Jerome Baggett's title invokes the classic lectures by William James published in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Longmans, Green, 1902). Unlike James, who focused on the psychological and aimed at uncovering the universal, Baggett concentrates on “the socially constituted aspect of nonbelief” and writes about people specifically situated in early twenty-first century America (229). He tries, though, “to emulate James's empirical grounding and interpretive generosity” “in order to provide a granular sense of what they [contemporary American atheists] think and how they go about living both without God and very much with a purposefulness of their own design” (227, xvi).
In Varieties of Religious Experience, James narrowed “religion” to mean the feelings, acts, and experiences of solitary individuals in relation to what they considered divine. Baggett narrows the “nonreligious” from a broader swath of secularisms to the subset who identify specifically as “atheists.” Over a third of the American public has some degree of doubt about God's existence. Twelve percent tell pollsters that they do not believe in God at all (a number exceeding “that of Mormons, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus—combined” [31]). But only 3–5 percent of those nonbelievers call themselves atheists, and still fewer think of atheism as a core feature defining their personal identities. Even within this narrower frame, though, Baggett offers a rich and fascinating account of how these Americans live and understand their lives.
The project began with Baggett's classroom frustrations with the popular authors of the much-ballyhooed “New Atheism”: Sam Harris's The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Norton, 2005); Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking, 2006); and Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Warner, 2007). Baggett's students—like many serious observers of religion, both believers and nonbelievers—found these polemical books disappointingly shallow. He discovered more depth and nuance in over five hundred interviews with and questionnaires filled out by “rank and file” atheists—farmers and pharmacists, schoolteachers and stockbrokers—all who left religion behind and manage to live full, meaningful, ethical lives without it (196).
Baggett sorts his respondents into sociological categories to organize the variety he found within the group. For example, he looks at the stories they tell to describe how they came “to reimagine what it means to be a decent, conscientious person independent of religiously circumscribed understandings of community and goodness” (45). Finding patterns, he labels his subjects as inquisitives, consolidators, searchers, and responders, and their conversion narratives are either teleological (atheism as an outcome of one's growth) or situational (atheism as a consequence of one's context). Baggett is even better when his discusses the “four main intellectual roots that . . . continue to anchor and nurture nonreligious sensibilities”: empiricism, criticism, agnosticism, and immanence (this-worldliness) (12). But the author is at his best when he stands aside to let the atheists speak for themselves, in generous block quotations, and then interprets their responses with sensitivity and insight.
The portrait that emerges from Baggett's admittedly nonrandom sample is of people who often make “considerable efforts to carve out intellectually honest and ethically discerning lives for themselves” (145). They valorize rationality but see the limits of reason. They admire science but without the inflexible scientism of some of the New Atheist authors. They have a this-worldly, life-affirming hope for progress even in a troubled world, though they cannot really be accused of naive Enlightenment utopianism or modernist optimism. They champion curiosity and open-mindedness, and rank intellectual integrity above emotional comfort but, Baggett writes, also display a surprising empathy for people who turn to religious faith in times of great need.
Baggett is not without his criticism of the atheists’ “blind spots” (225). He is unimpressed by their unheroic ethical sensibility, a morality too content with small efforts in daily life to spread kindness and alleviate suffering. He finds them too complacent and unreflexive concerning values they have merely absorbed from American culture—though, he admits, most of the nation's believers are in the same boat. He wishes the atheists had a rosier vision of institutional religion and that they could see that they actually have more in common with people of faith (at least with liberal and open-minded believers) than they think. However, while religious liberals who acknowledge multiple, imperfect paths to God and secular liberals who acknowledge multiple, imperfect ways to build a better world might be fellow travelers, sharing a sense of their human finitude, they are pursuing different ultimate goals. Baggett seems to want to nudge the atheists toward some vague “spirituality,” some cosmic yearning for transcendence and eternity, to give their view of life more philosophical depth. He concludes his excellent book by suggesting that atheists still have more to learn from religion, which is no doubt true. He points them toward Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (Pantheon, 2012).
A better recommendation, though, might be for contemporary American nonbelievers to further develop and articulate a politically engaged secular humanism. They might turn instead, for example, to Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019). At this time of climate crisis, the degradation of knowledge, and democracy under siege, we need more, not less, empirical rigor, critical inquiry, agnostic humility, and devotion to the “immanent frame” of the world we inhabit rather than to a divine realm we might dream about.
