For Week 9’s instalment of the social anthropology seminar series on ‘Understanding Ethics in Our Changing World’, Dr Lois Lee, Research Fellow in the Religious Studies school at the University of Kent, introduced her research on ‘non-religious’ populations in contemporary society.
Primarily drawing on her (2015) monograph Recognising the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular, Lee analysed comprehensively qualitative interviews undertaken with people who identify as non-religious as opposed to religious in a UK context. According to surveys, around 35 million people identify as non-religious in the UK: there is significant demand for social science to provide nuanced, qualitative understandings of what being non-religious actually means for the enormous range of people included within this data-set.
Non-religious identifications should not be reduced to ‘atheism’ as a rejection of propositional belief in God or ‘agnosticism’ as a lack of certainty about whether God exists. In practice, identifications as non-religious can be context specific: one person may use the label ‘atheist’ among friends but ‘non-religious’ among others. Moreover, non-religion subsumes a wide variety of relationships with ‘organised religion’ and religious sensibilities such as personal identities (‘I am ethnically Catholic but I do not believe in God’), lifecycle events and ceremonies (baptisms and Christenings, weddings, funerals, burial and cremation), public holidays (Christmas, Easter), education (attending a religious school), and attitudes toward ‘spirituality’. These experiences can have significant implications for people’s interaction with ethical concepts (e.g. notions of the ‘sanctity of life’) and moral systems, as well as their attitudes with respect to ethical issues, such as the place of religion in society.
In summary, Lee’s presentation demonstrated how ‘non-religion’ is a distinctive, varied and widespread social phenomena which can be analysed from a comparative perspective, making it highly relevant to debates in the anthropology of religion.
(Report by Tom Bell.)