Ariela Keysar

On the Receiving End: Discrimination toward the Non-Religious in the United States

The present study examines perceived discrimination faced by religious ‘nones’. After distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones’ who are deists or theists, we use nationally representative data from the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) to study the contexts in which these various types of religious ‘nones’ have reported experiencing discrimination. The strongest predictor of such discrimination was not theological atheism or agnosticism but self-identifying as an atheist or agnostic when asked what ones religion is. Context-specific predictors of discrimination are age, region of the country, rural versus urban location, parents’ religious identifications, educational attainment, ethnicity and race. Results are consistent with the view that people who hold more pronounced views are more likely to report discrimination.

American Jewish Secularism: Jewish Life Beyond the Synagogue

This chapter goes beyond asking whether a Jewish identity can exist independently of religion in the contemporary United States. American Jews have already answered that question in the affirmative. The chapter documents and illustrates the richness of today’s secular Jewish culture and expressions of Jewishness beyond religion by exploring how a multitude of trends—intellectual, social, demographic and political—are broadening and transforming Jewish identity and identification in twenty-first century America. Pluralistic market forces and the new information technology provide increasing opportunities for expressions of Jewish secularism and the formation of new forms of community.

Atheism and Secularity

Phil Zuckerman attempts an ambitious mission as editor of the two-volume Atheism and Secularity. The first volume is Issues, Concepts and Definitions, the second is Global Expressions. Zuckerman writes in the introduction that the volumes’ authors hope to enrich the study of ‘‘irreligiosity with the same level of interest and rigor that social scientists have devoted to studying the topic of religiosity for well over a century’’ (vii). While valuable and needed, these volumes do not quite live up to Zuckerman’s goals. The first volume presents the relationship between atheism and secularity and puts the two in the context of an assortment of topics of great interest to social scientists, including gender, family and children, morality, and immorality. Other chapters cover a brief history of American atheism; a contemporary portrait of secular group affiliates in the Pacific Northwest; and Jay Demerath III’s account of his expert-witness testimony on the constitutional legitimacy of the Church of Body Modification as a ‘religion’. The second volume contains insights into secularity and atheism in Japan, China, Ghana, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, countries of the former Soviet Union, North America, and the Arab world (although not France, the bedrock of laı̈cité). The two volumes illustrate the richness and relevance of atheism and secularity as an area of study around the world, both historically and in contemporary societies. The volumes’ main flaws are partisanship and disorganisation. As the editor, Zuckerman ought to be sensitive to the risk of lapsing into advocacy for atheism and secularity. In places, some authors seem openly hostile to religion, as in this passage by Gregory S. Paul, ‘‘the United States is the only First World nation to retain primitive Second and Third World levels of popular religiosity because it is the only one to retain the primitive Second and Third World levels of socioeconomic dysfunction that are needed to sustain mass theism’’ (Vol. 1, 175). What’s more, the organising principle of the two volumes is loose, so they sometimes feel like a grab bag rather than a coherent whole. A summary chapter by Zuckerman would have helped.

Socio-Economic Characteristics and Life Expectancies in Nineteenth-Century England: A District Analysis

This paper presents an analysis of levels of life expectancy and their patterns of change among six socio-economically differentiated sub-populations of England and Wales for the period 1851–1911. Differences in mortality levels among these sub-groups and their rates of change are analyzed with respect to three groups of explanatory variables, viz., environmental, stratification and demographic variables. Their relative importance for different periods is assessed and discussed. The findings show consistency with two previous studies, which have suggested that medical advances had little effect on the increase in life expectancy during the second half of the nineteenth century. The present paper supports the results of one study in that public health measures affected life expectancies earlier, while subsequently, the increase in standards of living was more important.

Secular Education and the Religious Profile of Contemporary Black and White Americans

This paper deals with the relationships among social status, race, and religion in the contemporary United States. The religious data came from the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification and a sub-sample of 84,469 non-Hispanic white and 8,859 non-Hispanic black adult respondents distributed across 14 religious groups. Educational attainment, i.e., high school and college graduation rates, was used as a measure of social status. Three issues were examined. First, does the historical pattern of social ranking among religious groups still exist in the 1990s? Second, do African-Americans fit the dominant pattern? Third, do national white-black educational disparities occur across all religious groups?

Filling a data gap: the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) series

Abstract The last US government survey that collected information on religious identification was in 1957. Since then researchers have relied solely on non-governmental data sources, primarily the General Social Survey. This paper shows how the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) series has deepened understanding of religious identification in the past two decades with its large samples (113 713 in 1990, 50 280 in 2001, and 54 461 in 2008) and its unique open-ended religion question. Giving respondents a chance to name their own religion, if any, allows researchers to identify and study small religious groups, which are placed together under ‘other’ in typical national studies. By using a consistent research methodology, the ARIS surveys form a time-series that enable tracking trends. The paper describes two case studies: how the ARIS series documented the rise of the Nones and how it tracked shifts in religious identification among American Latinos.

Education, Gender, and Ethnicity in Religious and Non-religious Populations in the United States: A Response to James Lewis

Abstract This comment extends the analysis proposed by James Lewis in his research note in the May 2015 issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Looking at data from the United States, the normalization of non-religiosity is explored. It is concluded that, while those identifying as atheist or agnostic are clearly of higher education and income levels, most of the generic ‘nones’, who are simply unaffiliated but may hold religious beliefs, are closer to the mainstream.

Freedom of Choice: Women and Demography in Israel, France, and the United States

Despite progress, women continue to suffer from economic and social inequality even in modern Western societies. Traditional religion plays a major role in perpetuating gender inequality by restricting women’s freedom of choice in reproductive behavior. The United Nations Statistics Division publishes a Gender Inequality Index. Although Israel, France, and the United States are all considered “very high human development” nations, their gender equality rankings are far apart. In 2011, the United Nations ranked the United States number 47, Israel 22, and France 10. The index is a composite measure “reflecting inequality in achievements between women and men in three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and the labor market.”1 The United Nations compares demographic variables, socioeconomic standing, and female representation in national parliaments around the globe.

The Persistence of American Secular Judaism: Jewish Millennials

This paper demonstrates that for many Jewish millennials Jewish life outside the synagogue is rich and vibrant. Jewish millennials, it shows, express Jewish pride and Jewish peoplehood even though they do not demonstrate strong religious bonds with their heritage. A case study of American Jewish college students reveals a wide variety of Jewish life outside the synagogue. This generation has been exposed to the major societal transformations of American Jewry, especially intermarriage. The paper explores predictors of secular Jewish identity. Utilizing a multivariate analysis, we discover that the most important predictor of a chosen identity in young adulthood is religious versus secular upbringing.

The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies. By Phil Zuckerman, Luke W. Galen, and Frank L. Pasquale: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. 327 pp.

The authors of The Nonreligious set an ambitious goal for themselves: to advance in significant ways the “emerging enterprise of secular studies” (p. 3) The outcome is a valuable contribution for s...