Phil Zuckerman spends a lot of time reassuring people that he isn’t out to bash religion.
“Secular studies isn’t about tearing down or debunking religion,” says Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College and a leading figure in the burgeoning field of secular studies. “It’s about studying secularism ... from the standpoint of such disciplines as sociology, history, religion, and science.”
At a time when growing numbers of Americans are opting out of organized religion, secular studies has started to make inroads in academe with a new journal, at least two interdisciplinary research groups, and now its own undergraduate degree at Pitzer.
To those who question how much meaning can be found in studying the absence of religion, Zuckerman’s reply is this: “If secularity and secularism represent absence, it’s a pretty dense forest of nothingness.”
Students in secular studies at Pitzer will examine what kinds of people and cultures tend to be secular, how secularism plays out in global politics, and what social and even neurological factors might influence agnostics and atheists. Pitzer has created a “field group"—the term Pitzer uses for department—in secular studies. Students may also pursue a “special major"—an option for those whose interests lie outside established majors—in secular studies. (Students interested in the special major will meet with Mr. Zuckerman to outline a course of study.)
Zuckerman came up with the idea of creating the major after seeing how many students and scholars were, like him, searching for better ways to understand the growing skepticism about religion in America. The percentage of Americans who don’t identify with any religion has doubled since 1990, to more than 15 percent today, according to a 2008 survey by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn. The nonreligious people the study dubs “Nones” make up 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds.
“I started out six or seven years ago wanting to study secular, nonreligious people, and I found that I had to do that within the academic confines of religious studies or through conferences and journals that were focused on religion,” says Zuckerman, author of the newly released Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (Oxford University Press).
At conferences on religion, he started running into like-minded scholars: “There were others—anthropologists, psychologists, historians, political scientists—who were turning their attention to secularity. It became clear to me that this was a burgeoning field.” After he taught a course in secularism and skepticism at Pitzer in 2009, along with a seminar in contemporary secularism, a student asked him where she could pursue a graduate degree in secular studies. His Internet searches came up dry.
“That’s when it clicked,” he says. Although the college could offer only an undergraduate version of what the student was looking for, “Pitzer has a real tradition of innovation and experimentation,” Zuckerman says. To create a new field group, he needed four faculty members to sponsor it, and three colleagues in sociology, physics, and history were interested. Pitzer’s College Council approved the field group in April, with the provision that it be reviewed in four years.
At first, no one knew quite what to make of the proposal. “The first reaction was ‘What the hell is this?’” Zuckerman says. “A lot of people didn’t get it.” A group of Christian professors from the Claremont Colleges questioned him politely over lunch about what he had in mind. “They were a little worried that it would be anti-Christian or antireligious.” Zuckerman describes himself as “an atheist, an agnostic, a secular humanist, and a Jew” who celebrates many Jewish cultural traditions. “I would say I’m a nonbeliever, although I think there’s mystery out there and some things we will never understand, and I find joy and comfort in that.”
Last month, Will Holt became the first student to fill out paperwork for the secular-studies major. The 21-year-old junior plans to balance that with a minor in religious studies. He wants to explore how his own views have evolved from when he grew up attending a Methodist school and church in Nashville, and he’s interested in the broader issues that secularism raises.
“It’s so amazing seeing how secularism manifests itself in society,” he says, citing battles over separation of church and state as well as France’s ban on women wearing the full face veil in public. Asked whether anyone inquires what he’ll do with a degree in secular studies, he laughs. “Yeah, my father asked me that, and it’s a question that sometimes keeps me up at night.” He says he’d like to attend graduate school and possibly help start a secular-studies program himself. The same question could be posed about any number of liberal-arts majors, Zuckerman says. “We’re not creating this major in the hopes that it will be a lucrative career springboard.”
Pitzer’s president, Laura Skandera Trombley, says the secular-studies degree “is a great fit for us. In the 60s and 70s, we were among the first colleges to offer environmental-studies majors. At the time, it was seen as a radical, revolutionary notion.”
Secularism, with all of its varying definitions, seems to be a growing presence on college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance has grown from 42 campus affiliates in 2003 to 311 today (27 are at high schools and the rest at colleges). Jesse Galef, a spokesman for the alliance, says that as more students “come out” as nonreligious, the stigma is starting to fade.
“When a secular student walks across the quad wearing a button that says ‘ATHEIST (Ask Away!),’ that goes a long way toward normalizing nonbelief,” he says.
Many people still equate God with morality and assume, of atheists and agnostics, that “we’re amoral, we’re arrogant nihilists, and we like nothing better than kicking puppies,” the alliance says in an online tip sheet for teach-ins.
Barry A. Kosmin is founding director of the secularism institute at Trinity, which has developed courses for a variety of disciplines. “We’re trying to infiltrate the mainstream,” he says.
One barrier has been the lack of publishing outlets. “Until recently, university presses have not been willing to publish volumes with ‘secular’ in the title,” Kosmin says. And social-science journals that focus on religion tend to be controlled by believers, he adds, “so articles challenging basic assumptions about religion, its impact, etc., are not likely to be given the benefit of the doubt.”
To help encourage young scholars, the institute has teamed up with the Non-religion and Secularity Research Network, an international, interdisciplinary research group formed in 2008, to start an open-access journal, Secularism and Nonreligion, which is scheduled to make its debut in January. The interdisciplinary journal will focus mainly on the social sciences, exploring such topics as what it means to be secular and what the lives of nonreligious people are like, but it will also accept manuscripts in such areas as medicine, biology, and philosophy.
Kosmin, one of the journal’s editors, is optimistic. “We’re dropping the stone in the water, and we’ll see how far the ripples go.”
