Not Religious and Not Atheist

Understanding The New "Nranas"

I’m not great at creating new words. I created one for my Substack publication - “Deconstructionology”. In my presentation at the ORTCON 24 (Open and Relational Theology Conference) I created a new group of terms to be included in the landscape of theological discourse, including:

• Atheology - the study of the meaning of God in the absence of God.

• Atheizing - the renunciation of any objectified existence of God.

• Absenthestic Spirituality - a life approach without God as a meeter of needs or solver of problems.

Though it’s not the subject of this article, if you’ve been reading my Substack newsletter, you know that my current efforts in the field of theology would be classified as “radical theology” or “death of God theology”. I realize these terms may sound bleak, but in my view they represent some of the most hopeful and liberating work in theology today.

I’ve written about this extensively. Here are a few articles to read if you have interest:

A New Theology

Saving Christianity From Itself

A Non-Religious Resurrection

The Death of God in Jesus

What if God disappeared?

The Perfect Murder

Can you be good without God?

Back to new words. I created a new one for this article - “nrana”. As far as words go, it has some serious downsides. Go ahead, Google words that start with nr. There aren’t many, and the ones we have are niche words like “nritta”, which is a type of Indian classical dance that involves abstract, decorative movements of the hands and body, and foot stamping.

Another downside to the word “nrana” is that it sort sounds a little like “piranha”, the extremely predatory and flesh-eating fish. And that’s not a good association for my new word.

The only real upside to my new word (depending upon your view) is that it also sounds a little like the American rock band “Nirvana”. In my philosophy series I wrote a special edition article on Kurt Cobain on the 30th anniversary of his death.

Unbelief in God May Not Make You an Atheist

The word I created for this article, “nrana” is essentially an acronym for “not religious and not atheist.” It turns out that this might be the fastest growing “religious group” in America.

The number of individuals in the United States who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown dramatically in recent years, and “the nones” are now larger than any single religious group. According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5% of the U.S. population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is around 30% today.

At first glance, some might assume this means nearly 1 in 3 Americans are atheists, but that’s far from true. Indeed, only about 4% of U.S. adults identify as an atheist. In other words, rejecting a belief in God is by no means a sufficient condition for identifying as an atheist. Only about 17% of religiously unaffiliated people explicitly identify as “atheist” on surveys. So why do some individuals who do not believe in God identify as an atheist while others do not?

For the most part, atheists more actively reject religion and religious concepts than other religiously unaffiliated individuals. Recent research examines two questions related to atheism. First, what makes an individual more or less likely to identify as an atheist? We know that the social stigma often attached to the designation of “atheist” is a significantly influencing factor. One’s social location - a person’s position in society (race, gender, social class, sexuality, age, ability, religious background, and geographic location) - can make an atheistic worldview more or less costly, thereby serving as supports or barriers to adopting it.

A second question is, what makes someone more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview over time? Research shows that people who had doubt about belief in God in adolescence are more likely to adopt an atheistic worldview and identify as atheist.

Research on the effects of education on religion have been mixed. Both social theory and popular narratives have often seen education as an agent of secularization. Education, particularly higher education, is assumed to erode individual’s religious beliefs and commitment. This is in part because individuals are exposed to a scientific worldview that undercuts religious claims about the world or are exposed to a pluralistic peer group that undercuts their religious certainty.