What does it mean to be nonreligious? One of the most notable trends in the study of religion today is the growing number of people who claim no religious affiliation. In the early 1990s, only about 7 per cent of respondents to the US General Social Survey would choose “none of the above” when asked to pick a religion. In 2018, about 23 per cent of respondents chose this option.

This trend toward religious disaffiliation has spurred interest across the social sciences – in sociology (Zuckerman, 2011; Hout and Fischer, 2002, 2014; Manning, 2015; Edgell et al, 2006, 2016; Schnabel and Bock, 2017; Frost, 2019; Smith and Cragun, 2019; Thiessen and Wilkins-Laflamme, 2020), political science (Layman and Weaver, 2016; Brockway, 2018), psychology (Silver et al, 2014; Gervais and Najle, 2018), and history (Schmidt, 2016). It is also more than an academic curiosity. When I tell people that I study this group I am often met with a knowing nod or an excited “That's me!” as people realize their own personal experiences fit into a larger social fact.

The unaffiliated are also entering public life, and many different interest groups want to claim them. Organizations like American Atheists and the American Humanist Association talk about this trend as if their ranks are swelling. Faith-based groups take it as evidence they need to redouble their efforts to welcome back disaffected believers who are unsatisfied with religious institutions. The unaffiliated are a substantive portion of the Democratic Party, but some have strong ties to independent or libertarian politics (Cimino and Smith, 2014). One of the most notable nonreligious advocacy groups was even run by a former Republican staffer and center-Right lobbyist.

This wide-ranging research base and public conversation create a challenge for studying the unaffiliated: being nonreligious means many different things to different people. This is an interpretive problem. There are many specific subgroups to study, including atheists, agnostics, people who say they are “spiritual but not religious,” and those who call themselves “nothing in particular.” There are many traits to study, including demographic and personality characteristics, beliefs, practices, and political views. Finally, there are a range of public frames for making sense of this trend in larger social context.