gives about the prevailing religious ‘temperature’ in its host cultures; the prevalence, growth over time, and demographic profile of those who identify as having ‘no religion’ (nones, the nonreligious), according to major national social surveys; and the extent, causes, and effects of lapsation, disaffiliation, and ‘nonversion’ within the Catholic Church, as a case-study of how wider trends of secularization have played out concretely at the meso-level of particular denominations. In addition to ‘constitut[ing] a substantial original contribution to knowledge’ (University of Warwick 2017: 3.4) within the sociology of nonreligion, I hope that 1 Although not part of the main doctoral submission, the Appendix to this portfolio features relevant excerpts from my and Lois Lee’s Oxford Dictionary of Atheism (2016), and is intended to serve as a ‘Glossary of Technical Terms’. In this covering document, those terms which receive a definition in the Appendix are given in bold on their first appearance. ii this portfolio also demonstrates the theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions this subfield can make to the wider concerns of the sociology of religion.