Is It Possible to Be Non-Religious in the United States?
Brad is joined by Dr. Joe Blankholm, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. They discuss his new book, the Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Non-Religious.
The Secular Paradox: https://nyupress.org/9781479809509/the-secular-paradox/
Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I happen to have a guest from my alma mater, UCSB, and that is Dr. Joe Blankholm, who is Associate Professor of Religious Studies there.
Joe, thanks for joining me.
Thank you, Brad.
It's really great to be here, and I'm excited for this conversation.
So we're here to talk about your brand new book, which has just dropped into the world, and that is called The Secular Paradox on the Religiosity of the Not Religious.
As I said, Joe is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UCSB, has his PhD from Columbia University, and is also the co-lead on a really cool project I wish we had more time to talk about, and that's a Templeton funded project.
And it's one that, Joe, this is really cool.
I mean, you're basically researching and talking to hundreds of families who the project has been talking to since the 1970s.
And you're basically trying to find ways to track and research religion and spirituality and non-religion in the United States during a time when people are becoming, in some markers at least, or some ways less spiritual, or their religiosity is harder to kind of track and notice.
And that's something we've talked about on this show.
And so that's a really cool project.
I hope we can have you back at some point to talk about what you find there and when all that wraps up.
Today, however, the secular paradox on the religiosity of the not religious.
This is an amazing book.
You're one of a handful of people who I consider social science experts on the not religious in the United States.
It's an understudy topic.
It's a very tricky field of study to get into because it's very hard to kind of find ways as we just talked about to research and to understand this demographic.
It's also one that has been in many ways ignored by religious studies departments, anthropology departments and others.
And so let me let me just start here.
You talk about a secular paradox in the sense that there's a tension between what secular people do share and do not share with their religious counterparts.
And so if you're a secular person, What I take away from your book is you're often trying very hard to get away from religion.
You might be an atheist, you might be a free thinker, you might be somebody who grew up religious and have said, hey, I'm saying no to all that.
However, I do want community.
I do want tradition.
I do even want ritual, because those things are ways that I can make meaning of my life.
And yet, when I do that, when I try to form a secular community or a secular Sunday school or a secular meeting group, I often repeat some of those elements or those patterns that are coded religious in this country.
Is, in your mind, that a fair description of what you call the secular paradox and the tension that lies at the heart of not being religious in the United States?
Yeah, I think that that gets to the heart of it.
One of the things that's important to think about when doing social science, doing anthropology, doing sociology, is that I have to understand people how I find them.
I don't get to go in after the fact and tell them, well, this is the right atheism.
This is the right secularism.
This is the right way to be not religious.
I have to make sense of the variety of ways in which people actually live their lives.
And it's very humbling for me.
It means I have to think about my own self and my assumptions, and it's taught me so much.
And so, what I realized, as paradoxical as it sounds, is that spending an enormous amount of time with secular people of all different kinds, they're absolutely not religious, and they're very religion-like, and they're sometimes religious.
There are people I talk to who will literally say to me, I put this hat on when I'm anti-religious and I put this hat on when I'm religious.
And that means really complicated things for them.
So as someone who's going around and talking to people, I have to confront the contradictions of life, but I also have to accept that they're only contradictions from a certain perspective that tries to impose a tidy order on living.
And so starting there, I think things look a different way.
And it's exciting to try to make sense of that variety.
I can use an example to try to demonstrate the problem that you've outlined really well.
I like to think through examples.
They really challenge us.
So in 2018, I was at a secular Dia de Muertos event at a restaurant in Los Angeles.
And there's so many interesting things that happened at that event.
But one of them that really struck me is had a profound effect on me.
I've talked to so many really smart and interesting people.
There's a woman who told me, you know, we're still humans who need each other and mark times in our lives with rituals, but we have none of the superstition and religion that normally goes along with an event like this.
So they want to do things that might seem religious.
They don't want to live solely in religion's remainder.
People want weddings.
People want memorial services.
Maybe they have kids and they want something like Sunday school.
Maybe they want to send their kids to a summer camp.
Maybe they want to get together with other people who share ideas like theirs about the world and what's real.
And maybe they live in a place where most of the people around them are evangelicals and ask them questions like, what church do you go to when they run into them at the grocery store?
And so how do people live without living in the small space that's left over after you've scrubbed every single aspect of religion from your life?
You end up living a little paradoxically.
And the reason is that Christianity has such a big influence on our culture.
It really sets the table.
I arrive in this world midstream.
I don't speak a language that I invented.
I speak a language that's come before me and I think through its concepts.
And boy, they're very Christian.
We can see it all over the place.
So I don't get to think without Christianity, and I don't really get to be outside of religion.
And I know it's paradoxical, and I know it sounds like a contradiction, but here's what we encounter over and over again, and it explains an awful lot, and I really like the explanatory power.
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