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The regime of religious pluralism: uncovering the cultural dimensions of American religious belonging

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THE REGIME OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM: UNCOVERING THE CULTURAL
DIMENSIONS OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS BELONGING

by

Bradly Nabors

________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

December 2015

Copyright 2015 Bradly Nabors

ii
Acknowledgments
The act of writing a dissertation, while lonely at times, is not a solitary
affair. One cannot be completed without the assistance of a web of mentors and
comrades who can lend their expertise and emotional support, often
simultaneously. I will do my best to acknowledge those who played such
indispensable roles during the writing of this dissertation.
My fellow graduate students in the sociology department at the University
of Southern California provided insightful feedback on preliminary memos and
chapter drafts throughout the dissertation process. These colleagues and friends,
including Brady Potts, Jess Butler, Megan Carroll, and Edson Rodriguez, are
owed a lifetime of gratitude for their generosity of spirit in helping me to tell the
story about religion in public life herein, and helping me traverse the arduous path
of this dissertation from inception to completion.
My dissertation committee was invaluable from the very beginning of my
graduate school experience, when I took classes from each of them and was
invited to grapple with some of the core concepts that spurred my interest in the
topic at hand. At a later stage, their feedback on the dissertation helped to prompt
some much needed fine-tuning to my argument. Despite tales oft-told in the
department hallways of intimidating and difficult committee personalities, Nina
Eliasoph, Randy Lake, and Paul Lichterman proved to be as empathetic as could
be, all working together to ensure that this dissertation saw the light of day. I owe
a special debt of gratitude to my advisor and committee chair, Paul Lichterman,
whose patience with this often confused and sometimes elusive Ph.D. student was

iii
nothing short of extraordinary. Paul’s constant optimism, encouragement, and
belief in my research were crucial to keeping this project alive, especially during
periods when I wasn’t sure I believed in it myself. I will always remember and
appreciate his insight, his standards, and his commitment to both me and my
research.
I also extend my sincere thanks to the staff of the Department of
Sociology. Stachelle Overland is not only a graduate advisor who helped me to
navigate the impossibly dense bureaucracy of the university, but also a friend and
contemporary who I always looked forward to chatting with on subjects ranging
from the USC football team to child rearing. Melissa Hernandez and Amber
Thomas provided essential administrative support and advice in all manner of
ways, and their willingness to laugh at my bad jokes – and at me – injected a bit
of well-appreciated levity into my time in the department.
Of course, I owe a debt of gratitude to those who participated in this study.
To a person, each participant shared a slice of their lives with me with both
intense interest and enthusiasm. Their warmness and candor made each
conversation a real pleasure, and I always left our meetings with the sense that
they enjoyed it likewise. This research was also helped in no small measure by an
Advanced Doctoral Research Award from the Center for Religion and Civic
Culture at USC, and the Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Award. The time and funds afforded to me by these awards allowed me to place a
focus on my research that would have been orders of magnitude more difficult
without them.

iv
Lastly, I thank my wife, Emily Basner Nabors, for her unwavering support
and encouragement during our years at USC. Even though it is my name on the
dissertation, this was a process we went through together. This is especially true
since as I was giving birth to this research she gave birth to our daughter, Frida
Jean. This project would have been impossible without either of them.

v

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ii
Abstract vi
Chapter One: Images of Religious Pluralism 1
Chapter Two: Associations of Religious Unconventionality 31
Chapter Three: Mapping from Unconventionality 39
Chapter Four: Plotting Life Histories 56
Chapter Five: Bridging Languages of Public Respectability 74
Conclusion 86
Appendix A: Interview Guide for Young Atheists 89
Appendix B: Interview Guide for Muslims in Community and Muslim Connection 92
Bibliography 95

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Abstract
This dissertation defines and advances a theory of religious pluralism as a cultural
structure that: 1) delineates norms of religious propriety while at the same time 2)
affording opportunities for cultural belonging amongst those cast as suspect by those very
same norms. I argue that religious conventionality in the United States is circumscribed
by four prominent and discrete cultural trends in religion: religious individualism,
religious voluntarism, religious cognitivism, and personalized notions of God. I then
show how those who exist around the margins of the religious mainstream are able to
access elements of shared culture that resonate with these structural dimensions in order
to articulate a sense of belonging in the U.S. The ability of such religiously
unconventional groups to do so poses a challenge to current theories of religious
pluralism that posit a dominant Protestant hegemony acting in a binary fashion to create
insiders and outsiders. This dissertation argues that the boundary between the religious
normative “center” and its outskirts is better conceptualized as boundaries with cultural
porosity, with the possibilities for traverse configured differently for each religiously
unconventional group.
By means of depth interview I examine the talk of two groups that enjoy
remarkably low levels of public trust in the U.S.: atheists and Muslims. I listened to how
they talked about themselves and their possibilities for belonging within the context of
American public life. I examine how they locate themselves on their own mental, social
maps in relation to other relevant religious groups. I then listen to, and examine their life
histories vis-à-vis religion: how they came into being in regard to the current iteration of
their religious identity. Then, I examine the languages they use to convey a sense of “we-

vii
ness” to an imagined public that already views them through a lens of suspicion. In doing
the above, I am able to demonstrate how different religiously unconventional groups have
varied levels of access to a sense of belonging in the U.S.
Overall, this analysis suggests that by thinking of religious pluralism as
constituted by these four dimensions, we can render the boundary as porous, and as
offering different cultural possibilities for different groups. This advances a recent
cultural turn in religious pluralism studies by showing that while the cultural boundaries
that constitute the regime of pluralism remain strong in their ability to structure
conventional religious life, and to socially construct certain “outsiders,” the manifold
nature of the regime makes this binary more gradient, making some “outsiders” more
“in” than others.

1
Chapter One: Images of Religious Pluralism
Expanding the “we”
On January 15, 2014, President Barack Obama signed the annual National
Religious Freedom Day Proclamation honoring Thomas Jefferson’s landmark Virginia
Statute for Religious Freedom, which was first enacted into law in 1786. Presidents since
Bill Clinton in 1996 have released such yearly proclamations, hailing the virtues of
religious liberty in the U.S. as well as its importance internationally. Throughout the
tradition’s nearly 20-year history, Presidents Clinton, Bush (43), and Obama have not
been at all reticent to refer to specific faiths in order to make their annual paean to
religious liberty. Whether referred to by the proper titles of Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam, or more indirectly by references to places of worship, such as church, synagogue,
or mosque, such faiths are brought together within the context of Presidential prose as
they ostensibly should be in real life.
The Proclamation of 2014, however, brought with it something very new:
Today, America embraces people of all faiths and of no faith. We are
Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs, atheists
and agnostics. Our religious diversity enriches our cultural fabric and
reminds us that what binds us as one is not the tenets of our faiths, the
colors of our skin, or the origins of our names. What makes us American
is our adherence to shared ideals -- freedom, equality, justice, and our
right as a people to set our own course. (Obama 2014)
While in previous proclamations Obama had more obliquely referred to atheist and
agnostic sensibilities - in 2011 as those with “no religion at all,” and in 2012 and 2013 as
“nonbelievers” - the inclusion of atheists into the larger American “we” was hailed by
many in the secularist world. In a world where surveys show a wide distrust of atheists
nationally, and they are considered less than American, such a statement by a sitting U.S.
president was certainly a groundbreaking one.

2
Despite the novelty of such inclusion of nonbelievers in his address, there is also
something quite commonplace about it. The religious contours of the United States have
transformed significantly over its first two-plus centuries; had such annual proclamations
been customary in the early 19th century, we may have read something about the bond
that brings together all the various Protestant faiths. In the mid-20
th
century we may have
read about our exceptional religious freedom within slightly more dilated Judeo-Christian
parameters. Instead, we received them in the form of Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury
Baptists (“religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes
account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of
government reach actions only, & not opinions”), and President Eisenhower’s oft-
referenced remark that “…our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a
deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-
Christian concept, but it must be a religion with all men created equal,” respectively.
Rather than something completely new, Obama’s proclamation is yet another in a long
line of public gestures (the prescience or success of Obama’s vision is another, empirical
question) to accommodate, manage, and reflect changing religious diversity. As such, this
proclamation serves as a particularly public expression of religious pluralism: the explicit
recognition of religious diversity undergirded with implicit and normative ideas about
that diversity’s parameters.
The trajectory of the above examples of “official” recognition by the state – from
Protestantism alone to a much wider swath of immigrant religions that includes
Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, and then on to the inclusion of atheists within this
conversation about religious freedom – suggests that religious diversity is an unmitigated,

3
if slow in coming, success story. However, many religious groups (even “major” ones
that constitute a not-insignificant percentage of the country’s population) are still looked
upon with suspicion in terms of American identity and belonging. Such suspicion arises
from implicit pluralist norms about how much one’s religion can deviate from the
Protestant mainstream and still maintain its respectability.
A challenge, then, for Americans that we may consider “religiously
unconventional,” is how to articulate a sense of belonging, or what Lamont has termed
“cultural membership” (2002). What cultural possibilities exist to enable them to sound
religiously “normal”? It is this very challenge that concerns this dissertation. I argue that
American religious pluralism is best thought of as operating within a pluralist regime.
The pluralist regime is a set of normative expectations about how religious people should
act, look, and speak about themselves in public. This set of expectations includes: an
individualist religious sensibility; an emphasis on the voluntaristic origins of one’s
religious conviction; an understanding of religion as a practice that is more cognitive than
ritualistic or communal; and that the tradition include a personalized image of God.
Taken together, these dimensions circumscribe a normative center of religious identity in
the U.S. that the religiously unconventional must navigate in order to present themselves
as American. They do so, if possible, through use of “connective” languages – mapping,
plotting, and bridging – that help them verbally traverse the gap between themselves and
the religiously conventional. Throughout this dissertation, these geographic metaphors
are used to descriptively signal when the religiously unconventional are accessing shared
culture in order to verbally transcend the strictures of the pluralist regime; they signify

4
the cultural work that the unconventional must undertake in order to sound worthy of
American belonging.
In one sense, the pluralist regime can be thought of as an institution. For the
purposes of my research, “institution” can be generally defined as such: “an organized,
established procedure… the constituent rules of society (‘the rules of the game’)”
(Jepperson 1991). Through social life, actors have knowledge of the implied rules for
institutions such as: the handshake, the university classroom, and direct sales. We all
know that we shake with our right hands, students generally stay seated in class, and
telemarketers routinely attempt to employ a mix of courtesy and expediency, if not
timing. But the implied stability for such rules that govern social objects as the
handshake, the university classroom, telemarketing – or religion – is misleading. While
older “institutionalisms” – or ways of institutional analysis – had a much more political
bent that focused on conflict and alliances, the “new institutionalism” that has arisen
since the late 70s is heavily informed by Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) contention that
shared systems and rules for interaction are externalized and objectified as taken-for-
granted realities.
This neoinstitutionalism is a relatively recent effort to look at “social facts as
things” while still being able to account for organizational change over time (March and
Olsen, 1989; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). According to Jepperson, “institutions are
those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively
self-activating social processes… [Institutions] operate as relative fixtures of constraining
environments and are accompanied by taken-for-granted accounts” (149). Likewise,
“institutions reflect the routine way in which people do what they are supposed to do”

5
(March and Olsen 1989: 21). Such theoretical contributions have illuminated processes of
shared culture previously unseeable. What gives neoinstitutionalism its strength in
understanding culture is that it incorporates a high order of analysis while still remaining
sensitive to the social constructedness of the categories at hand.
The concept of the pluralist regime can also be thought of as a heuristic tool that
describes an “ideal type” (Weber 1978 [1922]) placed directly at a “perfect spot” where
all four aforementioned expectations of religious propriety overlap. It is not meant to
imply the existence of a perfect and purely American religious tradition. Even
mainstream, conventional religions may deviate from this normative core. Many Jews,
for example, find meaning in ritual and community that some mainstream Christians
might view as artifacts of the past. Many Catholics understand God in less personal terms
than “friend” or “confidant” – so much so that Mary is widely venerated as the divine
intermediary. This heuristic tool is also not designed to determine the relative
conventionality of any tradition; that is an empirical question beyond the scope of this
research. It does presuppose that each religious group has its own set of unique and
complex cultural fingerprints; it is designed to chart the host of cultural dimensions that
different religious individuals and groups must reconcile, overcome, or leverage
differently than others in order to present their sense of belonging as natural. Rather than
conceiving religious pluralism as a binary of religious “mainstreamers” versus religious
“outsiders,” it helps us to understand different kinds of religious unconventionality, and
the different challenges that different religious groups may face in their search for
American belonging.

6
Lastly – and quite importantly - this research serves to add yet another rejoinder
to the so-called free market of American religious pluralism, as well as add nuance to
recent, crucial scholarship that has rightly decried any notion of a free religious
marketplace as simply illusory. While the former theorizes the religiously unconventional
as merely unsuccessful in appealing to consumers within a vibrant religious marketplace,
the latter notes their predicament of social exclusion, but in doing so tends to collapse
them into a single entity of “outsiders” socially subordinated by a normative, liberal
conception of the self. While I do not dispute the fact that liberalism is a powerful
cultural norm that does serve to exclude such groups, I bring attention to a heretofore
unremarked porosity of such boundaries. The religiously unconventional engage,
creatively, with a package of norms (many not unrelated to liberalism) that allow them to
communicate their identities as American in common cultural parlance.
Through this study of two religiously unconventional groups in a major U.S. city,
I will show that not only do they engage in specific kinds of cultural work to maintain
their own sense of belonging in the U.S., but also that these same groups that exist on
different coordinates on the outskirts of the pluralist regime interact and deal with those
parameters differently. In doing so, we are better able to see that the mapping of our
current constellation of pluralist norms –which include not only formal characteristics of
normative religion, but also wider, culturally-seated ideas about the individual, and how
one is to properly arrive at ideas about ultimate meaning – helps us to see pluralism in a
different and more nuanced way. We can see religious (un)conventionality in much finer
shades, and thus see each understand each tradition’s engagement with their identities as
“American” as unique.

7
The primary case for this study is that of atheists. In order to see the contours of a
regime that is hypothesized to provide varying cultural opportunities for a sense of
American belonging, it makes sense to put it to the test of a group that enjoys an
exceptionally low degree of social trust. In fact, this deficiency of trustworthiness within
the public imagination is so acute that atheists are thought to lack a certain kind of
“Americanness” (Amandine 2011). More than half of Americans would refuse to vote for
one running for public office (Jones 2007), and would disapprove of their children
marrying an atheist, (Edgell et al. 2006). Seventy- eight percent of Americans feel that
atheists do not share their “vision” of the country (ibid.).
We want to see what culture is available for the religiously unconventional to
maintain a semblance of conventionality. Atheists present a case where we can really see
that religious outsiders can and do understand themselves as American, and talk about
themselves in ways that are quite similar to those in the religious mainstream. Finally,
lest the objection be raised that an atheist could never be religiously unconventional, it is
helpful to keep in mind the point that religious pluralism is never simply “religious” in
character. It also shapes and is shaped by historic, ethnic, political, and legal contexts. In
a social milieu where religion (of a limited range, at that, chosen from what is believed to
be an exceptional variety) is assumed to be a default convention of national belonging
and necessary marker of social trust – a widely accepted convention of “Americanness” –
a refusal to identify as religious is indeed religiously unconventional.
Muslims provide a comparison case for the atheists in this study. As a group
similarly bereft in social trust (Pew 2014), Muslims provide an excellent contrast to the
atheists in this research because they are religiously unconventional in different ways.

8
Muslims do believe in God like their mainstream Abrahamic cousins, and most do feel
that religion is, generally, a public good. Yet these commonalities are often eclipsed by a
widespread suspicion of highly visible gender roles and the centrality of ritual life within
Islam, as well as the relative inseparability of ethnic and national identities from the
tradition itself. By looking at two traditions that are both religiously unconventional, yet
located at different coordinates of unconventionality, the concept of the regime of
religious pluralism and its virtues can become more clearly seen.
Religious Diversity in the U.S.
Many of good will would describe the current state of religious diversity in the
U.S. as “vibrant.” Our collective story of the U.S. as a haven for immigrants –
particularly in the wake of the new immigration act of 1965 - has enabled many to
consider the United States, in the words of a leading religious scholar, to not only be “the
most profusely religious nation on earth,” but “the most religiously diverse nation on
earth” as well (Eck 2002:22-23).
The case can certainly be made. As the president noted in his proclamation, the
U.S. is home to “Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs.” Even
so, one could argue that he was selling the country’s religious diversity short by failing to
mention the presence of others: the so-called immigrant religions of Jainism,
Zoroastriansism, and Shinto; the indigenous religions of native Americans (often
diminutized as “Native American Spirituality”); and not to mention the highly
individualized spiritualist practices that engage in bricolage of content from varied
religious traditions.

9
We can add to this mosaic the degree of internal diversity within many of these
traditions. In some cases the diversity is so great that members within the same larger
tradition cannot or will not recognize other groups as such. Diversity within the majority
(and as the trend indicates, soon, the minority) tradition of Protestantism is an illustrative
case. A recent Pew survey confirms that while Protestant denominations stand at the
threshold of minority status – they now claim just 51% of adult Americans as members –
they are also
...characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation,
encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped
around three fairly distinct religious traditions - evangelical Protestant
churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant
churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%). (Pew
2008)
The same survey also looked at diversity within the smaller traditions, and discovered
something similar:
Most Jews (1.7% of the overall adult population) identify with one of
three major groups: Reform, Conservative or Orthodox Judaism.
Similarly, more than half of Buddhists (0.7% of the overall adult
population) belong to one of three major groups within Buddhism: Zen,
Theravada or Tibetan Buddhism. Muslims (0.6% of the overall adult
population) divide primarily into two major groups: Sunni and Shia. (ibid.)
By and large, Americans view this religious diversity as a good thing. According to the
Religion and Diversity Survey (Wuthnow 2005), 86% of respondents agreed that
“Religious diversity is good for America.”
Yet, according to the very same survey, the American public’s proclaimed
acceptance of diversity can be quite modulated. In terms of national identity, 55% of
respondents agreed with the statement that “Our democratic form of government is based
on Christianity,” while an even greater 78% agreed that “The United States was founded
on Christian principles.” In America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (2005),

10
which partly draws from the Religion and Diversity Survey data, Robert Wuthnow notes
that while there is a tendency for Americans to hold a positive view of religious diversity
due to a shared regard for individual rights, commonsense morality, and choice, his
interview subjects expressed concerns with religious diversity that included perceived
threats to democracy, questions about the limits of fairness and decency toward religious
minorities, and whether religious diversity will cause common values and a common
moral order to dissipate.
How Did We Get Here? A Simple Story Of Religious Pluralist Growth
It is religious pluralism that allows us to proclaim the virtues of religious
diversity while simultaneously hailing (or fearing for) its limits. Religious pluralism is
the explicit recognition of religious diversity undergirded with implicit and normative
ideas about that diversity’s parameters. Somewhat paradoxically, it is a social ideal that
attempts to solve problems that come with the range of diversity that it itself allows.
Although the term “pluralism” has morphed throughout the last few centuries,
from denoting the clerical holding of multiple offices within the Church of England
(“ecclesiastical pluralism”), to Williams James’ argument against a unified philosophical
system (“philosophical pluralism”), religious pluralism has most recently emerged as a
social ideal in a range of pluralisms characteristic of modernity (alongside legal, political,
and cultural pluralisms), implicit in which is a normative “commitment to recognize
others across perceived or claimed lines of religious difference” (Bender and Klassen
2010:2). In a sense, the history of religion in the United States is a history of changing
pluralist regimes.

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Often this story America’s shifting religious pluralism is told in a conventional
manner, suggesting a gradual widening of the circle of accepted religion: the U.S. was
largely Protestant in its formative years, yet by the standards of colonial America the
diversity within the tradition was quite vivid; a “crazy quilt” of Protestant denominational
variety, according to Martin Marty (1989:36). Despite the common God shared by
Baptists, Congregationalists, Anglicans, Calvinists, and Methodists (among others)
denominational differences were quite pronounced as each “was certain that its own
version of the Reformation was the correct one while all the others were at least partially
mistaken” (Hunter 1991:68). The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (authored by
Thomas Jefferson) and its legal progeny the Constitutional provisions for the
disestablishment for, and free exercise of, religion nonetheless operated primarily in the
service of interdenominational pluralism within Protestantism.
For years afterward, however, anti-Catholic sentiment thrived and was
institutionalized, and Jews were relegated to social margins. Despite such Protestant-
based nativism throughout the 1800s, the years post-WWII saw our national pluralist
image of religious diversity expanded to envelop both aforementioned groups under the
umbrella term “Judeo-Christian” (Silk 1984; Todd 2010). The social significance of this
expansion was most famously noted by Will Herberg in Catholic-Protestant-Jew (1955),
perhaps the first significant and explicit statement on religious pluralism as a social force.
Herberg noted that multiple immigrant religions were subsumed under this tripartite
heading as a generic “civic faith” which expanded the margins of an American
togetherness that included heretofore excluded groups.

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Although there have always been so-called immigrant religions present in the
U.S. (Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism), a widespread national self-understanding that
included space for religious difference outside of Judeo-Christian family did not come
about until the mid-20th century - when religious difference became a more observable
presence. The 1965 Immigration Act and its resultant increased immigration flow was
the harbinger of arguably the largest expansion of religious diversity in U.S. history.
Suddenly, one of the implicit assumptions about immigration - an “assimilationist”
ideology positing that consensus was required for social stability - became untenable post
this massive influx of different cultures. The positive value placed upon diversity -
multiculturalism - has resulted in our religious self-image to be not pan-Protestant (as in
colonial times), nor strictly Judeo-Christian (as in the mid-20th century), but one of a
“nation of believers” that is inclusive of a range of faiths.
Complicating The “Simple” Story
What many take away from this story is a sense of gradual yet inevitable
expansion and acceptance of religious difference in the U.S. With increased contact with
those of different faiths, minority traditions can be demystified to a degree that allows a
finding of common ground where mutual respect can flourish. This conception of the
expansion of religious pluralism places a focus on increased visibility and acceptance in
terms of particular traditions. I argue for a deeper look at the dynamics of religious
pluralism that understands it in terms of cultural elements that transcend any individual
tradition or identity.
Religious traditions are not closed cultural systems. They are subject to, and even
constituted by, wider cultural currents that pervade social life. In order to better

13
understand the complexities of religious pluralism and its normative imperatives, I argue
that we would be well served by making these currents, not nominal tradition, our object
of study. Only by doing so can we make sense of a demonstrably less binary scene in
which people typically understood as religious outsiders can speak confidently in terms
that sound Protestant, and where certain groups with indisputable Protestant bona fides
nonetheless live on the margins of religious conventionality.
I consider the current American pluralist regime to be composed of four of these
particular cultural elements. These elements were discerned via a wide survey of
contemporary research on religion in the United States, as well as more “classic”
statements on the notion of the self in society. They are dimensions of American religious
life that have been so established in the literature as to now exist as core assumptions in
the field of study. Here, I will expand on each to demonstrate their prominence in the
construction of the current religious ideal all are compelled to reckon with.
Individualist religious sensibility
Although “individualism” is a well-remarked upon societal trend in the historical
development of the West, the term remains frustratingly multivalent. It is generally
agreed upon that the origins of the term are to be found in the wake of the French
Revolution amongst those concerned that Enlightenment glorification of the individual
posed a threat to society and the state (Lukes 1971). An attenuated version of this concern
was transposed to the American context via Alexis de Tocqueville who, upon observing
American democracy, noted that while individualism as “self interest properly
understood” could act as a positive societal force, the societal framework of voluntary
association was necessary to keep its atomizing effects at bay (Tocqueville 2000[1966]).

14
Americans, in turn, eventually and variously endowed the term with notions of liberty
(Whitman 1871 [2010]), free enterprise (Clews 1900), laissez-faire capitalism (Rand
1943), and Social Darwinist notions of “rugged individualism” (Hoover 1928).
Steven Lukes identifies a separate strand of individualism perhaps most relevant
for contemporary religious life in the U.S., which he calls the “Romantic” idea of
individuality: “the notion of individual uniqueness, originality, self-realization” (54). In
consonance with other German thinkers of his time (and in contrast to the more cautious
French understandings), Simmel called this strand the “New Individualism,” which
acknowledges the uniqueness of each individual and places moral autonomy at the heart
of human activity: “the realization of this incomparability, the filling-out of this
framework is man’s moral task. Each individual is called or destined to realize his own,
incomparable image” (Simmel 1950: 81).
Concerned with uniqueness, authenticity, and moral autonomy, Simmel’s “New
Individualism” animates much of the modern American religious sensibility today, and is
placed into contemporary relevance by Taylor (1991) as expressivism, the “notion that
each one of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover
what it means to be ourselves… by giving expression in our speech and action to what is
original in us” (ibid: 61). Taylor argues that modern social life, including the religious
world, is subject to an “ethic of authenticity” which, for the individual, means that “being
true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can
articulate and discover” (ibid: 29). Much of this ethic is based upon a “principle of
originality” which contends “each of our voices has something of its own to say” (ibid:
21). It is in this context of concern with the authentic self that expressivism emerges,

15
wherein instead of being based on tradition or coercion, “The religious life or practice
that I become a part of not only must be my choice, but must speak to me; it must make
sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this” (Taylor 2002:94; Taylor
2007:486).
As a concept, this strand of individualism was perhaps first brought into popular
public consciousness – albeit with a cast of suspicion – by Robert Bellah and his
colleagues (1985) in their bestselling Habits of the Heart. Perhaps the most lingering
image brought forth from that book was the figure of Sheila Larson who pointed to her
“own little voice” to direct her in moral matters; a “Sheilaism.” The authors left with the
conclusion that individualist language that favors self-expression may threaten societal
connections typically maintained by religious language. Meanwhile, within social
scientific circles, “Sheilaism” went on be a sort of epithetic shorthand for flighty, self-
occupied, disconnected spiritualists.
1

Scholars of modern American religion have established that a sense of moral
autonomy and fidelity to impulses of self-realization are dominant themes in religious life
today. Despite the pessimistic rendering of this kind of individualism found in Habits, it
provided groundwork for a less-morally evaluative body of research that examined how
individualism acts as a feature of religion that may provide sources of deep meaning for
the adherent, as well as an avenue toward connectivity to group life.
Religious Voluntarism
Religious voluntarism, or the ability to autonomously arrive at one’s own
religious worldview, can be seen as a corollary to the kind of religious individualism

1
Scholars are still critically evaluating Habits, and the authors are still engaged in the defense and
rearticulation of their work (e.g. Sociology of Religion 2007)

16
described above by Taylor. Whereas the religious individualist sensibility is concerned
with an authenticity and moral autonomy as the building blocks of a reflexive “project of
the self”

(Giddens 1991: 187-201), the pluralist dimension of religious voluntarism is
concerned with the degree to which deliberate choice amongst alternative worldviews
enhances and affirms the meaning and structure of that project.
According to a widely-cited Gallup poll, 80% of Americans believe that the
individual “should arrive at his or her religious beliefs independent of any church or
synagogue” (1998: 3). This should come as no surprise to the modern sensibility, not
least because it is a conceit established in law via the Free Exercise clause of the First
Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet, this phenomenon where official
religious organizations have experienced a waning of authority over members is a
relatively recent development.
In 1985, Roof and McKinney identified this development as a “new voluntarism”
in American religious life where denominational switching had become commonplace.
Observing that “40 percent of today’s Protestants have changed affiliation at one time or
another in their lives” (35), the authors note that not only do people feel at greater liberty
to switch denominations than had prior generations of congregants, but to also opt out of
institutional religion altogether. This new voluntarism also signifies a growing trend
where individuals “mix and match” disparate elements between traditions in order to
construct a custom, meaningful religious life; what Hervieu-Leger (2000), building upon
the work of Levi-Strauss (1962 [1966]), calls religious “bricolage,” or religion “a la
carte” (Hervieu-Leger: 139). In After Heaven, Wuthnow (1998) understands this
phenomenon of increased religious choice as a central component of religious life by

17
using the metaphor of “seeking.” In present times one is compelled to seek out ephemeral
sacred moments, and to discern them within a torrent of available spiritual meanings,
whereas in an earlier epoch religious tradition involved a “dwelling” in a more fixed,
stationary sacred space, such as church, temple, or even home, that could provide a more
stable set of religious meanings.
The voluntaristic strand of religious being has been examined by a host of other
scholars as well (e.g., Dillon 1999; Hammond 1992; McGuire 1988; McNamara 1992;
Roof 1993; Roof and Gesch 1995; Sargeant 2000), and like the larger theme of
individualism outlined above, can be considered a normative dimension of religious life
in the U.S.
2

Personalized Images of God
Historically speaking, shared images of God have always been subject to change
(Armstrong 1993; Miles 1995; Sharot 2001; Stark 2007). A second corollary to the wider
dimension of religious individualism, the personalized image of God is a popular
conception of God as friend, lover, confidant, counselor, or other approachable figure
with which one can speak directly, one-to-one. These images stand in stark contrast to
ones associated with Old Testament readings: king, master, or judge (Roof and Roof
1984). Although these more paternal understandings of God have not been completely
displaced by the more congenial sort, survey data have established that a majority of
Americans understand their relationship with God as a highly personalized one (Froese
and Bader 2007). According to a recent 2008 Pew survey (2008), 60% of U.S. adults

2
And despite a cultural myopia that I will address in the next section, the voluntarist sensibility has led
some scholars to the idea that churches actively compete for adherents by marketing their ability to meet
particular religious needs (Finke and Stark 1992).

18
agree that “God is a person with whom people can have a relationship,” A National
Opinion Research Center poll (2008) reports an even higher number (67.5%) that
believes in a personal God.
The contemporary religious group perhaps most associated with this image of the
God-subject relationship is that of American Evangelicals. An interviewee in Smith’s
study of American Evangelicalism (1998) exemplifies this conception: “Explaining what
it meant to be an Evangelical, this Baptist man expressed, ‘Born again. John 3:16.
Conversion, personal relationship with Christ, knowing that he died for your sins, and
taking that personally’” (25 n.4). This image of God has been explored in other areas,
most notably that of how gender roles are navigated and understood within Evangelical
circles (Brasher 1998; Chong 2008; Griffith 2000; Rose 1987). Research has also shown
that the image of the personal god is not limited to Protestantism and can exist easily
within the more hierarchically-structured tradition of Catholicism (Kennedy 1988;
Williams and Davidson 1996).
Cognitivist Understanding of Religion
In the United States, “belief” – typically in a deistic being – serves as the primary
marker of religion. Religion, of course, cannot be reduced to supernatural belief alone. In
fact, as Emile Durkheim (1995 [1912]) forcefully argued, belief in the supernatural is just
one particular, modern way collective representations can take hold in religious life. We
can point to a number of groups in the U.S. where belief is not central, be it unnecessary
(reconstructionist Judaism, Unitarian Universalism), or typically not an option in the first
place (such as Eastern traditions like Buddhism or Taoism). It is the other equally

19
important dimensions of religious life – such as ritual and community – as well as non-
deistic collective representations – that gives such groups a religious valence.
Yet, despite the presence of such groups – as well as the crucial role of ritual and
community in deistic traditions – belief (often interchangeable with the term “faith”)
becomes our shared shorthand term for religion (Neitz 2004). Charles Taylor asserts that
this conceptual reduction of religion to its cognitive, “in the head” dimensions (what he
terms “excarnation”) is a feature specific to modernity (2007: 613). Thus, we consider
ourselves to be a “nation of believers,” the term “faith-based” is assumed to adequately
describe the religious organizations assisted by the White House Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives, and “interfaith” dialogue in the form of coalitions, initiatives,
and discussions on websites such as Beliefnet is abundant in the service of greater inter-
religious harmony.
Jurisprudence has also been beholden to belief-centered definitions of religion. In
lamenting the difficulty the courts have in dealing with unconventional religious groups
like the Church of Body Modification, Jay Demerath notes that “The currently reigning
(if still implicit) definition of ‘religion’ traces back to U.S. v. Seeger (1965) and casts the
widest possible net by leaving the choice of religion, if any, up to the ‘sincerely held
beliefs’ of an individual. It basically endorses a psychological conception of religion”
(Demerath 2010:258).
It is important to note that these particular dimensions of religious life are often
conflated in the research, usually by an understanding of voluntarism and the
personalization of god as the logical outcomes of religious individualism. For example,
Madsen (2009) speaks of choice as the primary hallmark of the “American religion” of

20
individualism, while Roof’s “spiritual marketplace” (2001) itself is understood as a
structural expression of religious individualism. Scholars also commonly understand the
idea of a personal god as a “spiritualist” expression of religious individualist trends
(McGuire 2008; Stark 2001). Even the cognitivist understanding of religion is folded into
the larger trend of religious individualism in renderings of secularization that view
religion as retreating from public life (therefore shedding its communal and ritualistic
facets) and into the private, personal realm of individual contemplation (Berger 1967;
McGuire 2002).
However, as will be shown in the analysis to follow, these trends are analytically
distinct and irreducible to one another. By understanding them as such, we can see a
complexity in religious pluralism that resists notions of a simple Protestant cultural
domination. Although they might find their loudest expression within Protestantism,
these dimensions can live and exist across disparate traditions, allowing the religiously
unconventional to speak as “regular” Americans, and sound remarkably “Protestant”
while doing so. The contrast between Protestant-hegemonic understandings of pluralism
and the understanding of it as a regime composed of several cultural elements will be
made clearer in the following section.
Alternative Stories Of Pluralism
Before proceeding, I would like to acknowledge two major camps of current
thought regarding religious pluralism that hold opposing estimations for the possible
range of American religious diversity. One I find unsatisfactory for reasons I will note.
The other is one I find much more promising, and one that the concept of the pluralist
regime can help to further focus.

21
The Religious Economy Model
The first approach to understanding religious pluralism presented here, the
“religious economy” model, arose in response to secularization theories of the mid 20th
century that predicted a privatization of religious belief, if not an outright decline. The
concept of secularization has had quite a complex history, one that has simultaneously
confounded and energized scholars of religion. While the term itself was first used
sparingly in sociological theorizing by Max Weber (1980 [1920]), the underlying concept
ran through much of his work: that the modern world had come into being through a
process of increasing rationalization of action. And, as a direct result, society
decreasingly looked to supernatural forces for explanation of this-worldly phenomena.
Such disenchantment devalued the idea of “mystery,” and situated mystery as an object
of rational evaluation.
However, it was not until the 1960s - as multiculturalism as a social ideal was
finding its first footing - that the term re-emerged as a widely-used concept, one loaded
with implicit fears that religion was on a fast decline, and social cohesion was ultimately
at stake. The United States, exiting a postwar period of optimism about the integrative
role of generic “values” of religious origin as conceived in the work of Talcott Parsons
(1967), was confronted with an era of increasing religious diversity and conflict.
Sociologists looked to thinkers such as the phenomenologists Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann, who each contended that the societal function of ecclesiastic religion was in
danger, if not already diminishing, due to a widespread shift of meaning systems ushered
in by religious diversity (Berger 1967; Luckmann 1967). As a result, “secularization” was
conceived of as a relegation of religion to the recesses of the private word, if not a decline

22
in religious belief. This conception echoed into the late 20th century as scholars of
religion have looked to church attendance rates in the larger, mainstream denominations
for data that would inform the already-common assumption that religion was indeed
becoming more “privatized.”
However, a widely-welcomed line of theory eventually emerged that provided a
rational, tidy way to explain the persistence – and increase – of religious diversity in the
U.S. In the 1990s, the religious economy model was developed in the service of revising
those foreboding classic secularization theories that predicted that religious plurality is
inherently damaging to the exclusive claims of religion (Finke and Stark 1992; Warner
1993). Generally speaking, proponents of the religious economies model explain
religion’s success in the United States to their relative de-regulation by the state. The
First Amendment, in this view, serves as an explicit deregulation of the “religious
marketplace,” allowing religious consumers to make a rational selection of one of the
many religions available. Likewise, in such a free market there are clear winners and
losers. Given the increased number of traditions in the supply-side model of religion, a
religious organization must compete – they must create a demand, even if religious
innovation is necessary - among others or perish.
Whereas classic secularization theory considered religious pluralism a threat to
social solidarity, theorists of a religious economy praise pluralism and the processes of
secularization in which it is embedded as facilitating a free and beneficent religious
market. The error made by advocates of this line of thought is an overestimation of the
fairness of the market upon which religious groups may compete for adherents. This
“new paradigm” of religion assumes a neutral playing field upon which the relative

23
failure of these groups to successfully compete in the U.S. religious marketplace are
considered a problem inherent in the development and marketing of the traditions
themselves. This approach misses a key point on the level of culture: such capitulation to
mainstream “demand” is no small concession, and in many instances unthinkable. The
religious economy model depends upon the image of American religious life as having
evolved into its own institutional sector, with congregationalism as its primary
expression. Congregationalism is underpinned by a “first principle” of voluntarism that,
as described above, presupposes the ethic of individual volition and choice. For a number
of immigrant religions, high-boundary religions of domestic origin, Native American
spiritualism, and others, this ethic may be eclipsed by more communitarian sentiments.
So, where the more culturally-minded observer might see these groups as being
handicapped from the start within the game, theorists of the religious economy are
compelled to understand them as merely unskilled (Gill 2008). Finally, it has not gone
unnoticed that the voluntarist logic which governs the religious marketplace also finds a
particularly rich expression within mainstream Protestantism (Beaman 2003). This
observation hints at what religious tradition we can look to in order to discern the
dimensions of the current pluralist regime.
A “Cultural Turn” in Religious Pluralism
A second body of theoretical work on religious pluralism is now emerging that is
critical of the religious economy model due to a faulty premise: that religious activity in
the U.S. is played out on a neutral field, be it the “free market” or a civil society
undergirded by a liberalist ethos. Informed by Gramscian notions of hegemonic
domination (Gramsci 1971), the consensus among these scholars is that the “field of

24
play” of religious freedom is actually a normative cultural structure that is exclusionary
in nature. These scholars seek to bring attention to the degree to which religious pluralist
norms may be unattainable to certain groups not be steeped in individualist, voluntarist,
and/or liberalist ethics. Where religious economy theorists see religious individualism as
a universal form of currency that enables participation in American religion, those
aligned with the cultural turn see it as exclusionary to those whose traditions trade in a
different kind of cultural coin. For example, Williams (2007) recognizes that a
voluntaristic civil society is not a “neutral ground” for all religious styles, and questions
the ability of religious groups not steeped in liberal notions of citizenship to have access
to “Americanness”:
Religious pluralism will affect civil society and the way we, as a society,
can think and talk about ourselves… How can American society
accommodate religious faiths that do not accept these liberal premises,
that do not begin with the assumption of autonomous individuals as the
social building block of Society? (52-53)
Likewise, Lori Beaman observes that what we commonly celebrate as religious diversity
is in fact illusory, and its normative contours have a suspicious resemblance to Protestant
Christianity:
The department store approach, the buffet of choices, or the religious
marketplace should not be confused with diversity. The offering of
communion on the first Sunday of each month as opposed to the last
reflects religious diversity similar to the diversity faced when choosing
orange juice from concentrate, or not? With pulp, or without? Ultimately,
though, the choice is still orange juice…. Diversity is diversity of "brands"
or style, and represents a shift in religious form that remains true to
Protestant substance. (Beaman 2003:311)
Scholars who have taken this approach appear to reach a consensus on one crucial point:
religious pluralism is absolutely normative, and it is undeniably Protestant in nature.

25
Protestants, in this view, enjoy a privileged position in public life, as their own religious
tradition has become the standard against which others are judged.
This cultural turn in religious pluralism also offers a secondary yet equally
important critique of prior approaches to pluralism, namely of the “simple story”
summarized above. Pluralism isn’t an unmitigated good that stands outside of history. It
is context-dependent, shaped by cultural and institutional forces that shift over time. In
fact, a recent volume by Bender and Klassen (2010) that serves as somewhat of a rallying
call for this kind of cultural comprehension of pluralism, speaks in terms of pluralisms,
and that the United States must reckon with its own unique brand. In their introduction to
the volume, they observe that
The details of European and North American cases reveal... complexity
and complication, if not contradictions, in the formations of pluralism. In
the United States, for example, a secular state that is presumed to neither
encourage nor discourage religious identity unites some variants of
religious plurality as admissible under law while excluding other religious
groups as insufficiently tolerant. At the same time, the idioms of tolerance,
multicultural or religious celebrations, simultaneously depoliticize and
depublicize particular religious interests. In the face of these normative
paths to “religious” recognition, scholars must acknowledge and inquire
further into the processes by which gaining religious recognition in the
United States requires that groups take a seat at a multireligious table. (18)
What the concept of the pluralist regime can provide
Those who celebrate religion as a free and open marketplace of competing
worldviews presume that religious actors have the cultural capability to act in the
marketplace. The result is a view of the religiously unconventional as merely
unsuccessful and eccentric, rather than as vested with an entirety different cultural
currency incommensurable with the mainstream religious market. On the other hand,
proponents of a cultural turn in religious pluralism research highlight the cultural short-

26
sightedness of religious economy theory and aim to place religious pluralism’s social and
historical mutability, as well as it exclusionary capabilities, at center stage.
Thinking of pluralism as existing as a regime composed of a number of normative
dimensions helps give focus to the cultural turn. We can see how groups considered to
exist on the outskirts of religious propriety (and even suffer for it) might use culture
differently to think of, and to talk about themselves as American. This strengthens the
plot from one of a simple domination story that pits religious outsiders against a
Protestant hegemony to one of cultural and even creative engagement with a pluralist
porosity. As the analysis below will demonstrate, the regime concept allows us to make
better sense of non-Protestant groups who nonetheless sound Protestant. By recalibrating
our analytical lens from the level of nominal “group” to the level of cultural current, we
can avoid a conceptual “flattening” of traditions that might keep us from making sense of
Protestants such as Seventh-Day Adventists or certain Charismatic traditions who may
indeed lie relatively further away from the normative center than do their more
mainstream brethren. Likewise, the regime concept allows us to identify non-Protestant
traditions such as Reform Judaism, mainstream Catholicism, and even Mormonism that
exist remarkably closer to the center than do many Protestant groups.
The regime concept also helps to understand different unconventional groups on
their own terms. While one religiously unconventional group may nonetheless have
access to a voluntarist language that helps “connect” themselves to the conventional
religious mainstream, another group may not share a cultural logic in which voluntarist
language can make as much sense (as in the case of the Young Atheists that follows).

27
These mismatches in access to shared culture can help us to understand what may, or may
not, be realistic bases for pluralistic engagement in the wider society.
Lastly, we can move beyond the “simple story” of a religious pluralism as a
slowly-but-surely widening circle of inclusivity. By thinking of pluralism as a state that
exists in a multidimensional form, we can better understand how it may shift and change
shape over time, often placing religious groups at coordinates relative to the normative
center that you would not be able to predict by nominal identity alone.
Methodology
In order to chart the ways the religiously unconventional were able to talk about
themselves with a sense of American cultural membership, I identified two groups that
represent larger traditions that have not been well-received in contemporary American
society.
Young Atheists
I interviewed 20 members of Young Atheists (YA), an atheist network in a major
U.S. city. Organized via the popular internet organizational site Meetup.com, YA is a
monthly meeting of free discussion on atheist life for those in their 20s and 30s. It is
common for members of this group to also be affiliated with other atheist and secularist
organizations in the area that network via meetup.com (which illustrates the growing role
of the internet in shaping modern atheist identity as noted by Smith and Cimino (2012)),
as well as national organizations such as American Atheists, Americans United for the
Separation of Church and State, Freedom from Religion Foundation, and Center for
Inquiry. The monthly meetings I attended were semi-structured, and featured no agenda
other than to facilitate friendly conversation among those in attendance. Although there

28
was a core of “veterans” within the group who had been attending for some time (for
most, complementing their involvement in other atheist groups), it was not uncommon
for a small number of attendees to be “just checking it out” for the first time. This latter
feature of the group made YA ideal as a site from which to draft interviewees. It allowed
me to be able to compare those more practiced on the ways of “doing atheism” with those
making first contact with the atheist community and not yet fluent in the articulation of
their atheist identity.
Muslim Connection/Muslims in Community
Twenty Muslim interviewees were recruited from one of two local monthly
discussion groups organized on meetup.com: Muslims in Community (MiC), a large
Sunni-based group consisting of over 200 members; and Muslim Connection (MC), a
much smaller Shia-based group of approximately 25 members. Both groups shared
certain demographic characteristics with the atheists I interviewed: the average age was
approximately 30, and most were college educated (Muslims slightly moreso than the
atheists). Also, like the atheists, the Muslims who participated in this study were largely
joiners: many were members of a range of organizations associated with their religious
identity, from national organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR) to smaller, college campus-based Islamic groups. Lastly, much like my
experience with YA, some attendees I met were newcomers like myself. A few I
interviewed did not return to the group beyond their initial participation, which allowed
me to get a sense of what, if anything, they found lacking in this particular form of
Muslim togetherness.

29
I recruited interviewees from both groups within the context of monthly meetings,
almost all of whom were clearly eager to share their stories. Each depth-interview, which
lasted from one to two hours, sought to draw out personal stories of life in a social milieu
where (a particular kind of) religiosity is an expected norm. I asked them to tell me
stories about their lives as Atheists and Muslims (or, in the case of a few Muslims and
more than a few atheists, their arrival at their religiously unconventional identities), as
well as stories about times in their pasts when they felt they had to justify their religiously
unconventional identity to others. I listened for how they mapped their atheist identity by
asking questions that allowed them to consider religion’s qualities in terms of gradations
rather than binarily. When appropriate, probes and follow-up questions were utilized (and
at times improvised) for clarification and a depth of understanding of the interviewees’
stories. Each interview was digitally recorded, and later transcribed. I carefully sorted
through the transcriptions, coding for patterned themes within justifications. To preserve
confidentiality, the discussion group and all participating subjects have been assigned
pseudonyms.
Throughout, I followed a “responsive interviewing” model, an interpretive
constructionist approach attuned to the “common expectations and meanings through
which people interpret what they see and what happens to them” (Rubin and Rubin
2005). As such, this approach requires the researcher to be reflexively attentive to their
own cultural understandings while collecting and analyzing data. It also requires some
flexibility in research design since analysis is part of the data collection process itself,
and not reserved for a later stage. Thus, I continually analyzed and refined the data during
both interview and coding stages of research in order to allow new questions, probes, and

30
themes to emerge along the way. This allowed me to gradually and carefully discern the
rhetorics my interviewees employed – along with the cultural resources they drew from –
in order to talk about their identities as atheists, as Muslims, and as Americans.
Map of dissertation
In the following chapter I introduce the groups I studied and discuss my rationale
for why I found them suitable for this research. In Chapter 3, I show how the religiously
unconventional find connection to the religious mainstream through “mapping” of
themselves in relation to relevant others in the religious field. In Chapter 4, I explain how
members of YA and YM connect to the pluralist norm within the plotting of their life
stories vis-à-vis their current (non)religious identity. In Chapter 5, I demonstrate how
atheists and Muslims both craft bridging languages in the context of scenarios where they
must address an imagined public. Lastly, I conclude with some final thoughts and
suggestions for future research, and application of the regime concept.

31

Chapter Two: Associations of Religious Unconventionality
In order to chart the languages the religiously unconventional have access to in
order to express their own sense of belonging, I wanted to speak with people who had an
articulable sense of both the “we-ness” and the “other-ness” of their respective traditions.
I wanted to capture conversations with people who had thought at length about the
challenges they face by dint of identities that fall outside the religious mainstream, and
who were willing and able to share their reflections on how those challenges might be
met. As a researcher I faced my own challenge: from where to recruit such volunteers
from two radically disparate groups, with the presence of some kind of common social
thread that could prove as a basis for comparative purposes.
Conveniently for this study, the United States is quite well-known for its
remarkable vibrancy of voluntary associations. Such free associations of individuals are a
crucial part of American civic life that “reinforces participatory norms, encourages
cooperative interaction, and promotes interpersonal trust, all of which are believed to be
crucial for achieving effective solutions to important problems facing the wider
community” (Curtis et al. 2001). The acknowledgement of the heightened voluntary
impetus in American life goes back to Tocqueville, who noted that
Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are
forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial
associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types
– religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited,
immensely large and very minute. (2000 [1966]: 513)
Participation in voluntary associations and the social interaction it entails can also
provide people with a sense of connectedness and cause for self-reflection in wider social
terms (Baggett 2000).

32
I was easily able to locate two such local associations, one atheist and one
Muslim, via the internet-based social networking site meetup.com. I sent each an
introductory email, informing them of my research interests, and requested permission to
attend their next upcoming meeting. I also noted that I was looking for interviewees, and
that with their approval I would like to be able to introduce myself and my research. Both
groups were very warm and many seemed genuinely interested in my area of study. Over
the course of a few meetings, after casually conversing with various members from both
groups about a host of issues bearing upon religion and public life it became clear that
these individuals thought about their religious unconventionality often, yet still spoke
about their faith, or lack of faith, in ways that sounded completely confident in their
propriety.
It was revelatory that these interviews took place within the context of life in a
large West Coast city. One may rightly suppose that metropolitan life would afford its
denizens a relative freedom from religious homogeneity, allowing their religious
unconventionality to exist in public life without daily challenge or scrutiny (as it would
not, one might predict, in a more rural and sparsely populated U.S. town). Nonetheless,
interviewees for this research expressed a deep knowledge of their unconventional status.
All of them understood that they were suspect in the public eye, and talked about
themselves (at times wholly unprompted) in relation to a conservative Christian
religiosity despite the fact that they enjoy a relative freedom to move through their lives
with less scrutiny than others elsewhere. This very fact suggests that the languages that
the religiously unconventional find to talk about themselves are not just defensive

33
products of stigma management, but exhibits of the shared culture that all who exist
within the regime are compelled to live with.
Young Atheists
Young Atheists (YA) is an atheist “meetup” group geared toward those in their
20s and 30s (although a number of people in their 40s were regulars). YA meetings were
held monthly in a dining area at a local tavern. The gender breakdown of the group
during the times I attended was approximately 75% male and 25% female, with very few
people of color. My selection of interview subjects reflects that. I interviewed 20
members; 5 were female (four white, one African-American) and 15 were male (13
white, one African-American, and one Hispanic). Most were employed in some sort of
professional capacity: the film industry, law, engineering, and the space industry, to name
a few. In political terms they could be described as largely liberal with a few libertarians.
Most were familiar with, and had read, works by leading lights of New Atheism,
such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Yet only roughly half of
those interviewed actually fell in line with, or even sounded like, the aggressive, anti-
religious style of atheism that these authors represent. I saw this as a positive for this
study because New Atheism, while perhaps the current iteration of “official atheism” in
the public eye, is nonetheless not the only way to inhabit an atheist identity (Baggett
2011). As following chapters will reveal, the epistemological preoccupations of New
Atheism make perfect sense given the religious pluralist regime’s cognitive dimension,
yet atheists are also able to invoke other dimensions that help them soften their stance
toward religion. YA is a contemporary expression of a tradition that has been cursed to

34
follow religion’s cues for how to behave, and their relative heterogeneity in ways they
express their atheism can be greatly illuminated by the concept of pluralist regime.
Muslim Connection/Muslims in Community: The “Young Muslims”
My population of Muslim interviewees was culled from two separate groups
located on Meetup.com: Muslim Connection (MC) and Muslims in Community (MiC)
(hereafter collectively referred to as YM for “Young Muslims”). Muslim Connection, the
first group I contacted, is the smaller of the two. Organized by members of the Shia sect
of Islam, the group meets monthly in various locales (from veterans’ halls to local cafes),
with attendance usually in numbers ranging from 8 to 15. The age of this population of
interviewees ranged from early 20s to mid-30s. The ethnic backgrounds of MC varied
somewhat, but most were of Iranian heritage; all were either first- or second-generation
Americans with the exception of one convert (the group’s organizer) who was born in the
U.S. and came from a mixture of Christian and Iranian backgrounds. Gender was evenly
split at MC, with all women wearing hijab. Politically speaking, most interviewees from
MC described themselves as socially liberal on most issues except gender, but still
religiously conservative.
In order to expand my scope to include Muslims from the larger sect of Sunni
Islam, I made contact with Muslims in Community, a Sunni organization that on its
website dedicates itself “to uniting Muslims of all backgrounds through educational
activities, philanthropy, artistic endeavors, and social and environmental stewardship.”
Each monthly gathering was potluck-style, usually in a member’s residence. MiC also
sponsored a number of smaller groups such as hiking and biking groups, a sports club, a
prisoners’ consultative group, and a Quran study group. The monthly potlucks were

35
routinely attended by at least 50 people (out of a membership of over 200), and included
prayer and informal chat. The age range of MiC was wider than that of both Young
Atheists and Muslim Connection, ranging from people in their early 20s to a few who
could be estimated to be in their early 50s. While most, like MC, were either first- or
second-generation Americans, the ethnic background of MiC members was much more
varied which reflects Sunni Islam’s greater global preponderance. In fact, some Shia
members of MC attended (and even preferred) the MiC meetups because of the greater
ethnic diversity. MiC members were generally less religiously conservative than their
MC counterparts, particularly in gender roles; although many women wore hijab, an
equal number felt comfortable not wearing it.
I recruited my Young Muslim volunteers from these two groups, specifically
limiting the age range to reflect that of the Young Atheists: 20 to 30 years of age. Unlike
YA, however, women were equally represented in both groups, so my pool of
respondents reflects that parity. Where I could have easily recruited 20 Sunni Muslim
volunteers from MiC alone, I wanted to include the more religiously conservative Shia
voices as there is good reason to believe that their need to be able to express American
belonging is more acute. Therefore, 7 of my 20 Muslim respondents are from MC.
Members of both Muslim groups are representative of what Peek (2005) has
termed a specifically “Muslim American” identity focused upon countering negative
public perceptions of the tradition in the aftermath of September 11. This “reactive
ethnicity” (Portes and Rumbaut 1996; 2001) characterizes much of the voice heard from
public Islam, and also serves as a source of group solidarity (Smith 1998). For this
reason, groups like MC and MiC are good places to look if we want to discover ways that

36
the often-unwelcoming context of American religious and public life informs Muslims’
ability to speak about themselves as belonging.
The Value of Talk
In his article on the value of talk in social scientific inquiry, Robert Wuthnow
asserts that “Talk conveys meaning because it is culturally patterned. What we say, how
we say it, and what we accomplish through discourse are important aspects of what it
means to be human and thus of relevance to the human sciences” (2011:15). This
research takes talk seriously, showing how such widely shared patterns can serve as
substantive components of identity, even for those commonly understood to live
“outside” of cultural conventionality.
The “connective languages” of mapping, plotting, and bridging can be
sociologically interesting not because they reflect some authentic inner disposition of the
individual, nor because of their strategic role in interaction, but because they derive from
a pool of culturally available (and appropriate) terms already in play in wider society that
circumscribe a range of cultural possibilities for social actors. It is only by way of
preexisting, recognizable repertoires – albeit spoken with different “accents”, perhaps –
that various group identities can be made socially legible to themselves and others. To
note a few oft-cited examples of this kind of approach, Swidler (2001) demonstrates how
popular conceptions of romantic love are expressed within a limited range of
“repertoires”; Wuthnow (1991) tells us the story of how volunteer work and charity is
made sense of through a standard set of “vocabularies”; and Schmalzbauer (1999) reveals
how evangelical and Catholic journalists use different kinds of “bridging languages” (a
term I borrow in this research) to create a relationship between their religious and

37
professional identities. By paying close attention to how the religiously unconventional
talk about themselves, I aim do something similar with cultural analysis: to chart how
different sets of connective languages may or may not be available to each group, and
what that might say about the possibilities for American religious belonging within the
strictures of the pluralist regime.
The Interview as Research Setting
As a research methodology, depth interviews are not intended to serve the same
function as more traditional survey interviews. The intent is not to generate results that
are generalizable and subject to tests of validity, but to plumb depths of meaning
inaccessible by standardized and impersonal methods. Thus, depth interviews are joint
projects; they are “forms of discourse, that is, as speech events whose structure and
meaning is jointly produced by interviewers and interviewees” (Mishler 1986: 105). The
interviewee, therefore, is not a passive subject upon whom queries are foisted with the
expectation of a pat response. Rather, the interviewer and interviewee are participants in
a discussion where the former may introduce a question or topic, but the latter is also free
to work with the former to clarify the meaning and context of the discussion at hand.
Likewise, a skilled depth interviewer is expected to utilize prompts or probes to better
ensure a clear understanding of what is being communicated without danger of “leading”
the interviewee. The depth interview is a site of mutual collaboration where “neutrality”
of survey research is not sought, but the finding of a shared context within which to
communicate meanings.
My interviews with the religiously unconventional featured this dynamic. After
asking a handful of short demographic questions, I began each interview by asking some

38
very broad questions such as, “Can you tell me a little bit about your religious
background?” and “What is your definition of religion?” I allowed each interviewee to
take their time with their responses, and utilized prompts and encouraged the interviewee
to ask clarifying questions in return when meanings were unclear between the two of us.
This conversational setting allowed me to get a good sense of how I was perceived by
each interviewee. In each case it was clear that my own identity as a researcher (one
writing about the particular topic of religious normativity) placed interviewees at ease,
and rendered me as a sympathetic ear. In the case of YA, for example, they readily talked
to me as if I was an ally in the cause of railing against a Christian normative structure.
Equally important, I was also able to get a sense of the “they” that they imagined
to embody religious conventionality. For YA members, “religion” was usually shorthand
for evangelical Christianity, which is not an uncommon way to speak, even for many
religious people (Lichterman 2008). In the case of MiC and MC, this “who we are talking
about” was much less explicit, but as will be shown in the following chapters, they
enjoyed more options for talking about “Abrahamic” commonalities with Christianity
than did YA. The setting of the depth interview gave me access to these implicit
assumptions that were held by each group in ways that more traditional survey interview
methodologies cannot. Such as assumptions are to be regarded as data – albeit of the
“between-the-lines” variety – and informed my analysis in no small measure.

39

Chapter Three: Mapping from Unconventionality
Of interest (sometimes explicitly, other times implicitly) in much of the recent
qualitative work to date on religion in the U.S. is the construction of symbolic boundaries
– self- and other-defining demarcations which manifest themselves through cultural
attitudes, practices, distinctions, and (dis)likes – that religious people and groups employ
to differentiate themselves from other relevant social actors. Although concern with such
constructions is rooted in the work of sociological forbears (Durkheim 1995 [1912];
Weber 1978 [1922]), more recently symbolic boundaries have been understood as sites
where social boundaries themselves are maintained (but also reframed), be they those of
class, gender, ethnicity and/or race, work, science, national identity, community, or
religion (Lamont and Molnar 2002).
This approach has been utilized (albeit implicitly) in a number of studies of
atheism, wherein religious people essentially serve as a “negative reference group”
(Newcomb 1950). Although he did not have atheism in mind in his study of evangelical
Christian subcultural identity, Smith aptly defines the term as “categories of people who
are unlike them, who actively serve in their minds as models for what they do not believe,
what they do not want to become, and how they do not want to act” (emphasis in the
original) (1998:105). In most research to date, the identity work of atheists has been
understood as involving a clear separation of “us” versus “them”: atheists are rational, the
religious are irrational; atheists choose reason, the religious choose fantasy. Such
boundary work is framed in terms of cognitive states signified by (and in turn driven by)
proclaimed epistemological stances.

40
The case of Islam in the United States is a bit different. Whereas in the case of
atheists the concept of symbolic boundary draws our analytic eye to points of
epistemological dispute, the case of American Islam reveals response to public suspicion
to be the site of most action. Most work in this regard has taken the wearing of the hijab
as its focus, illuminating how the hijab acts as an identity-affirming boundary for young
women in the context of individualism and equal rights (Williams and Vashi 2007), and
also in the intrafaith context as a meaningful and multivalent source of identity for both
covered and uncovered Muslim women (Furseth 2011). Muslims have also taken the role
of negative reference group in recent research on boundary work. For example, Bail
examines how boundaries of “Americanness” were successfully shifted by a small but
amplified group anti-Muslim organizations engaged in the representation and framing of
Muslims in the media post 9-11 (Bail 2012). Also researched is the boundary work that
Evangelicals (Ciminio 2005) as well as mainline Protestants and Catholics (Jung 2012)
do in order to distinguish themselves from what they perceive to be the threat of Islam.
While such inquiries into how the construction and maintenance of symbolic
boundaries figure into each group’s identity can tell us a lot about how life-as-atheist or -
Muslim is navigated, the binary nature of the concept as used in these studies (a “we”
contrasted to an “other”) prevents it from revealing much about wider images of the
religious field. While it can tell us quite a bit about group-specific meanings, it doesn’t
yield much in terms of revealing how diffusely shared (and less obvious) cultural schema
becomes available to different groups in the service of crafting a sense of American
belonging.

41
I argue that when we examine the boundary work that the religiously
unconventional engage in, we should look deeper into how they “map” themselves in the
context of religious diversity. By “mapping” I mean the conception of a social
relationship to others in metaphorically spatial terms, some kinds of people being socially
nearer or distant than others. I adapt the concept of mapping from Lichterman (2008),
who uses the concept in an ethnographic setting to discern how religious group identity is
informed not only by religious rationales, but also by analytically distinct group
imaginings of other relevant actors. Mapping involves a demarcation of a field of relevant
others, cataloging those who are similar or different on a number of conceivable
dimensions. In doing so, those doing the mapping can both discern and express a sense of
who “we” are.
Used here in my analysis of interview data, the “mapping” concept can serve a
similar purpose: not to merely catalog individual atheists’ reasons for shunning religion,
or to learn how Muslims’ shared experience of discrimination provides new bonding
opportunities, but to listen carefully to talk about the differences each group may perceive
amongst religious people, and to discern possible criteria of evaluation that may deem
one kind of religious behavior more or less problematic than another. More simply put,
we can learn whether there may be any kinds of religious people who atheists and
Muslims may consider “nearer” or “further away” from themselves, how so, and what
that might indicate about the nature of their imagined “we.” Approaching both groups
with a heightened sensitivity toward how they map themselves and others within the
wider field of religious diversity can reveal what cultural dimensions of the pluralist
regime are accessible to them, and allow them to create a space for belonging.

42
Atheist Mapping
As noted, social scientific research has focused upon stated rationales – expressed
in the form of logical rebukes to supernatural belief – that underlie atheist identity. Of
course, it makes sense for researchers to ask atheists, “what’s the matter with religion?”
with the presumption that their rationales will tell us something crucial about their
unconventional identity. Justificatory rationales used by atheists not only tell us stories of
how and why they reject religion, but expose present cultural schemata (a scientistic
sensibility, for example) in what is otherwise assumed to be an identity characterized by
religious absence.
Although we need to take atheists seriously when they tell us what it is they are
“a-” about, an exclusive focus on atheist talk wherein competing epistemological models
of the cosmos serve as the symbolic boundary of sociological interest can obscure real
cultural commonalities upon which both religion and modern American atheism are
constructed. Rationales can tell us how atheists see themselves. By listening for the
presence of criteria of distinction other than epistemological stance, I was able to allow
atheists to speak of religious people in gradient terms that allowed a more textured
picture of where they see themselves. Instances where “mapping” talk rises to the surface
can reveal bases of atheist identity that justifications might not. When atheists were given
the opportunity to talk about differences between religious groups, or to describe what
might make one religious group more problematic (or benign) than another, the criteria of
evaluation expanded from that of scientific verifiability alone to also include the relative
ability and freedom of the individual to make their own moral choices.

43
For example, Ellen, a video production assistant in her early 30s who otherwise
claims that belief in any god fails scientific verification and that any entertaining of the
possibility of a god equates to a “thought experiment,” was surprisingly magnanimous
when asked whether there may be any religion or religious group that could be
considered allies to atheists in any sense:
I feel like religious groups that don’t proselytize and have similar moral
views could be considered allies in certain fights, although I know a lot of
atheists would be like, “No, we don’t want anything to do with religion.”
I’m OK with using religious groups that are sort of in tandem in important
fights, like gay rights. That’s hugely important to me. I want everybody to
have equal rights. And I’m totally cool with us working with religious
organizations that don’t force anybody to try and believe what they
believe and are just trying to see this through in a good way.
Likewise, when Kurt, a 27 year-old lawyer and ex-member of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints, was asked to identify a religious tradition or organization that he
found particularly troublesome to his atheist sensibilities, he eagerly shot back:
Yes. Yes! Southern Baptist. [laughs] Really, it’s any religion or religious
group that seeks to impose its worldview on others or to enforce their
worldview on the population that is either not homogeneous or that
doesn’t desire that is a problem. I’ve found that there are a lot of Southern
Baptists who are very politically active. Same thing with the LDS
Mormon community. It’s a very politically active group that seeks to
impose their worldview and to enforce their standards into the framework
of our laws and customs.
A range of tolerance for religious groups previously obscured by rationalistic
scientism has now come into view. Ellen and Kurt both share a similar map: there is an
imagined social distance between them and religious groups that proselytize with dogma
or moral coercion. Religious groups that refrain from such are much closer on the map;
so much so that they are conceivable partners with which to interface in the service of
wider social issues. Brice, an aerospace engineer in his early 20s who we will later
observe describing his lack of belief in terms of p-values, concurs with Ellen and Kurt

44
that a common respect for the moral agency of the individual is at the heart of any fruitful
interface with the religious. When asked what kinds of religious groups he views as
troublesome, he began his reply by referencing a particularly notorious religious group to
make his point:
Westborough Baptist. There’s a few here and there. You can imagine what
I’m pointing at. Mostly extremists in general. But as long as they’re not
overall aggressive, I don’t even mind evangelicals in general of any sort,
as long as they’re not impinging on rights or being abrasive or
aggressive... opposing birth control or picketing soldiers’ funerals or
driving planes into important buildings.
Although Brice follows the lead of Ellen and Kurt by raising the boundary between
atheists and religious people who don’t respect the moral agency of the individual, as he
continues the rationalistic logic that atheists often employ to distance themselves from all
religion begins to take a role in his map-drawing:
There are subsets of people in many religious organizations which atheists
can see as allies. In my opinion, the most important things are the social
freedoms. And so these social freedoms are things that we could ally with
other people for. But other than that, the other reason that atheists would
ally with someone, the other goal would be to evangelize other religious
people, or dis-evangelize them, if that makes sense, for their own good. I
don’t actively pursue that at all. But that’s the only other reason I could
see atheists trying to garner the assistance of other groups, to either dis-
evangelize people or promote social freedoms, just rational thought in
general, not necessarily in the religious sense, but also just in the
behavioral sense.
Brice’s response presents an interesting paradox. At first, he maps using the criteria of
individualism to determine the boundaries on his map. Then, he moves on to imagine that
a “dis-evangelicalization” through rational thought could possibly be a good basis for
atheist togetherness. This tension between the respect for individualism and the scientistic
outlook that dismisses religion out of hand will be further discussed in Chapter 4, but we
can easily see how a message such as this can be seen as contradictory and even hostile to

45
the American religious sensibility: as atheists we can live together with others who don’t
proselytize and dogmatically coerce. Yet, we also can live together with people who seek
to go out and convince non-rational others that they are mistaken.
During my time interviewing members of YA, this tension surfaced regularly. For
Jerome, a 31 year-old software engineer recently transplanted from Boston, the
simultaneous use of individualist language and scientism took the form of speaking from
under two different “hats.”
(Can atheists ally) with the religious? I’ve got two answers to this. The
anti-religion atheist says no, I don’t think there’s any religious
organization that we could consider an ally. If I wanted to tone it down a
little bit, and let’s go with atheists that want segregation of church and
state only, there’s going to be some organizations out there that we can be
compatible with or use as an ally. I know the Universal Unitarianism, I
call them the UUs, whatever they are, they’re a religion/not a religion/they
got to a church/don’t go to a church. I don’t understand it. I have to go and
understand it. I’m still hung up on the idea that if they don’t believe in
God, why do they call themselves a church? Because any definition of
church you look up online has to do with the Christian religion. So I’m a
little confused on that. It seems kind of strange to me, but I know that they
have a lot of the same ideas as atheists, and a lot of them are atheists. So in
that aspect, yeah, I think that if we want to take it one step at a time,
there’s definitely religious groups that we could use as allies, and we’ll
start small, start with the separation of church and state, because that tends
to be the biggest thing right now.
Jerome begins by dismissing any kind of alliance with the religious because of his anti-
religious stance.
3
However, he also demonstrates a commitment to upholding the virtue
of individual moral autonomy by citing the separation of church and state as a cause that
could bring atheists and the religious together. He then proceeds to cite an example of

3
During another segment of the interview, Jerome established his rationalistic critique of religion, saying,
“when it comes to religion, you have smart people, and they block off their reasoning and common sense
and logic from going into the religion aspect of their lives. They (apply logic to) every other part of their
lives, but when it comes to religion, they shut down.”

46
religion that may be particularly revelatory as to why he alternates between these two
maps: the case of Unitarian Universalism.
Immediately before my time interviewing members of YA, they had taken part in
a number of interfaith meetings by the invitation of the local UU congregation. Since UU
is a very liberal religious group that characterizes its faith as a “free and responsible
search for truth and meaning,” and indeed welcomes atheists within their rolls, Jerome
and other YA members had difficulty making heads or tails of what it was they were
experiencing. Per the pluralist regime, religion in the U.S. is thought to require a “belief”
of some sort (Dimension 4) in a personalized God (Dimension 3). This makes apparent
how the pluralist regime shapes the expectations of even those who, arguably, could be
considered the most religiously unconventional of all. For Jerome and others, the cultural
categories of “religion” and “individualist” get challenged by a group like U.U.
Confronted with the lack of dogma, individualist ethos, community, and warm inclusion
of atheists within UU, the “anti-religion”-capped atheist that understands religion as
purely irrational belief loses use of the rationalistic language he is accustomed to using
against religion. Thus, for Jerome, it appears that this predicament may help inform his
conclusion that “church-state” challenges seem like the most feasible grounds for
working alongside select religious groups, rather than elimination of religious belief
itself.
Max, a 35 year-old computer programmer who serves as the leader of YA, also
demonstrated how difficult it was to reconcile the two ways of speaking about religion.
Reflecting upon the group’s interaction with the Unitarian Universalist Church, Max

47
wrestles at length with how to classify them in a way that saws back-and-forth from
admiration to suspicion:
We can (associate) with the Universalists, because they’re very open… It
didn’t even occur to me (that we associated with a religious group),
because I don’t consider them to be that religious. So when you say
“religion,” it didn’t trigger that in my mind. But there are people there that
are believers, Christians, and people that are straight-up atheists. There are
ways that we can partner on things with them. I know that they do things
like helping the homeless and they do things for the community that we
might be able to partner with. But they are a believing group. They would
say that, or they have said, that many of them are atheists in the group, but
ultimately the teaching of the church, from what I’ve seen, is that there is a
higher power. They make those statements, that there is something
controlling us. What it is, what’s going on, they’ll allow everybody to
discover that for themselves. They’ll sing hymns, there will be talking of
God, of a higher power. So there are atheists that find it welcoming and
that it is a community that they can be a part of without being beaten over
the head with religious dogma. I wouldn’t be against putting together a
joint event with them. I think that one went really well. A lot of good
information went back and forth. But they are still a religious group, and I
think they have some fundamental differences. There are things we can
ally ourselves with them, in certain cases and on certain things.
Max's ambivalent read on UU shows that his stance toward religion is not necessarily a
settled matter, much less than if we were to pay attention to his use of rationalistic
scientistic language alone. Like some of the other YA members, Max didn’t immediately
recognize the religious nature of UU given their lack of dogma and variety of
membership, which contains both believers and nonbelievers. He sees potential in allying
with them on certain issues, such as feeding the homeless or generic “community
service”. Yet, despite their religiously individualistic virtues he tempers his enthusiasm
with the caveat that they are still a group that believes in a higher, controlling power,
despite previously acknowledging their considerable atheist membership. He then goes
on to qualify this caveat with another one still: they still allow everybody to discover
their own path. Therefore, there is still potential for further positive interaction between

48
Unitarians and YA, but the pendulum swings back to an implied desire to keep UU at
arm’s length with Max’s solemn judgment that “they are still a religious group.”
The retelling of YA’s experience with UU also became occasion for mappings
that rendered religion – despite its epistemological flaws – as having a special sense of
community that atheism was either lacking or just beginning to approximate. Baggett
(2011) describes a strand of atheism that he dubs “wistful atheism”: affirmative nonbelief
that features “an acute sense of loss or disappointment about exiting a putatively secure
realm of belief into which they feel they can never re-enter” (262). While none of those I
interviewed were wistful about any loss of belief, many expressed a similar longing for
the kind of community that they imagine to be a part of religious life. Lucy, a
photographer in her early 30s, discussed how the kind community found at UU that
doesn’t include a requirement for belief can act as a way station on the map between the
religious and atheist worlds:
There was the Unitarian Universal church that we had a Meetup for. I
think a lot of atheists, especially those that are just recently having left a
community, the atheist community is amazing. You can see what it did for
Jessica—the girl who was getting bullied in school because she was
standing up against the prayer on the wall. I cannot remember her last
name. That and the Meetup on the Washington Square Mall that Dawkins
put together. It’s really a community now, without a doubt. And when
you’re talking about somebody coming from a church, especially a very
evangelical Bible Belt church, they need—I don’t know if it’s a transition
or the same sense of community that they get, but they go to something
like the Unitarian Universal, ad they get the same sense of community that
they got from their Christian church.
By mapping the UU Church onto a location between the atheist and religious worlds,
Lucy tells us something about how she understands religion. Lucy and most members of
YA are utterly American in that they tend to equate belief with religion. Community, for
these interviewees, was simply the by-product of the practical activity of getting together

49
to be proselytized to. Yet, many recognized its great value because they were able to
decouple it from belief. Since community is an add-on to religion only to be “filled in”
with belief, it can be legitimately remembered from pre-atheist lives with a fondness and
longing.
However, it was not just the community found at UU that YA members found
valuable. Some also found resonant meaning in the messages they heard at the UU
Church. Such messages were religious in origin but generalized to be made applicable to
the varied of membership. In praising UU’s non-coercive style, some members ended up
tipping their caps to these generic religious teachings. Grant, a 42 year-old insurance
broker, seemed either unaware or unconcerned that the individualized ethos of the UU
Church has a distinct religious heritage:
(They) were very positive, no negativity to it, no association with being
scared, having to do the right thing. It was more focusing on just, you
don’t even need to think about doing the wrong thing. You’re a good
person and you treat people the way you want to be treated. Not a fear
factor that if you don’t you’re going to go burn in the eternal fire. I
remember hearing that stuff when I was very young. It’s disturbing.
It is worth pointing out that Grant’s retelling of the experience utilizes individualistic
language in service of an ethos shared by the “Golden Rule Christianity” first typified by
Hoge et al. (1994) and described by Ammerman (1997:211) as “not driven by beliefs,
orthodox of otherwise… Golden Rule Christianity emphasizes relationships and caring…
All the while, the ideas of others are respected. Proselytizing is frowned upon, and
tolerance is celebrated”. Ammerman argues that this personalized, “do-unto-others” ethic
is not a purely liberal, “less religious” stance, but a wider practice irreducible to theology
that is also found in evangelical congregations. It has also found a home in atheist circles
as evidenced not only by Jeremy’s reflection above, but by popular New Atheist writers

50
such as Richard Carrier (2004), who acknowledges the religious heritage (if not
conceding the original source) of the ethic:
Jesus was repeating an old Jewish proverb when he said “Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you,” and Confucius was recording an
old Chinese saying when he wrote “Do not do to others what you would
not want done to you.” All atheist systems of morality seem to derive in
various ways from this core principle, and so it would be appropriate to
say that atheists stand for the Golden Rule in its fullest meaning and
significance.
Whether or not the “Golden Rule” is primarily understood as religious teaching or
“broader principle” (ibid.) discerned through reasoned observation of human
relationships is not as important here as the fact that both interpretations share a common
individualistic core, one that serves as a shared expression of the pluralist regime within
both religious and atheist worlds. By translating a religious maxim such as the Golden
Rule into individualist terms that emphasizes one-on-one interaction, as well as an
essential quality of the “good” self – “You’re a good person and you treat people the
way you want to be treated” – the boundary on the map between atheists and the religious
become porous, yet still firm due to their understanding of religion as essentially a
cognitive activity.
Looking at how atheists engage in creating their social maps reveals something
one cannot see by looking at symbolic boundaries alone. As some atheists map out their
range of imagined allies, we can see that it is respect for personal autonomy, not just
capability for rationalizing away religion, that can provide a basis for togetherness. Yet,
individualistic mappings do not completely displace rationalistic ones. Sometimes
atheists use two separate maps at once, placing individualistically-minded religious
people closer to them, only to erase them from the map completely. This appears to stem
from a conflict of languages that we will discuss more thoroughly in the next chapter.

51
Lastly, the mapping activity of atheism, particularly when it involves an “intermediary”
group on the map such as UU, can help them articulate ideas about elements of religion
that they may themselves desire or find valuable.
Muslim Mapping
The Muslims I interviewed were similarly fluent in the mapping language of
religious individualism, and at times their remarks were almost indistinguishable from
those made by the atheists interviewed for this study. When talking about what might
make one religious tradition more troublesome than another, Alan, a 28 year-old of
Iranian descent who works as attorney, remarked:
Troublesome? …I’ve heard very bad things about Scientology, about
people entering into it at a young age and having trouble getting out,
basically with people entering it and becoming slaves to the Church of
Scientology or whatever it’s called. I find that, to the extent that it
negatively impacts those people’s lives, troubling, in the sense that they
want to get out and can’t. But generally I think religion is a good thing. As
long as it gives people the choice to come in and out and respects other
people’s choices, I can’t think of anything particularly troubling.
While considering religion a “good thing,” as do most Americans, Alan also considers it
something that is not be coerced; something that may be entered, left, and reentered (as
do most atheists).
However, unlike that of the atheists from YA, the Muslims I interviewed were
quick to map themselves as speaking from within the circle of religious people. By doing
this, Muslims are able to make claims of religious kinship to other, more religiously
conventional Americans. This kinship matters, because as already noted, religiosity is
seen as a strong basis for social trust in the U.S. YM members were able to do this in a
number of ways.

52
Sarah, a 27 year-old who spent most of her childhood in Lebanon before
emigrating to Canada, and later to the U.S., was not unusual in that she saw a meaningful
point of commonality amongst the Abrahamic traditions: “I believe that a lot of the things
that we have between Christians and Muslims and even Jews are very common. There’s
lots and lots of common ground.”
4
Others were able to expand the circle of religious
people outward. Robina, a 38 year-old former physical therapist who now works as a
“stay-at-home-mom” agrees that the Abrahamic faiths have a particularly special bond,
but not one that necessarily precludes interaction with traditions beyond. “(I feel a bond
with) Christianity, Judaism,” says Robina. “I think that because the Qur’an says that, but
besides that, I have lots of Hindu friends, I have Jewish friends. I don’t see their religion.
It doesn’t stop me. I think I accept all of those religions.” Akilah, a 30-year-old
professional writer, also expands this circle further outward from just Abrahamic faiths:
Really, honestly, the root, the cause of the establishment of every religion
is kind of the same. When I’ve learned about Christianity, about Judaism,
it’s all—the core is the same. You could find differences, but at the same
time, there’s a lot of similarities. So any religion that has a book is very
similar to Islam.
Samira, a 26-year-old Shi’a graduate student in psychology, adds another point of
religious kinship to the discussion: Muslims’ ethnic and religious minority status:
I think in general all people of faith (can be allies to Muslims). When I say
this, specifically I think more so the monotheistic religions should be
allies. I would think that all people of the Abrahamic faiths should be
allies. It’s a natural thing. But in general, if we’re thinking about America,
minorities as a whole, they’re all allies. We’re all minorities and the
struggle is the same for everyone. There’s a nuance, but the general
trajectory is the same. So I think they’re natural, minorities, but as a faith-
based thing, the Abrahamic faiths are a natural ally.

4
Cimino (2005) notes that post-September 11, national Muslim groups such as the Council on American
Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American Muslim Council made efforts to popularize the concept of
“Abrahamic” religious identification, as well as “Judeo-Christian-Islamic.”

53
The ability to declare a common religious kinship with others is not just meaningful for
imagined possibilities of togetherness, it can have an impact on how religious individuals
and groups interact and work with different traditions. For example, Sarah finds that the
shared, formal characteristics of the Abrahamic religious family can be a great asset when
organizing and facilitating inter-faith seminars which are occasionally held at her local
Islamic educational center:
Even though some Christians or Jewish people would not agree with the
fact that we have the same God, but generally speaking, we do share the
same tradition. It’s always the route we can take in any discussion. It
definitely makes it easier. And it makes it a challenge when you’re
working with non-Abrahamic traditions, because then you’re trying to
figure out, what is our belief on God? People may get caught up in the
extreme differences in that. If you have harmony in an organization, it
does make it easier, so it’s a lot easier when you’re working with the
Abrahamic traditions, and you can focus on the prophets and saints you
have in common or the story of creation. Even if you do want to delve into
religious issues, you can focus on religious issues that we have in common
as a foundation for whatever social issue we’re using. Like the family
seminar, if someone was to give an example about Adam and Eve, people
will always be able to relate to that, because they understand that, even if
there are differences in the details of the stories.
For Sarah, the ability to identify with people from within her own Abrahamic family tree
can help provide a basis for togetherness, although this basis may be limited by the ability
of shared, common symbols to help them hold fast against the divisiveness of social
issues. Smooth interfaith interfacing with other religions beyond the Abrahamic family
remains a puzzle for her. “I’m not sure how we can bridge the gap in terms of relating
with other non-Abrahamic traditions,” she admits. “It’s a good question. I’ve been
thinking about that myself.”
A much less-used way of mapping by MC members was that of decoupling the
actions of individuals from the larger religious tradition. For example, Akilah makes a
statement that suggests that she separates the larger religious tradition from the actions of

54
individuals: “I don’t think (any particular) religion is troublesome, no. I think people,
humans, their interpretation of religion could be troublesome, but I think religion is not.”
Akilah’s sentiments here reflect a very modern understanding of religion where the
element of individual interpretation is central to religious being. Alan echoes this
uncoupling of individual religiosity with institutions, stating that “clearly there have
historically been tensions between Muslims and other groups of people. But I have no
problem with those groups of people or their religions.” In other words, he does not see a
responsibility to bear any grudges of his larger tradition that may affect his relationship
with other individuals.
In a sense, these Muslims map the religious field using what may be best
described as an impression – as a seal pressed in hot sealing wax, or handprints in wet
concrete – of religious individualism. As religious institutions have lost their authority
over the individual in moral matters, it follows that the institution is not responsible for
the individual’s interpretation and living of the faith. In a way this impression, or
interpretation, of religious individualism makes possible a preemptive pardoning of
traditions for transgression their adherents may commit, because it is a matter of poor
interpretation and living, not doctrine.
For Muslims, a sensitivity to mapping revealed two substantial insights about how
Muslims in the U.S. are able speak of themselves as belonging within the family of
American religion despite their religious unconventionality, and with relative ease. The
first makes sense because they have cultural access to perhaps the strongest marker of
social trust in the U.S. They were able to speak of themselves from within this circle of
trust by citing religious kinship outward from the Abrahamic family of traditions to other

55
religions, including polytheistic ones. The second is that in a social context where
Muslims are often collectively blamed for the actions of extremists, they are able to
interpret religious individualism in a way that absolves religious traditions from any
imperfect interpretation by its followers.
Atheists were not able to speak of togetherness with such ease. Although we saw
that they mapped out their relation to religious people in terms of religious individualism,
which widened their circle of social trust, they also used a second map with coordinates
drawn in terms of rationalistic logic that narrowed the circle considerably (the following
chapter will be further investigate how rationalistic languages can hinder access to
voluntaristic ones). However, despite YA members’ use of individualist language, some
were not without a desire for community. The rationalistic, trust-constricting map,
premised upon a cognitivist understanding of religion (that is, it happens in the head of
the individual) made it possible to speak of community as something separate and wholly
incidental to religion. Yet, the same map that allowed such a wistfulness for community
was also the source of apprehension of the UU Church: religion is belief, yet here is a
religion with nonbelievers. Where are they to exist on the atheist’s map?

56

Chapter Four: Plotting Life Histories
To continue an investigation into how the religiously unconventional are subject
to the norms of the pluralist regime, it also makes sense to present a broad view of how
they talk about the trajectory of their lives in relation to such normative pressures. A life
history approach provides such a “wide angle.” Taking a cue from Mills’ observation that
“no social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of
their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey” (1959:6), this
research methodology permits an examination of the relationship between social structure
and personal experience. Additionally, it helps one to avoid the mistake of viewing
religion as a static state rather than a process subject to change over time (Beaman 2003).
This latter error is a crucial one to avoid since the norms of religious pluralism itself are
also changing over time, subject to historical, institutional, and cultural contingencies.
Although the entire schedule of interview questions for this research project was
not dedicated solely to the biography of the individual, certain questions took a cue from
life history research toward the goal of allowing the interviewee to discuss and elaborate
upon how they interpret their own change vis-à-vis religion over time. These questions
focused upon religiosity in the household of origin, how as children they imagined their
religious or non-religious futures, current ideas about religion, and any events or notable
shifts of attitudes that brought them to their present state of being vis-à-vis religion.
When describing such change, it was common to associate changes with specific life and
historical events, geographic location, and notions of the self. Taken as a whole, the life
histories as revealed though the interview data reveal how the religiously unconventional

57
draw upon and emphasize aspects of culture that help their arrival at their current
religious identities sound, to put it colloquially, normal.
First, I will show in this chapter that atheists understand their coming-into-being
as atheists primarily as a project of the self. Much like the current of individualism that
many scholars of religion consider to animate mainstream religious identity in current
times, atheist identity comes into being as an outcome of internal self-reflection wherein
the self becomes the sole arbiter of the acceptance or rejection of systems of ultimate
meaning. In many ways, atheists’ paths to the embracing of atheism follow the guiding
star of the “American religion” of religious individualism remarked upon by Madsen
(2009). Yet, this chapter will also show where atheists diverge substantially from the
American religion in a deeply cultural way that goes beyond the obvious, explicit lack of
belief in a god. Unlike many mainstream American religious people, atheists do not use
the language of choice in describing their transition into atheism. I suggest that such
language, while normative in American religious life by dint of how it instills personal
religious experience with authentic, individualized meaning, may be difficult for atheists
to employ due to the language of rationality that they employ to describe their move to
affirmative nonbelief.
As noted in the previous chapter, much of the current social scientific research on
Muslims in the U.S. in undertaken with the aim of understanding how such a growing
religious group – one compounded by the co-presence of minority, ethnic, and racial
identity – manages to engage in identity maintenance in the context of heightened public
suspicion. The second half of this chapter will illuminate how American Muslims have
managed to understand themselves as authentically “American”, primarily through

58
incorporation of a spiritualist ethos that they understand to imbue ritualized lives with
meaning. Muslim interviewees describe their current religious lives in contradistinction
to a past that they still render as authentically Muslim, but having lacked in the kinds of
experiential and spiritual connection experience that they, much like the American
religious mainstream, find necessary for a meaningful religious life.
Atheists
Given the nascent (but rapidly growing) state of research on American atheism, it
is appropriate that a focus upon the process of “coming to” an atheist identity has been in
the forefront. A look at the development of this line of inquiry not only reveals a gradual
improvement in the way that scholars understand atheism as a process of identity
development per se, but also makes visible the growing degree of nuance with which we
understand atheism both as a philosophical stance (as an epistemological view of the
cosmos) and a public identity (as something understood to reveal oneself as in public
life).
One of the first in-depth investigations into the process of adopting an intellectual
argument to argue for a nonrelgious identity, and possibly the most influential to the
trajectory of research on this topic was undertaken by Bruce Hunsberger (Hunsberger
1976; Hunsberger and Brown 1984) in an extensive study of college students who either
did or did not identify as religious. Working within the context of socialization theories
that predict religious life in childhood to be a strong predictor of religious life in
adulthood, the authors found that a relatively small number of nonreligious people came
from highly religious homes. These anomalous individuals, who the authors termed
“amazing apostates,” were unlike nonreligious people from nonreligious backgrounds in

59
that they had developed highly intellectual arguments for discarding the religion of their
family. That such arguments, which feature a commitment to intellectualism and
questioning, had overcome any assumed socialization, served to bring the focus of future
research of nonbelievers onto those whose identity as such was accomplished in contrast
to religion.
More recently, Smith (2011) examined the stories of self-identified atheists and
found that their stories of becoming atheist were primarily rejections of the culturally
normative belief in God. In an article largely responding to Smith’s conclusions, LeDrew
(2013) notes that paths to atheism are multiple and cannot all be adequately described by
a simple “rejection” (although that process is certainly true for some atheists). The
multiplicity of paths to atheism is due to the fluidity of religious and nonreligious identity
over the life span; therefore, while some may reject God, others who always doubted
since childhood may understand their affirmative atheism as a process of self-discovery,
while others’ atheist identity may be considered to lie dormant until engagement with an
atheist collectivity provides them with the confidence and “conceptual schema” to bring
it to life.
While LeDrew’s approach to the construction of atheist identity is the most
sophisticated (and needed) thus far, he does not explicitly tie the process of self-discovery
or any other “conceptual schema” to the wider culture in which atheists are embedded.
What my approach can add is the cultural “meat” or “muscles” that animate these
“skeletal” paths to atheism. Such animating currents are the manifestation of the common
cultural schemata that constitute the norms of religious propriety and difference. Even

60
atheists, despite their conviction that religion is no longer a meaningful part of their lives
(if it ever was), are subject to these cultural parameters.
Take, for example, Kurt, who grew up in an upper middle class family that he
describes as “very devout.” He was very active in his church as a boy: “I held every
leadership position a young person could in the LDS church. I was very, very involved in
early morning seminary, which is an hour every morning. I had a loving family, loving
parents, very supportive, very kind.”
Kurt describes religious life in his household of origin as a strong presence,
although he gives the sense that religion was not as assumed and invisible. Rather,
religion was a source of day-to-day meaning:
It was more in terms of – religion was an all-encompassing thing growing
up. It touched on every aspect of your being. It was the purpose you’re
here on earth, the purpose you live, the purpose you work, the purpose you
have relationships for. Every breathing waking moment was tied in some
way to a religious purpose. So the concept of religion was always
impressed on me to be all-important, and that a life without religion would
basically be a life not worth living, because it wouldn’t have the purpose
and the guidelines that are inherent in a religious system.
Kurt’s break from the LDS church and journey into atheism was a long process that hit its
zenith when he started to seriously question the Mormon Church’s stance on marriage
equality:
It happened over the occurrence of many, many events. I think the
breaking point, if you will, was really when the LDS church came out so
forcefully for Prop 8 here in California. That’s when I said—I guess that
was the reinforcing event that allowed me to say to myself, “No, I really
just don’t believe that God would exist like this,” that I can really set
myself apart from the religion. Maybe that wasn’t the event that brought
me to my atheism, but brought me the courage to really accept myself and
stop making excuses for the religion that I had been a part of. They were
very, very involved in that, and it became very ugly. I remember having a
very vigorous debate with my father over dinner in a restaurant which left
my mother crying and me storming out of the building. It was very, very
intense.

61
Although Kurt identifies this event as approximating the time when he first identified as
atheist, it is just as important to note that he also identifies this event even more strongly
with the time he really began to “accept himself.” For Kurt, as well as a handful of other
atheists interviewed for this study, recognizing himself as an atheist was not only an
outward expression of his disenchantment with religion but equally a process of finding
an authentic self. This search for the authentic self is a thread common to stories of both
“seeking” novel religious experience and “dwelling” within the tradition best suited for
the individual that characterize the modern religious experience (Madsen 2009). Duane, a
29 year old returning community college student who studies engineering and, like Kurt,
was raised in a religious household, elaborates even further on the topic of self-discovery
and acceptance when it comes to his casting aside of faith:
(I realized that religion) doesn’t fit in with who I am and my lifestyle, and
the more I would say that I read and started to understand the world more,
reading more, especially my readings with Daoism, and I would listen to
Alan Watts and he would do some comparative, and that was just gripping
to me. You see all these parallels, and you kind of get where the sentiment
comes from. It’s like, you absolutely understand that it is absolutely a
human invention and condition that I’m sure worked well for a number of
generations, but I would say I just arrived at it through a roundabout route
of feeling disenfranchised by religion and realizing that I didn’t need to
feel excluded or anything like that.
Although the substance of Kurt’s and Duane’s newfound stances on God are decidedly
unconventional in terms of mainstream religiosity, their descriptions how of their selves
are ultimately transformed to a more authentic form are nearly indistinguishable from
those who succeed in finding a spiritual or religious dwelling.
Implicit to the search for the authentic self in mainstream American religion is the
role of voluntarism, or deliberated choice. As Madsen (2009), Roof (2001), and
Wuthnow (1998) demonstrate, encouraged and enabled by a social milieu often

62
considered to be an “open marketplace” of religious ideas, the notion of choice features
prominently in the narratives of modern religious seekers. Choice itself places the
individual actor in the foreground, as both locus of authority and discerning consumer. In
order for religious lives to be made meaningful in an era where institutional religion is no
longer the dominant source of moral authority (Chaves 1994), they must be imbued with
a sense that they are uniquely suitable for the unique individual, a dynamic anticipated by
Durkheim’s concept of the “cult of the individual” wherein the abstract idea of “the
individual” comes into being, imbued with a sacred status all its own (Durkheim 1984
[1933]).
Interestingly, this is where the stories of coming-into-being-as-atheists diverge
from the norms of mainstream religious conventionality. Not one of my interviewees
used the concept of “choice” or any of its variants when discussing their turn to
affirmative nonbelief. Like most in the religious world, their identity development vis-à-
vis religion did feature their selves as the main agent of change: the “I” was the
prominent character in all their stories. However, the “I” was not choosing, or even
discerning a good philosophical “fit.” Rather, the “I” was understood as simply following
rational thought to its logical (and only) conclusion: that there is no God.
A look at the language they use in their life histories in regard to atheism can
show us why the language of choice is not just avoided, but obviated. Duane, for
example, not only attributes his atheism to a recognition that it’s a better-fitting
“lifestyle,” but also to a “rational” look at evidence, and corollary reasoning that with all
the commonalities amongst different religions there could not be one correct faith:
Over time, it was looking at the rational reasons for a God existing, or for
a supernatural force, and comparing that with the evidence around me,

63
comparing that with my own experience. A lot of it had to do with reading
different types of religious literature from other religions and other
persons and coming to the conclusion that the similarities that they shared
among the religions and the violence and oppression they had caused
really hit home the idea to me that none of them could be right and that it
made more sense to me rationally that we’re simply as we are, here. That’s
how it developed.
Likewise, Brice, the engineer who came from a religiously mixed family where his
mother was Catholic and father was atheist, attributes the death of his once-ambivalent
stance toward religion to his own mathematically-occupied vocation:
I would guess I believed (my mother’s religion) a little bit, but mostly I
was just going with the flow. I wouldn’t ever consider it a truly serious
part of my life, especially once I started coming into my life as an
engineer. That really had the tendency to put nails in coffins.
Brice further elaborates the development of his atheist identity using the terminology of
statistical significances:
But the main reason for college doing it for me is that it happened to be
the time when I started studying all these things I described earlier that are
ancillary to my officially sanctioned studies. And also, I started studying
science and biology and engineering, so I could look at these things and
say, “Look at this. If you follow these rules, here, here, and here,
Kirchhoff’s current laws, linear algebra, stochastic prophecies, they
always work, every single time. There’s always evidence.” I just realized
that everything that we accept and that we use, what makes this cell phone
work, what makes our computers work, they all have all this evidence and
work, not P=.25, but P=.00001. Those are the kinds of things that we trust.
In religion, there’s just not evidence, there’s no reason to believe it.
There’s no reason to prove it exists and there’s no reason to prove it does
not exist. It’s not really—it doesn’t fit.

Ellen, who grew up in a family she describes as “culturally Jewish,” tells a similar story
of transformation that posits her change as the foregone outcome of rational thought:
When I was a kid with my imaginary friend God, and I realized that God
didn’t actually do anything and said different things to everybody, that
was when I kind of realized it, but then I came to the idea maybe there are
just millions of gods. I’ve always loved Greek and Egyptian mythology,
so I decided those would be my gods for a while. And they were really not
much different than the God from earlier, just kind of like an imaginary

64
friend. I guess growing up, I started to realize that these myths are all
different, there’s nothing universal about it. If it were universal, it would
be universal in the evidence. By the time I was 14, it was obvious, it was
clear….
At this point I’m like, “If God were real, we would have scientifically
verifiable evidence. Q.E.D., not real.” I’m not even going to go 99%. I’m
like, “This is ridiculous. Anything else is just playing a thought
experiment.” [Sarcastically]: Maybe there’s a giant teacup that was what
sparked the Big Bang.
Such stories of the realization of atheist identity (common of interviewees for this
research) that rely upon personal renditions of the scientific method also concord with
interview data presented in the recent social scientific literature on atheism as well as
writings of the current leading lights of the New Atheism. This particular language of
rationality, described elsewhere as the language of “Scientific Atheism” (LeDrew 2013),
and described to a greater extent in the previous chapter as “Rationalistic Scientism,”
draws upon a melange of mathematical, scientific, and logical strains of thought that posit
the result of the actor’s calculation as not only correct but also singular in its validity.
Without daring to reduce modern atheism to “just another religion” (a pet peeve of many
atheists interviewed for this study) one could consider such scientism a “piety of science”
(Burke 1984). This piety of science (the use of fetishized scientific principles as an
ordering logic for experience) serves as a dominant frame for atheists, and a big
challenge for them is that such scientism (which according to Burke, is a language of
nonsymbolic movement) leaves little room for comprehension or consideration of more
dramatistic pieties based in symbolic action; ones in which a “choice” of worldview can
make sense, and ones in which human existence amounts to considerably more than
calculative prowess alone.

65
One cannot make wide-reaching claims about all atheists and their accessibility
to, and deftness with, certain ways of recounting the formative experience of self-
identifying as atheist given the limited scope of the research undertaken here. However,
there is enough data to reasonably put forward a reasonable hypothesis: for some
Americans there is such a thing as an autonomous, individual self without a lived sense of
“choice” in the way most people understand it. Even American evangelicals – perhaps
atheists’ equal at times in terms of intransigence – freely talk about choice as central to
their identity (Smith 1998). Atheists may not be able to easily use the language of choice
in this context because rationalistic thought has little place for “choice” in its internal,
cultural logic. Atheism, understood as a product of rational thought, presents itself as a
logical terminus where choice itself is obviated for the rational mind. One becomes
atheist because it makes logical sense to do so, and once it makes sense it becomes a
mental accomplishment.
Lastly, it is important to reiterate a thought from the introduction of this study and
apply it to this particular discussion about language: as a social scientist, I am bracketing
the question of whether the atheist is “really” choosing their identity or not. It may be
completely valid to make the argument that the atheist, finding a personal affinity with
the scientific method within their own occupation, “chose” to apply the same logic
toward religion and came to the conclusion of the atheist that there is no reasonable
evidence for the existence of God. The same individual may even one day make the
deliberate choice to “come out” to a select cadre of friends, and then again later on to new
acquaintances. However, this research is not concerned with psychology nor internal
motivations, but publicly available languages for making those inner motivations

66
outwardly legible. And, as the data here reveal, atheists render their identity not as a
choice, but rather as the sole logical conclusion of correct thinking. Much like one cannot
choose their sum, difference, product or quotient in basic mathematical operations, it
appears that “choice” has little role in the development stories of atheists. And, this may
matter greatly for the ability of atheists to gain public trust in the U.S. Such a unique
framing of how one arrived a their identity vis-à-vis religion can cut as a double-edged
sword in the mind of a public steeped in the value and essentiality of choice: that atheists
consider religious people to be dupes who lack reason (already a staple of the rhetoric of
New Atheism), and conversely (at times articulated by both religious and non-religious
scholars of religion), that it is the atheists themselves who have chained themselves to
reason alone, when they indeed have a range of avenues to truth available to them.
Muslims
Compared to atheists, Muslims have been the focus of substantially more research
on the processes of identity formation: gender roles (Bartkowski and Read 2003;
Hermansen 2003; Read 2003); Muslim identity politics (Khan 2000; Marshall and Read
2003); transmission and retention of religious identity (Abu-Laban 1989; Barazangi
1989); sect-specific differences in religious practice and identity of American Muslims
(Sachedina 1994; Wallbridge 1999); as well as the intersection of religious, ethnic, and
national identity for Arab American Muslims (Abraham, Abraham and Aswad 1983),
African American Muslims (Allen 2000; Kahera 2002; Nuruddin 2000), and Iranian
Muslims (Bozorgmehr 2000; Sabagh and Bozorgmehr 1994). Yet, as some scholars have
noted, there is little research on how American Muslims arrive at their religious
identities, this dearth being most notable in the case of the second-generation.

67
Peek (2005), however, examined the stories of identity development of college-
age American Muslims post 9/11, and recognized three distinct stages of religious
identity for this particular cohort of Muslims: a stage of ascribed identity in childhood; a
stage of “choosing” identity in young adulthood; and finally, a stage of “declared”
identity in which the aftermath of 9/11 became an impetus to learn more about the
tradition, heighten its salience in the hierarchy of personal multiple identities, and act as a
positive public representative of the tradition. Yet, this research is relatively acultural in
that each stage of identity progression remains untied conceptually to the wider schematic
dimensions that constitute the pluralist regime. In the analysis that follows, I show how
the change from early, ascribed experiences of Islam to current, religiously spiritualized
incarnations are products of what the pluralist regime makes available, and not just
endpoints of a personalized, developmental process.
Common to most of the Muslims I interviewed, there was a stark shift in religious
style from that of household of origin to the present. For example, Aamir, a second
generation Indian-American Sunni, grew up in Boston in a household that he describes as
more “culturally” Muslim, and attributes it to his parents being more “conservative” than
“religious”:
I think our prime motivation was education and all that stuff. Implicitly
more so than religion, although we were always socially conservative. I
never had a girlfriend. My mom was real careful about who I had for
friends. No eating—halal food was super-important. We never ate—you
know what halal is, like the meat that’s been slaughtered properly
according to Islamic doctrine. But I would say that’s almost cultural,
because we were so ridiculously strict on food.
For Aamir, the character of this “cultural” Islam was the “doing”, not necessarily any
spiritual aspect of religion:

68
Being religious was always about doing—growing up, we talked about—
[pause] we talked about—religion was all about just doing things. It
wasn’t really about—because I think a lot of people have this relationship
with religion and spirituality, they kind of go together, and about, like,
they’re almost—it’s about connection and all this fancy stuff. We were
totally not like that at all, not even a little bit. It was just like, you were
religious because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. It was just the
true—it was just a reality. We never questioned—I never grew up
wondering, “Is there really a God?” For me, that question was answered. I
never even thought about it. The possibility never even entered my mind.
It was that we had that matter-of-fact relationship of being religious. It
was good and bad.
When he was growing up, Islam constituted the fabric of daily life to the degree that it
remained nearly invisible – it was a “matter-of-fact” that he can now identify as such.
And by way of describing a more religiously ascribed past, Aazim acknowledges the fact
that modern religion has its preoccupations with spirituality and “connection.”
Farid, a 33 year-old of Pakistani heritage who was born in Norway but
immigrated to Canada as a teen and a few years later as a young adult to the U.S., recalls
his religious life growing up in Norway, which was not dissimilar from that of Aamir:
It was more traditional, but it was very close to how Islam generally in
Pakistan was practiced. We had a good idea about what prayer is. We
were taught to read the Qur’an from when we were four or five years old,
and it grew from there… I don’t remember (religion) being so much
directly talked about by (my parents). It was more the practice that we saw
that we followed and we had questions and we would ask. But obviously it
was an obligation. For example, when Ramadan came, it would be an
automatic reaction that we are going to fast for the 30 days. I also learned
from the society around me as well. There was a big population of
Pakistani Muslims that lived there, so whatever was going on, I kind of
fell into that.
Like most of those interviewed for this research, Aamir’s and Farid’s memories of
religious life growing up involved a taken-for-granted status of Islam; it was something
that was manifested in daily practice, obligatory, and yet rarely talked about.

69
However, not all Muslims I interviewed for this research were free from the
influence of modernized religion within their household of origin. Jasmine, a 29 year-old
first-generation American Sunni woman of Pakistani descent, tells a slightly different
story than do Aazim and Farid wherein each parent was religious but in different ways:
I feel like I got a really good, interesting foundation at home because my
mom is more traditional in her approach. She knows all the prayers. She
taught us how to read the Qur’an. I’ve been fasting since I was really
young, but regularly since I was in the seventh grade I’ve been practicing.
She really instilled those rituals and the value of it and the tradition into
us. And then with my dad, he has more of a spiritual approach. He was
never too much into reading the Qur’an regularly or the rituals or “Pray
like this” or “Sit like that.” It was more so understand the spirit of it and
why it is that you do what it is that you do. Honor the principles behind it.
So I feel like I got both. That’s my background.
Even though Jasmine’s father had a “spiritual” approach to religious practice, she
nonetheless learned the ritual life of Islam from a young age from her mother, and
continues to keep that aspect of it in her life.
Aamir, Farid, and Jasmine all understand their life as Muslims as having
undergone a substantial change since childhood. Aamir credits the beginning of his
religious shift to a speaker at his hometown Mosque in Boston who made (what he then
considered) an audacious claim that Muslims belong in America and that there is nothing
wrong with creating one’s own “space” here. Until that moment he had only heard
khutbahs (Islamic sermons) proclaiming the virtues of the caliphate, which precluded
voting and political participation in U.S. democracy. Remembers Aamir:
People were different. Muslims were different then. (He was) basically
saying, “Look, for us to be Muslims here, we really have to care about
people around us. If they succeed, we succeed.” So talking about being a
member of society in the fullest sense. People came out of that and were
like, “What is this guy talkin’ about?” Because no one ever really talked
about that before. That was a new idea… You don’t belong anywhere but
where you are.

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Aamir eventually relocated to the West Coast – after “we got our asses handed to us after
the whole 9/11 thing” – and was pleased to discover this attitude toward American
belonging more abundant among fellow Muslims in his new location:
I came out over here, and I became more aware of the social justice
component of Islam. A lot of people were focusing on that. Here people
talked about Muslim American identity, and that translated to a—people
were very deliberate in southern California in terms of their programming,
in terms of what they do, to create a space where that exists. So growing
up in Boston, it didn’t exist. There was no notion of Americanness. You
were Muslim. We did not self-identify as Americans growing up. It was
more like, “We’re Muslims and we’re here. They do their stuff, they’re
kind of weird. We’re gonna keep to ourselves. We’re fine.”
Aamir is not unlike other Muslims studied by Peek (2005) who, in the wake of 9/11,
joined a large wave of fellow young Muslims that began to more strongly articulate a
distinctly “Muslim American” identity, as well as enrich knowledge of their own
internally-varied tradition. This exposure and contact with a greater diversity of Muslims,
in turn, expanded Aamir’s ideas about religiosity:
Just hanging around more Muslims, this is all within Islam, reading
different stuff, learning more about what people have thought as far as
Muslims go, like Sunni, Shia, Salafi Sufi, the whole shtick, that whole
spectrum, and where different groups, what they differed on, this kind of
stuff. I got a broader sense of what the landscape was as far as Muslim
belief. Also, I became more aware of Sufism, the good and the bad. Those
ideas of spiritual journey and getting close to God. Religion became less—
I don’t want to say I figured it out, but I became aware of the fact that
there is this idea that there is more to religion than just doing things. As
simplistic as that sounds, that’s the reality for me.
9/11’s role in Farid’s shift in religious identity was even more salient, given his career as
a professional aviator:
For the first two years, I was in the aviation business, and I was a little
shy, too. I wasn’t openly practicing while I was studying, I wasn’t really
praying five times a day at that time. However, after 9/11, things changed
for a lot of Muslims in the U.S. We were hit by the fact that we had to find
out who we really were. It was a time where you were gonna get
questioned by others, the media was continuously attacking, so this was a

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sort of a push towards yourself, finding out, researching yourself and
discovering what Islam would mean to you.
Where previously Farid and Aamir lived religious lives that would probably seem foreign
to those in the American religious mainstream, now they both sound remarkably normal.
“Spiritual journey,” “getting close to God,” looking inward and “discovering what (your
faith) would mean to you”; these ways of talking about one’s religion in such
individualist and personalized ways are made possible by the pluralist regime, and
Muslims access it in ways that appear quite natural.
Although 9/11 proved an important turning point in many Muslims’ coming-into
of their current identities as Muslim, Jasmine demonstrates that the impetus for
understanding one’s faith in more religiously conventional terms can come from less
unfortunate origins. Perhaps this was because an individualist strain was always
copresent with a highly ritualized life. Jasmine sees the differences between her parents’
approach to religion not as something contradictory, but as elements that act additively in
a religious life. However, she feels like religious “benefits” are more readily obtained by
following her father’s more spiritual approach to religiosity, which can better facilitate a
“closer connection” with God :
I liked the combination of both. I think I’ve connected with the spiritual
element more, but I do imagine and I do want to engage in the ritual
practices as well. So if I have to be completely honest, I do pray as often
as I can, at least two or three times a day, if not more, but that’s an area
where I’m struggling to really connect. So I do it and I’m trying to get the
most benefits out of it, and I recognize the benefits that are there, but it’s
not necessarily that—I do it because I can and I should and I want to, but
it’s not like I’m feeling a very close connection. I feel a closer connection
to God when I’m just talking to him, when I’m just thinking about things,
the spiritual aspect.

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Although Jasmine regrets not being able to engage with the ritual side of her tradition as
much as she would like, she considers her own striving for self-improvement and
connection with God as equally important for her life as a Muslim:
So when I imagine myself as the ideal Muslim, to me being Muslim is not
just about praying, following the rituals. It’s about doing that plus being
the best person you can be and being intentional and doing it for the sake
of pleasing God and strengthening that bond, those types of things. So I’m
really driven by the spirit, but I do my best to practice the rituals, the
traditions.
Farid did not speak about any sort of relationship with a personalized God, yet he did
share a story about a time in his life when he rediscovered his tradition using language
that emphasizes personal connection with others, acceptance, belonging, and spiritual
growth:
For some people, it might have turned them away from Islam, but for a lot
of people my age at that time, we were more attracted to the mosques.
That’s when I started going more, and I felt a different sort of brotherhood
in the U.S. than I did before in my life. I was accepted openly. There was a
lot of love among people, just like any other religious setting in the
mosques. So I felt like I started belonging there. And then as I grew older,
in my twenties, I felt like there was a need for me to spiritually also find
out what this is all about. There was a growth period there I went through
in my twenties, and that was all in the U.S.
Aamir notes that despite the way he described it earlier (“fancy stuff”), this sort of
religiosity is not something that other people indulge in but something that has taken hold
in his own life:
So I feel like my early years were more about—it was not about
spirituality, definitely not about connection or deeper meanings. It was all
about just fear of hell. It was actually kind of interesting, because in Islam,
there’s this concept of, it’s all about the journey, which is true across the
board. Everyone has a journey to God. The mystics will talk about, you
start off fearing hellfire and desiring paradise. As you go up the ranks, and
I forget what all the details are, that’s the beginning, fear of hell and
desiring heaven. But the end of it is just, out of love of God. That where
the end of that journey is, it’s all about how that’s up there. So I feel like
that beginning part of my life was really about just doing what your

73
parents wanted you to do and it was just all very—it was like religion
devoid of spirituality, for better or worse.
For Aamir, Jasmine, and Farid, their modern religious identities are undergirded
by use of certain dimensions of the regime of American religious pluralism. As a
monotheistic religion that also is cognizant of its familial, Abrahamic ties to mainstream
religion, they are able to easily access, or “latch on” to the strands of religious
individualism, religious cognitivism, and to personalized images of God that allow them
to sound religiously conventional. This does not mean a dismissal of ritual life, however.
The Muslim Americans I studied kept their ritual lives intact, but access to and use of
modern religious languages recast ritual life in modern terms so that it would sound
nearly unremarkable to those outside the tradition, as just one of numerous avenues to
self-understanding and a true connection with God.
The regime of American religious pluralism provides a bigger obstacle for
atheists to overcome, however. When YA members plot how they came into their current
identities as atheists, they lack access to the notion of voluntarist “choice.” Since one’s
atheism is arrived at via the means of logic and reason – as most atheists contend – then
there can only be one correct terminus of the journey. In this way, the prevalence of
rationalistic scientistic language within the modern American atheist milieu negates
“choice” as meaningful. This should be of special interest for theorists of pluralistic
engagement who may see recognition of choice as uniquely facilitatory: “choice” just
might not be a cultural option for some people. This casts doubt on whether a voluntarist
ethic can be a viable basis for engagement between atheists and the religious, at least in
the regime’s current cultural configuration.

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Chapter Five: Bridging Languages of Public Respectability
Both Muslims and atheists are aware that they exist on the margins of religious
conventionality, and must attend to their own use of language while talking about
themselves. They are aware of stigma attached to their identities, and this awareness
informs how they imagine and anticipate how they may or may not be accepted by the
mainstream. In this chapter, I will show how each group imagines one of their own in a
scenario where they must present their best public face. I do this through the use of open-
ended vignettes posed during the depth-interview.
The use of vignettes within sociological research has typically been seen as a
compromise between the “messiness” of open-ended interview methodology and the
“real world” contextual deficiencies of survey methodology.
5
My use of vignette is
decidedly more cultural in aim. During interviews, I presented each respondent with a
scenario in which they were asked to imagine a similarly-identified person who was
running for public office. I asked open-ended questions about this candidate, such as
“What would be a suitable way for this person to argue that she/he is best for the job?”
and “What would a bad way to run for this office?” allowing each respondent to think it
out on their own, and to verbally “work out” and consider different possibilities for the
imagined candidate. I also asked about their thoughts on the use of generic religious

5
Alexander and Becker (1978) describe it as such: “Vignettes are short descriptions of a person or a social
situation which contain precise references to what are thought to be the most important factors in the
decision-making or judgment-making processes of respondents. Thus, rather than allowing or requiring
respondents to impute such information themselves in reacting to simple, direct, abstract questions about
the person or situation, the additional detail is provided by the researcher and is thereby standardized across
respondents.” By providing interviewees with a standardized set of descriptive cues embedded within the
question, responses could be commensurated to a higher degree, while at the same time allowing for
responses to have context and thus “ecological validity” (Cicourel 1982).

75
utterances by political candidates as well as how to deal with a presumption of Christian
faith. I followed up with probing questions that usually resulted in much more
elaboration. By doing this, I was able to listen to how each respondent imagined one of
their own could successfully appeal to and “bind” with the larger public.
YA members were likely to attempt the use of a bridging language based upon a
privatized, secularist notion of religious identity, something along the lines of, “I’m not
running for Pope, I am running for mayor.” This privatized language is built upon a quite
narrow and specific sense of religious individualism: religion is not just something that
emerges as an expression of an authentic self, but it is something that holds no relevance
in public life and its expression is best left to the confines of one’s own private, inner life.
However, YA members also recognize that religion is commonly seen as a social good
and as a marker of trust. Since they lack a public identity as “religious” they recognize
this disadvantage and compensate by translating “faith” into a concept denuded of its
cognitive-religious dimension. This illuminates a significant cultural obstacle that atheists
must face in public life: demonstrating deservedness of the social trust that comes with a
religious identity without access to the language that allows them to actually speak as
religious people.
For YM interviewees, bridging languages were much more accessible. Although
most were keen to downplay an explicitly Muslim identity, many recognized the
importance of signaling a religious identity to others either in individualist terms of the
“Golden Rule”, or in more cognitive terms of a shared Abrahamic belief.
Young Atheists

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When asked how an atheist political candidate should argue his suitability for the
job, Bart, a 26 year-old who is considering returning to college for a graduate degree in
earth sciences, responds:
That’s a good question. He should try to get a sense of what the people in
the community want, what’s best for the community, and he should try to
identify with the people, saying, “I’m one of you. I want what’s best for
the community. My religious beliefs or lack therefore are completely
irrelevant to whatever it is you want. I can agree or disagree with any of
the other candidates. As long as you feel that I would serve best the needs
of this community, I think you should vote for me.”
Likewise, Carlos, a 41-year old who was raised in Ecuador has a similar response:
If he’s better than the other guy, and the other guy is a Christian, you
should not run on religion. Just run on, “Look what I did with this office,
with this budget. It’s my record. Why are you hiring me, to be a priest or
to fix your roads and your sewage system? This is what I’m gonna do. It’s
really this simple.” I know it’s not easy, it’s not good on the politics, but
why should you say that you’re an atheist? You shouldn’t have to. It
should not be important. He’s a Christian. I’m a Taurus, an Aries, a
Gemini… Religion is like sports. If you were born in New York, you’re
gonna be a New York Mets or Yankees fan.
For Bart, it is very important that the atheist candidate somehow demonstrate to the
(religious) public that he is “one of them” by sharing the community’s interests. One’s
religion, adds Carlos, is irrelevant to the tending to those interests. Religion is a personal
preference among a host of others, “like sports.”
Many members of YA used the language of privatization to understand religion.
However, a large number of members also seemed to be willing to forgive the use of
religious language by a political candidate as long as its use didn’t represent deeper
religious motivations to influence public policy. Says Max, YA’s main organizer,
It wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. There are bigger issues. Now, if she wants
to use her religious understanding of what God told her to do or her
understanding of the Bible, using that as a yardstick for what the rules
should be, I would have a problem with that. If all things were equal, I’d

77
vote for somebody who didn’t do that rather than her, but on the scale of
things, it’s not a major issue.
Bart, who earlier remarked that an atheist candidate can and should identify with the
people without the use of religious language, also appears to understand that religious
language can be used in other ways than as basis for policy:
I wouldn’t say the expressions are problematic. It depends on if he’s using
them just to garner more votes, or if he’s planning to use his own religious
views in order to push his views on—if he’s trying to get, like, creation
taught in the public school domain, that would be a reason for me to not
vote for him. Other than that, the expressions I don’t mind as much. That
wouldn’t be a reason for disqualifying him. I would be OK with
expressions like that.
Here, Bart reveals something interesting. He knows that a religious identity can garner
more votes.
Others, like Brice, showed an explicit awareness that people associate religious
identity with being a good person:
Just say (to the public), “I’m an atheist.” But definitely point out how
strongly you believe in helping people. Try and take on as many of the
qualities that people associate with religion without actually being
religious, because most of the beneficial qualities, good, caring, generous,
are all things we associate with religion.
Although Brice understands that the ability to signal a religious identity is important in
public life, he thinks that an ersatz religious identity can be projected merely by “taking
on all the qualities that people associate with religion… good, caring, generous.” A
common and incomplete understanding of Tocqueville is that he thought that religion is
important because it might instill a beneficent sense toward others. An insight that gets
missed by many neo-Tocquevillian scholars concerned that the decline in religious
affiliation will bring along with it a weakening of other-directed concerns is that
Tocqueville also observed that it is important that others sound religious.

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For many YA members, this proves difficult to do convincingly. For example,
Kurt suggests that if an atheist candidate were to be mistakenly asked by a voter to
“please tell me about your faith,”
I think she could and should respond that her personal faith is in the things
that she does believe in, she responds with what she does have faith in,
whether that be a spirit of community spirit, or the ideals of the American
experiment, or in the common good of mankind, things like that. She
would need to answer honestly and in a way that highlights her strengths
and her morality and character. When you look at the question, the
question isn’t truly about—I mean, it may be, but it’s not looking at what
religion the person believes in, it’s trying to look at what kind of person
you are. I always try to answer in a way that would reflect that in the most
accurate way possible.
Here, we see Kurt engaging in a translation of the term “faith” as commonly understood –
as signifying the cognitive experience of religious belief – into a generalized trust of the
best of society.
Similarly, Mason, a 27 year-old who works on spacecraft software (“I’m literally
a ‘rocket scientist,’” he jokes about himself) translates the term “faith” into a reverence
for the common good, and even recognizes that he is doing so by “bending” its meaning.
He then goes a step further and embeds this newly-translated notion of faith into almost
religious garb:
That he wants to—that he has faith in the people around him, that he
believes they’re all there for the common good, that they all want to be
good people. That’s one way to bend the meaning of the question to his
own will, which he’s gonna have to do as a politician. To almost express
kind of a humanism rather than atheism explicitly. “I have faith that this
community can work together and resolve its issues. I have faith that we
can build beyond this. That’s the faith that sustains me, and that’s why I
should be your next mayor.”
While not-quite-religious in the public imagination, humanism has been accused of aping
religious behavior by many in the atheist community. So, it makes sense that in Mason’s

79
mind, an atheist candidate might be willing to approximate religion by claiming a
humanist identity.
Others (the minority of atheists) preferred to forego translating “faith,” but that
doesn’t mean that they responded without care. Some opted to be forthright about their
lack of religious faith, yet also took care to avoid the term “atheist” and use the less-
combative “non-religious” instead. Says Jerome, the Boston transplant,
That she doesn’t have any. Something like that would be too short of a
time frame to explain to this person who probably doesn’t know what
atheism really means and get them sent off in a good way. I would tell her
to go with the, “I’m not religious” kind of aspect. I don’t like when people
swing the question. I don’t want her to go off on something else to evade
the question. I would just have her say, “I’m not religious.”
Duane does a similar evasion of the atheist label:
I would say that “I am non-religious. I don’t affiliate with any specific
religion or religious organization, and I’m running for mayor, not bishop,
not whatever you call it. That’s not what I’m running for. I’m running for
mayor, and that’s a secular position.” It’s just the word. If she were to say,
“I’m non-religious,” there’s further that you can go. It’s a little bit more
open-ended. It leaves people wanting to think—many people already have
a preconceived notion about what atheism is that’s not necessarily
positive. So by using a different term, “non-religious,” which essentially
we could argue is the same thing, or similar, that’s a way to more easily
open up a dialogue and talk about why it’s not important.
Common among those atheists who did have a problem with generic religious
language was the feeling of exclusion.
Duane: Yes. I feel like they’re inappropriate and they don’t belong in the
public sector, because you are not only speaking to your own religious
group. You are speaking to people who may be Muslim, Jewish, and you
can’t be blessing people who may not want to be blessed. It’s a soap box,
a podium, not a pulpit. And I don’t think it’s the appropriate venue for
that, and I think she would turn off a lot of voters, and I have been turned
off by certain candidates. Even Obama, who feels this overwhelming need
to say “God” at least once right before an election, take pictures of
Michelle going to church with her daughters. That’s fine, but I don’t think
it’s appropriate in a political arena, because in a way, when you assert it, it
speaks to some kind of supremacy.

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Ellen: I have a huge problem with even generalized expressions of
religion, because as much as I am nice to people in day-to-day interaction,
when it comes down to it, I dislike religion. I really dislike religion. I am
so sick and tired of hearing those stupid, generalized religious things Even
being a Jew growing up, it was annoying. Everybody says “Merry
Christmas, Happy holidays!” Why not just include the other people who
aren’t Christian in your holiday greeting, because there’s another major
holiday that happens here called Hanukah. …. I am tired of being beat
down and excluded just by the terminology people are choosing to use, by
bringing God into everything. I’ll keep my atheism to myself if you keep
your God to yourself. Let’s just never hear these things again.
Perhaps the upshot of these two passages is that the cognitive dimension of the religious
pluralist regime keeps frustrating their sense of inclusion. They don’t “believe” as
religious people do, so if belief is a primary marker of religious identity, then they are
doomed from the start.
Atheists are both enabled and constrained by the cognitive dimension of religion.
In one sense, they operate within the dimension: they craft identities against religion in
mainly cognitive terms. It allows them to cast religious people as mistaken in their
attempts at truth (or, in scientistic terms, “facts”). On the other hand, in a mileu where
“belief” is shorthand for religion, and religion is in turn a shibboleth for “good citizen,”
this same cognitive dimension is bound to keep them out of the wider circle of belonging.
Muslims
At first, it looks like Muslims engage in a similar privatized bridging language. A
few did, sounding just like atheists. When asked about how a Muslim should run for
office, Aamir says:
If you speak in general terms, people basically want to know you’re not—
a voter like that probably would want to know that you’re not crazy, and
that you’re American. You can articulate faith in a way that’s general
enough that—for the voter who’s looking for “Jesus died on the cross for
your sins,” you’re not gonna get that vote. But a guy who says, “I believe
that we need to be good to each other and we need to care about each

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other,” all this kind of stuff, religion in abstraction, that’s the voter that
you’re gonna get.
Aamir is able to abstract religion into the qualities that people tend to associate with it,
without giving clues to his own religious identity.
Jasmine, too, when asked about how she would respond to a Christian voter
asking about her faith:
I would tell them that faith to me means to have trust, trust in myself, trust
in the goodness of people around me and trust that if good things, good
actions, good intentions bring good experiences and results, that my faith
tells me to strive and be my best and help others and care for—do good in
the community. My faith tells me to be honest and sincere and all these
things, and my faith tells me to value understanding and compassion and
collaboration.
However, these were in the minority. Most made reference to a religious identity, even if
implicitly. Says Alan, who imagines a Muslim running for office:
I think he would start out by stating what the characteristics of a great
mayor are, what qualities—maybe ask the people, “What are the qualities
you’re looking for in a mayor?” And then I don’t think anyone is actually
really looking for a particular religious background in a leader. I think
they’re looking for someone who can lead and who can make the
community a better place. So I think he should look at what the people
want in a mayor, what their agenda is, what they wish the agenda of the
mayor can be, and show how he can best serve that agenda.
Akilah follows suit:
She is running for a position that is for the country that she lives in, she’s
proud to live here, that’s why she wants to run, and she wants to follow
the same practices, the same rules, the same laws that have been, whether
Christian or Muslim, it doesn’t matter what the religion is. You are an
American and you follow those same laws and rules and you try to
establish them.
Ali says that no one is looking for a particular religious identity. Similarly, Akilah states
that “it doesn’t matter what the religion is.” They are not saying that it doesn’t matter that
someone is religious or not. What is irrelevant is what kind of religion. For Alan and

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Akilah, they don’t sound like they want to exclude a religious identity, although they may
want to obscure a specific, particularly maligned religious identity.
Muslims appear to be aware of the Tocquevillian function of religion. When
asked, as were YA members, how one should respond to a question about their personal
faith, Muslims sounded much more at ease in their responses. It could be reasonably
guessed that this ease was due to the absence of translating. Says Samira,
I would say, “I am Muslim. What that means is that my life is centered
around serving God and being the best person that I can and reaching that
potential, reaching that closeness to him. On a day-to-day I don’t think I’m
very different from you and your religious practices. I believe in honesty
and being truthful and kind and a good person. So really, that is my
personal faith.”
The use of the imagery of both religious individualism (“reaching that potential”) and the
personalized God “reaching that closeness to him,” allows Samira to signal her religiosity
to others in generic yet mainstream terms.
Says David, a 35 year-old customer account manager, when asked about his faith,
Given how I am, I’d be very up-front. I would be very direct about it. I
would tell him, “Hey, I’m a Muslim-American, born and raised here in the
USA. Granted, my faith may be different, but I, like yourself, have a
family, want the best for my kids, my community, my neighbors, and
regardless of my religious beliefs, I’m best qualified for the position.”
Here we see David appealing to common interests, like community and
neighbors, as did the atheists. The difference is that, for David, such common interests
take on a greater shared nature when seated within a religious identity.
Farid had made a point of noting a kinship between himself and any Christian he
may be appealing to via the cognitive dimension/Abrahamic imagery:
I would say that I am a devout Muslim and I believe in God and I believe
in the one God, the only God, who I believe is also the God of the
Christians and the Jews. I would say that I believe in the last day. And
then I would go into more details about what that belief and that faith

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leads me to—how that makes me a better person in the society. And by
that example, and by my background of what I have accomplished so far, I
would use those examples to explain why I am a better candidate, and how
that faith has helped me through that.
Farah, a 35 year-old communications coordinator for a national Muslim advocacy group,
also relies upon a cognitive “handle” on religious belonging:
If someone approaches her and says that, I would say, make sure to talk in
similarities, using similar terms. So, “I believe in God. I’m spiritual. I
believe that God is a God of mercy and compassion. This is how I lead my
life, with concepts like the Golden Rule that is strong within me.” The
Golden Rule is assumed to be a Christian rule, so using things like that
that transcend all religions.
The cognitive dimension seems to be particularly important in imaging connectedness to
religious others. When asked if the use of generic religious language by political
candidates was a problem, Robina replied:
(I would not have a problem) at all. Because I think fundamentally we all
believe the same thing. It is good to be blessed. It is good to have God
watching upon you, whether you believe your God is different than my
God. There’s a higher power that we believe in, and that’s who we’re
looking to.
Akilah would actually prefer to hear religious language:
No. I’d be happy to hear that (language). I would be happy if somebody
who is running for a position gives thanks to God and uses words like
“blessing.” I’d be happy. I feel like unfortunately there are less and less
religious people. Religion is taking a back step in life in America. Whether
Christian, Judaism, Islam, whatever religion, I get happy when I see
somebody who still believes in God.
Akilah demonstrates the Tocquevillian function of religion in the U.S.: she wants
to hear politicians tag themselves as religious somehow. For Akilah, tagging oneself in
cognitive terms is unproblematic, as long as it’s “whatever religion” (although she makes
sure to give a special priority of importance to the Abrahamic faiths). She feels happy

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when someone professes a belief in god; this cognitive dimension of pluralism allows her
to express that.
However, we can also see a tension that arises when different bridging languages
are invoked. Says Samira:
For me, as a Muslim-American voter, no, (religious language) is not
problematic. Again, it goes back to our thing, like, I think people who
come from Abrahamic traditions, the things they say aren’t necessarily
problematic to me because I see—I do believe in God, so the concept of
being blessed is something that resonates within Islam, too. It’s not
problematic to me as a voter. But I can see how it would be to somebody
who, for example, doesn’t have a faith, doesn’t believe in God.
While thinking in individualist terms, Samira took care to recognize that religious
language might be a problem for others without a belief in God. She is able to articulate a
recognition of those who may feel excluded by the use of religious political language.
However, cognitive bridging languages ultimately trumped individualist ones. Jasmine
does something similar:
For me personally, no, because I relate to it. Even if she calls God “God,”
I know it’s God. She says blessings, we have blessings. So for me
personally, no, it’s not a problem for me. But I do know of other people
who would see it as a problem, and coming from a student affairs
background, there’s a tradition or a practice to be as inclusive as possible,
and I really how that practice is not necessarily inclusive of everyone
because then it’s speaking to a community that associates with God and
blessings and excludes the community that doesn’t relate to it. But because
I relate to it, I feel I’m included.
She sees how an individualist lens would clue one in to exclusion, yet ultimately she can
“relate” to generic religious language and it makes her feel included.
In this chapter we can see that atheists rely upon the bridging language of
religious individualism, but only in a very narrow, privatized sense: that religion is purely
an individual matter, and as such should remain confined to the realm of one’s private
life. Also, while they are subject to the pluralist regime in that they hold a cognitivist

85
view of religion, they are unable to bridge outward to religious others using the term
“faith” because the scientistic logic outlined in Chapter 4 renders the term senseless. This
inability to find a suitable bridging language to connect themselves to the religious
mainstream may have an impact upon the trust the wider public may or may not affords
them. Without the ability to sound religious, and thereby signal that they are indeed
“good people,” atheists may continue to find themselves struggling in this regard. That is,
until they are able to find a better bridging language(s). Lastly, without any further access
to elements of the pluralist regime that may help them project a sense of belonging to
others, atheists may also attempt to “bridge” by softening their identity from atheist to
merely “nonreligious” in the hopes it will present a more neutral stance.
The YMs I interviewed, however, deployed both individualist and Abrahamic
bridging languages. Their individualist bridging language, however, was much broader
than that of the atheists. It wasn’t as privatized; in fact, rather than claim that religious
identity is irrelevant for political life, a number of respondents instead claimed that they
didn’t care which religion the candidate belonged to. Claims like this imply that religion
is, of course, an assumed part of the picture. YMs also used Abrahamic bridging
languages that drew a connection between an extended family of those who believe in the
same God. Unlike atheists, Muslims were easily able to penetrate this cognitive
dimension of religious belonging. Lastly, Muslims can benefit from the ability to use
these particular bridging languages because it allows them to be seen as “religious” in
public life, and therefore a good person worthy of trust.

86

Conclusion
In this dissertation, I have attempted to introduce the concept of pluralist regime
into the fold of a recent cultural turn in studies of religious pluralism. Our current regime
of religious pluralism in the U.S. consists of four interrelated dimensions that give
normative structure to “conventional” religion: religious individualism, a religious
voluntarist sensibility, a cognitivist understanding of religion, and a personalized God. By
thinking of pluralism’s boundary as constituted by these four dimensions, we can render
the boundary as porous, and as offering different cultural possibilities for different
groups. This advances the cultural turn in religious pluralism studies by showing that
while the cultural boundaries that constitute the regime of pluralism remain strong in
their ability to structure conventional religious life, and to set apart “outsiders”, the
manifold nature of the regime makes this binary more gradient, making some “outsiders”
more “in” than others.
In Chapter 2 and 3, I introduce each group, and go on to show how each “maps”
themselves in relation to a wider religious field. The mapping that each group undertakes
– by locating relevant religious others as either socially “near” or “far away” from them –
tells us not only about their relation to “religious others”, but also their sense of “we.”
While atheists mapped out their relation to religious people in terms of religious
individualism, which widened their circle of social trust, they also used a second map
with coordinates drawn in terms of rationalistic logic that narrowed the circle
considerably. Muslims, on the other hand, easily accessed both the religious individualist
and the cognitivist dimension of the regime by mapping in individualist language, and
Abrahamic terms of religious kinship, respectively. We were also able to see how

87
religious individualism could provide more avenues toward cultural membership for
Muslims than for atheists. In a social context where Muslims are often collectively
blamed for the actions of extremists, they are able to interpret religious individualism in a
way that absolves religious traditions from any imperfect interpretation by its followers.
In Chapter 4, I show how each group “plots” their life histories vis-à-vis their
(non)religious identities. As members of a monotheistic religion that also is cognizant of
its familial, Abrahamic ties to mainstream religion, Muslims are able to easily plot their
religious histories using the languages of religious individualism, Abrahamic kinship
(religious cognitivism), and a personalized God that allow them to sound religiously
conventional. The regime of American religious pluralism provides a bigger obstacle for
atheists to overcome, however. When YA members plot how they came into their current
identities as atheists, they lack access to the notion of voluntarist “choice.” Since one’s
atheism is arrived at via the means of logic and reason – as most atheists contend – then
there can only be one correct destination. In this way, the prevalence of rationalistic
scientistic language within the modern American atheist milieu negates “choice” as
meaningful.
Chapter 5 shows what languages the religiously unconventional use to “bridge”
with the religious mainstream. Atheists rely upon the bridging language of religious
individualism, but in a narrow, privatized sense: that religion is an individual matter, and
should remain confined to the realm of one’s private life. Also, while they are subject to
the pluralist regime in that they hold a cognitivist view of religion, they are unable to
access that dimension and bridge outward to religious others by using the term “faith”
because the scientistic logic outlined in Chapter 4 renders the term senseless. The

88
Muslims I interviewed, however, deployed an individualist bridging language that was
much less privatized than that of the atheists: rather than claim that religious identity is
irrelevant for political life, a number of respondents instead claimed that they didn’t care
which religion the candidate belonged to. Claims like this imply that religion is an
assumed starting point in public life. YMs also used cognitive, Abrahamic bridging
languages that drew a connection between an extended family of those who believe in the
same God. Unlike atheists, who culturally recognize the term “faith” (since they
themselves are particularly indebted to the cognitivist dimension of the regime) but
whose epistemological concerns preclude them from accessing and using it in a
normative way, Muslims can benefit from the ability to use these particular bridging
languages because it allows them to be seen as “religious” in public life, and therefore a
good person worthy of trust.

89
Appendix A: Interview Guide for Young Atheists
PERSONAL INFORMATION AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY

First, can you please tell me a little about yourself?
Age
Education
Occupation
Marital Status
Place of origin

Can you tell me a little bit about your religious background?
Were your parents religious?
What did you hear your parents saying about religion?
Tell me about something particularly striking your parents said or did regarding
religious practice.

What is your definition of religion?

Thinking back to when you were younger – a teenager, perhaps – do you remember what
you thought religion was, or what you expected a religious life to involve?

In terms of religion or religious belief, do you have a category that you use to describe
you?
If so, what is it?
What does that mean?
How did you arrive at your atheism?
Can you talk about the circumstances leading to this point?

Thinking back to before this event, do you remember what you thought atheism was?

Have your ideas about atheism changed since your first days as an atheist?
How and why?

Have your ideas about religion changed since your first days as an atheist?
How and why?

Are there any religious traditions or organizations that atheists should consider an ally?
Why is this the case?
Has this ever been a point of contention amongst peers in your organization?
Why or why not?

Are there any religious traditions or organizations that you consider particularly
troublesome?
Why do you think this is?

90
Has this ever been a point of contention amongst peers in your organization?
What makes one religion or religious group more troublesome than another?

ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE

Are you associated with any other groups or organizations pertaining to this
classification?
Can you please name them?
How long have you been a member of each?
Do you hold any particular leadership positions in these organizations?
If so, what makes you qualified?

What was the first group you joined?

How did you find out about it?
What made you think it was a good decision to join?
How, if at all, have your reasons for membership changed since then?

Are there any groups you have left?
Why did you leave?

There appears to be a range of organizations that are closely related to atheism, but use
other/his labels, such as “skeptic” or “freethinker”. How would you describe the
relationship between all of these groups?
Is there any major common thread between them?
What kinds of conflict, if any, have arisen amongst these kinds of groups?
Why do you think such conflict does or does not exist?

PUBLIC PRESENTATION

It is often said that the United States is a "Christian Nation."
Are you familiar with this phrase?
Who says this? Why do they say it?
What do you think is meant when you hear this?

Scenario Prompts:

(Interviewee name) is an atheist who decides to run for Mayor in her/his town. She/he is
bright, educated, and sincere in her/his desire to serve the community. However, every
other public office holder in her/his community is an avowed Christian.
How does she/he argue that she/he is best for the job?
What do you think would be an unsatisfactory way for her/him to argue for
her/his suitability?

At a campaign event, (interviewee name) is approached by a potential voter who asks,
“Can you please tell me about your faith?”

91
What is a good way for her/him to respond?
What is a bad way for her/him to respond?
Can you anticipate/imagine any particular reservations the voter may have about
her/him?
(If appropriate): The potential voter still appears put-off by her/his response. Is
there any further argument that she/he can make? At what point does she/he “cut
bait” with this potential voter?

Diane/James is a candidate for public office who is also a self-professed Christian.
She/he often uses generic religious language at campaign events. For example, she/he
often refers to the community as “blessed”, and she/he often “thanks God” for the
successes of the community.
Given that most candidates for public office are Christian, are these particular
expressions of faith problematic for you as a voter? Why or why not?

PERSONAL STORIES

Can you tell me a story about a time in the last year (or 5) when you experienced
discomfort that you related to being an atheist among religious people or anti-atheist
messages?
What were the circumstances surrounding this event?

Can you tell me a story about a time in the last year (or 5) when you felt like you had to
explain and/or justify your beliefs/lack of beliefs to a group of others in public?
What were the circumstances surrounding this event?
Why did you feel compelled to give an explanation?
Was your character called into question in any way?
What did you say?
What response did you get?
Do you think your explanation was satisfactory to others? Why or why
not?

92
Appendix B: Interview Guide for Muslims in Community and Muslim Connection
PERSONAL INFORMATION AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY

First, can you please tell me a little about yourself?
Age
Education
Occupation
Marital Status
Place of origin

Can you tell me a little bit about your religious background?
Were your parents religious?
What did you hear your parents saying about religion?
Tell me about something particularly striking your parents said or did regarding
religious practice.

What is your definition of religion?

Thinking back to when you were younger – a teenager, perhaps – do you remember what
you thought religion was, or what you expected a religious life to involve?

(IF CONVERT): How did you arrive at Islam?
Probe- particular circumstances, if any?
Thinking back to before this event, do you remember what you thought IslaM
was?

(ASK ALL): Have your ideas about Islam changed since your early days as a Muslim?
How and why?

Have your ideas about religion changed since your early days as a Muslim?
How and why?

Are there any religious traditions, denominations, or organizations outside Islam that
Muslims should consider an ally?
Why is this the case?
Has this ever been a point of contention amongst peers in your organization?
Why or why not?

Are there any religious traditions, denominations, or organizations that you consider
particularly troublesome?
Why do you think this is?
Has this ever been a point of contention amongst peers in your organization?
Why or why not?
What makes one religion or religious group more troublesome than another?

93
PUBLIC PRESENTATION

It is often said that the United States is a "Christian Nation."
Are you familiar with this phrase?
Who says this? Why do they say it?
What do you think is meant when you hear this?

Scenario Prompts:

(Interviewee name) is a Muslim who decides to run for Mayor in her/his town. She/he is
highly qualified, and sincere in her/his desire to serve the community. However, every
other public office holder in her/his community is an avowed Christian.
How does she/he argue that she is best for the job?
What do you think would be an unsatisfactory way for her/him to argue for
her/his suitability?

At a campaign event, (interviewee name) is approached by a potential voter who asks,
“Can you please tell me about your faith?”
What is a good way for her/him to respond?
What is a bad way for her/him to respond?
Can you anticipate/imagine any particular reservations the voter may have about
(If appropriate): The potential voter still appears put-off by her/his response. Is
there any further argument that she/he can make? At what point does she/he “cut
bait” with this potential voter?

Diane/James is a candidate for public office who is also a self-professed Christian.
She/he often uses generic religious language at campaign events. For example, she/he
often refers to the community as “blessed”, and she/he often “thanks God” for the
successes of the community.
Given that most candidates for public office are Christian, are these particular
expressions of faith problematic for you as a voter? Why or why not?

PERSONAL STORIES

Can you tell me a story about a time in the last year (or 5) when you experienced
discomfort that you interpreted as a result of being a Muslim among non-Muslims or anti-
Muslim messages?
What were the circumstances surrounding this event?

Can you tell me a story about a time in the last year (or 5) when you felt like you had to
explain and/or justify Islam to a group of others in public?
(If “no”): How about in private?
What were the circumstances surrounding this event?
Why did you feel compelled to give an explanation?
Was your character called into question in any way?
What did you say?

94
What response did you get?
Do you think your explanation was satisfactory to others? Why or why
not?

95
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Creator Nabors, Bradly John (author)

Core Title The regime of religious pluralism: uncovering the cultural dimensions of American religious belonging

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 08/27/2015

Defense Date 05/27/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag atheism,culture,Islam,OAI-PMH Harvest,religious pluralism

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lichterman, Paul (committee chair), Eliasoph, Nina (committee member), Lake, Randall (committee member)

Creator Email bnabors@usc.edu,bradnabors@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-172177

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Identifier etd-NaborsBrad-3852.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-172177 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-NaborsBrad-3852.pdf

Dmrecord 172177

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Nabors, Bradly John

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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