UC Santa Barbara

This article bridges the gap between the study of religion-making secularism and the study of secular people with an empirical analysis of three recent lawsuits filed by secular activists in the United States. Each suit asks the courts to understand nonbelievers in a different way: one group refuses to identify as religious, another wants to be protected as a religious minority, and a third wants to be analogized to religion without actually being called religious. Relying on extensive fieldwork among these and other nonbeliever organizations, this article contextualizes each lawsuit and demonstrates how nonbelievers often exceed the binaries of secularism and warrant a more capacious understanding of religion.