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This chapter focuses on material and symbolic non-religious representations, calling particular attention to the banal forms that surround people in contemporary England, as, perhaps, elsewhere. These incarnations of the non-religious often seem unremarkable and yet they establish and reproduce non-religious norms as well as secularist ones. This taken-for-grantedness is perhaps especially powerful when it comes to material non-religion, not only because people in Western cultural contexts are more attuned to intellectual aspects of non-religion over other dimensions, but also because people often take the material world for granted in general. Recognizing the diversity of material forms of non-religion therefore opens up new ways of understanding these cultures beyond the intellectual and, in considering the mundaneness of these forms, shows how what is ostensibly secular may have non-religious currents running beneath.

This chapter explores the challenging and contested idea of a secular body. It considers how distinguishing between non-religiosity, secularism, and secularity helps identify distinct forms of embodiment, variously manifest in modes of dress, physical habits, and attitudes. In a continued effort to recognize forms of non-religiosity that have not yet been given much attention (or even conceived of), this chapter highlights ways in which people infer non-religiosity through different types of absence—the notable absence of religious modes of dress or practice, the combination of religious representations from which non-religious meanings are emergent, the objectified sense of freedom from obstacle between people sharing non-religious norms—the real presence of which is only visible when these practices are disrupted in some way.

Despite widespread, wide-ranging and often straightforward, easily graspable criticisms of its core premises, the idea that religion and science are opposed to one another has proved remarkably resilient. Given how easy the notion is to rebut, it is not therefore the theoretical question (How are religion and science opposed to one another, if at all?) but the empirical one (What is the basis of this problematic binary and its hold over popular and scholarly imaginations?) that is arguably the most compelling.The goal of this chapter is to consider this question from the perspective of non-religion and secularity studies (Bullivant and Lee 2012), focusing in particular on the relationship between science and non-religiosity. It builds on ideas arising from critical secular studies and critical religion studies, both of which challenge the idea that science mainly impacts on religion epistemically, and instead draw attention to the ideological and mythological roles that science plays in the subjectivities, identities and cultures of non-religious people.The chapter uses the UK as a case study for understanding the role of science within non-religious cultural formations found more widely, especially across Europe and other Western regions.The aim of this chapter is to contribute to – and further encourage – the more localised and detailed empirical explorations of perceived non-religion/science affinity that are just beginning to emerge.

Understanding the secular population requires differentiating between people who are not religious (defined by what they are not) and those who are secular (defined by what they are). Non-religiosity is measured as the absence of the usual markers of religiosity—no religious affiliation, no religious attendance, and so on. Secularism is defined with new measures that reflect whether someone has a secular identity, receives guidance from secular sources, and has a secular worldview. Distinguishing between nonreligious and secular Americans reveals that they have very different levels of civic engagement. The former are civically disengaged, while the latter are often engaged in civic activity. Since both religionists and secularists share a high level of participation in civil society, it suggests the possibility of building bridges between them. But making such social connections will require conscious effort to overcome mutual suspicion.

This book’s core question is whether ‘not religious’ people are characterized and identifiable by their lack of engagement with religion or whether they are influenced by sensing or performing their difference from religious others. Are they meaningfully non-religious or are they largely indifferent to matters of religion? To what extent should unreligious rituals and practices be understood independently of religion if they have religious equivalents or antecedents? If they are developed in contradistinction to religious cultures, is it sufficient to understand them as insubstantially areligious, post-religious, or secular, rather than as substantively non-religious? This chapter sets out the distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘non-religious’ upon which these questions rely, and explores how it might be possible to move from an overly inclusive and therefore slippery notion of secularity to a more specific set of concepts.

This chapter clarifies the core conceptual argument of the book, and presents the wider, relational vocabulary in which it is embedded. The vocabulary also provides one way of distinguishing and managing the multiple relationships with religion that terms like ‘secularity’, ‘non-religion’, ‘secularism’, ‘atheism’, and ‘non-theism’ are supposed to describe. This terminological work is useful in its own right, but it is also bound up with the theoretical problems that the book investigates, in which the insubstantial, purely analytical notions of secularity are confused or conflated with concrete non-religious forms. The relational vocabulary developed provides a solution to those problems, facilitating the ways of recognizing the non-religious and reimagining the secular that the book proposes.

This chapter outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the notions of the secular as insubstantial and as substantial, as well as highlighting theoretical questions that preconceived notions of the secular have obscured. It draws out tensions between rival accounts of the secular as substantial and insubstantial that have rarely been articulated. It shows how problematic assumptions about the secular are rooted in established areas of theory—including secularization theory, rational choice theory, and postcolonial and critical accounts of the categories ‘religion’, ‘secular’, and ‘secularism’—but demonstrates also how these literatures provide resources for approaching secularity and non-religion in new research methodologies.

This chapter focuses on the social side of ‘secularity’, demonstrating how non-religious engagements with religion structure social relations in positive and negative ways. It shows how people’s religious, spiritual, non-religious, and secularist knowledge and situated identities become visible when they recall social encounters. Building on the idea of everyday, banal non-religiosity, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which non-religious cultures are shared between people at certain moments and become part of the tacit knowledge that mediates their ongoing relationships. While participating in organized non-religious activity remains relatively marginal in the UK, non-religiosity therefore contributes to the ‘hidden solidarities’ of everyday social relations and friendship. These forms of solidarity are less visible than centralized and institutional ones, as are the cultural forms that mediate them, but they nevertheless structure daily lives.

This chapter is a case study of self-classification, looking at representations of the self as ‘atheist’, ‘non-religious’, and ‘secular’, and the work that these representations do. It points to ways in which people in so-called secular societies are required to conceive of themselves in non-religious terms, that is, in relation to the religious people and cultures also present in these societies. It problematizes the idea of ‘secularity’ as a way to capture these empirical realities, demonstrating how the idea of the insubstantial secular is instead inscribed in self-understandings and social relations through the use of negative or inverted identities—‘atheist’, ‘not religious’, and ‘indifferent to religion’. Despite taking these forms, though, apparently negative identities express much richer and discrete commitments and therefore compete with more explicitly positive identities such as ‘humanism’.

Having established the existence and array of visual, spatial, material, and embodied forms of non-religiosity, of the relationships and patterns of association informed by it, and of self-understandings and personal and political practices of self-classification and identification, this chapter focuses on belief. It demonstrates the existential threads that run through and appear to determine non-religious cultures in significant ways. It considers how existential positions are expressed in ideas and beliefs and are bound up with the material, social, and symbolic. The chapter shows how the philosophical gives form to these existential cultures, but also that these philosophical threads are experienced aesthetically and communally as well as intellectually. Demonstrating that existential cultures are refracted through religious and spiritual as well as non-religious cultures, this chapter argues that the study of existential cultures provides opportunities for developing new inclusive approaches to the study of religion.

The Introduction suggests there are multiple ways of recognizing the non-religious in society and rethinking our idea of secularity in light of this. This concluding chapter revisits the notion of the secular, showing how recognizing non-religion as autonomous from it draws attention to implicit but long-standing questions about how the two relate. Shifts in thinking about non-religion and secularity have immediate implications—empirical, methodological, theoretical, and political, and this chapter also considers the central ones of these. It is also full of questions, because recognizing the non-religious and reformulating the idea of secularity points to multiple configurations of the religious, spiritual, non-religious, areligious, secular, and secularist—and about which there will be very much more to say.