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Organised secularism in the United States. New directions in research. Edited by Ryan T. Cragun, Christel Manning and Lori L. Fazzino. (Religion and its Others, 6.) Pp. viii + 321 incl. 21 tables. Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. €99.95. 978 3 11 045742 1; 2330 6262

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

Leigh E. Schmidt*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St Louis
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Abstract

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

The product of a conference on nonreligion and secularity held at Pitzer College in 2014, this collection of fourteen essays focuses on the institutional structures and community-building activities of contemporary secularists, humanists and atheists in the United States. Most of the pieces document the growing visibility of nonbelievers in American culture over the last two decades; they offer new empirical data on the mission of various secular organisations such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the American Humanist Association; they assess the tensions and sometimes rancorous divisions within the contemporary secular movement; and they attend closely to emergent practices of secularist identity formation through online networks or through new congregational ventures such as the Sunday Assembly. Much of the best work on the history of unbelief, atheism and secularity is richly dialogic with the history of Christianity, but that is not a conversation foregrounded in these pages. With its primary focus on organised secularism as a contemporary social movement, the volume offers only modest material for historians. Michael Rectenwald reaches back to George Jacob Holyoake’s initial codification of ‘secularism’ in the 1850s: namely, the promotion of a this-worldly moral programme free of other-worldly preoccupations. As Rectenwald suggests, the fractures within nineteenth-century British free thought, epitomised in the divide between Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh, portended enduring tensions within the secularist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Also, Charles Louis Richter offers an insightful examination of how atheism has been figured as a religion in its own right in American musings on cults as well as in American jurisprudence from the 1920s through the 1980s. The threat of ‘secular humanism’ as a surrogate creed in the public schools was one of the primary motivators of the New Christian Right. Beyond the Rectenwald and Richter essays, the volume also contains some helpful contributions to thinking about the history that immediately precedes the rise of the ‘New Atheism’ of the last two decades. That proximate history includes Madalyn Murray O'Hair's American Atheists and Paul Kurtz's Council for Secular Humanism. Still, the collection’s primary offerings remain in the domain of the sociology of contemporary secularism and irreligion, and it is especially worth consulting for those interested in that area of inquiry.