Today, amid the latest iteration of the“New Atheism”(a term that has emerged several times since the beginning of the twentieth century; see Fazzino and Cra-gun, this volume, for more on New Atheism), the visibility of atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists, the nonreligious, and the non-affiliated has reached un-paralleled levels. And yet the“I know it when I see it”approach to defining re-ligion is still in ubiquitous use.
Perhaps the best recent example is found in reactions to the Sunday Assem-bly, a“godless congregation”founded in 2013 by British comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, which consciously uses organizational models derived from Christianity, but divested of revealed doctrine or deity (see Smith’s and Frost’s chapters, this volume). The idea of a church-like community that uses a congregational model, but without theistic belief is not new; the Sunday As-sembly has its precursors in the Ethical Societies, the 4A, Unitarian
Universal- “A Debate on Religion Freedom,”Harper’s, October 1984, 15.
ism, and even Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s American Atheist Church, all of which used the form of churches without incorporating belief in a god.¹⁶None of the early organizations had the benefit of the Internet; the Sunday Assembly has leveraged online communities to seed local communities very effectively. The first meetings of the initial Sunday Assembly group in London got some media attention, but it was when the founders announced a world tour to seed new congregations in November of 2013 that the organization got widespread atten-tion as an“atheist megachurch,”in the words of salon.com reporter Katie Engel-hart (EngelEngel-hart 2013). As other media outlets took notice, including a widely re-published Associated Press piece, they also picked up on this language, regardless of the fact that the founders intentionally avoided calling their move-ment either an atheist organization or a church. The“megachurch”label is also a misnomer – all the Sunday Assembly attendees worldwide might fit into one good-sized American mega-church.
And yet the“atheist church”label sticks because, again, we know it when we see it. Observers of the Sunday Assembly see a group with a set of beliefs about humanity and the world, a familiar form of celebration, a peculiar form of rev-erence, and a community built on local congregations linked in a global body.
It fits into the grid. So the Sunday Assembly, like secular humanism, is a disrup-tive element; it seems to fit the category of religion, but there is cognidisrup-tive disso-nance preventing it from fitting too neatly. Here is something we can learn from colloquial approaches to defining religion: a disruptive element like secular hu-manism betrays the observer’s biases and shows how tightly intertwined religion is with politics and culture. The interpretation of secular ways of knowing as in-herently and necessarily anti-religious or anti-theistic also shows the normative quality of both religiosity and Christianity in American culture. Sometimes it is not politically expedient to call it as one sees it, and in this, the study of nonre-ligion can help us better understand renonre-ligion.
Secularist organizations have also claimed religious status under the law to gain equal foot-ing with religious organizations. See the American Humanist Association’s religious tax exemp-tion (Fazzino and Cragun, this volume) and the Universal Life Church’s authority to perform mar-riages (Hoesly, this volume) for examples.
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