The Secular Paradox

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Living in a culture saturated with Christian language and ideas, America's nonbelievers struggle to define themselves on their own terms. They face the difficult choice of avoiding religion completely or embracing parts of religion and living with contradictions. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm explores what it feels like to be secular and live with this ambivalence. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume shows how secular people are both absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. The Secular Paradox focuses heavily on nonbelievers who don't fit easily within secularism because they are the ones who tell its story best. The challenges faced by people of color, women, and those who have left non-Christian religions shed light on what secularism is and how it works by revealing its limits and contradictions. Placing them front and center unveils a new landscape of American religion and offers a view into what American secularism is becoming. Book jacket.