The Secular Paradox

Joseph Blankholm’s The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious examines nonbelievers and how their lives intersect, often in unpredictable ways, with the concepts of belief, spirituality, and community, to name but a few. Through a series of case studies conducted over the course of the better part of a decade, Blankholm’s fieldwork includes interviews with community leaders of groups who focus on secularization and community building. These interviews attempt to address the paradox of how nonreligious people live a secular life in a world saturated with Christianity iconography, and subject to Christian influences on organizational paradigms and culture. The major concern of this book, as the title suggests, is addressing the paradox of the nonreligious, whose beliefs and practices often resemble a form of religiosity. While the nonreligious attempt to differentiate themselves from the religious, they create structures that begin to look religious.

The aim of this book is to make sense of people’s secular ideas toward religion and religious practices. To be secular entails participating in a secular tradition and sharing a way of life with other secular people, and for precisely this reason these groups look religious. To establish this claim, Blankholm draws on his field work to systematically describe five aspects of secular life—Belief, Community, Ritual, Conversion, and Tradition—that equally apply to religious life. The author argues that because of the paradoxical nature of secularization, the ruptures between nonbelievers are extremely generative, thus contributing further to the complicated nature of describing secularization.

 Chapter 1, titled “Belief,” expounds upon the complicated nature of the terms used by nonbelievers to describe themselves and their beliefs. The terms are unsettled and deeply personal, as Blankholm’s interviews show that terms like “atheist” and “free thinker” often overlap, but nevertheless differ in subtle and important ways; for example, some nonbelievers see the term atheist as aggressive (39). The difficulty of terms is one of the previously mentioned generative ruptures. The chapter on tradition traces the various concepts that nonreligious or secular people have used historically, tracing the humanist movement and how the movement is adopted to and transformed by current social structures. For example, building on the work of Mason Olds, Blankholm asserts that there are five types of humanism: Renaissance Humanism, Literary Humanism, Nietzschean Humanism, and Naturalistic Humanism. Olds adds Religious Humanism to this mix, claiming it is closest to Naturalistic Humanism.

Blankholm’s writing is praiseworthy. In his field notes, he describes the interview space, lending a quasi-surreal feeling to the reading experience. For instance, the introduction of the “Tradition” section opens with a vivid description of a Unitarian Church Blankholm attends, and though the details seem extraneous at first, they highlight the materiality that the interview participants emphasize. Moreover, the author clearly articulates complicated paradoxical positions and clarifies murky terms. The necessity of clear terminology is paramount when discussing paradoxes, and the secularization paradox is no exception.

One of the few shortcomings of the book is its focus on organized nonbelievers. According to Blankholm, one of the reasons for this is pragmatic (19), but it raises questions. If we examine organized communities of nonbelievers based on the same categories we use for organized communities of believers, we may impose church-like structures onto secular individuals. But can nonbelievers and believers be evaluated by the same terms? Is an “organized” nonbeliever fundamentally different than an “organized” believer?

The conclusions that Blankholm draws are fair, in that by identifying a slippage in terminology, and by identifying just how individual these communities are, he shows that secularization is not a monolithic movement, as few movements are. The collective similarities outweigh the differences, yet it is in the differences that the most generative insights can be found. Due to these ruptures, nonbelievers are left with constellations of terminologies, practices, and organizational patterns that this book identifies and explores, contributing to our larger understanding of secularization. The book is well suited for any advanced ungraduated and graduate students in religious studies or anthropology who are looking to examine secular beliefs from a more nuanced and emic perspective.

Nicholas Petry is a graduate student in German studies and religious studies at the University of California, Davis.

Nicholas Petry

Date Of Review:

July 30, 2023