Jonathan Jong
...present among ostensibly nonreligious (or secular) individuals and groups. Scholars of religion and nonreligion should therefore all but abandon the terms “religion” and “nonreligion”, and with them the clichéd definitional handwringing that typically comes with attempts at defining these terms. At best, they may retain their social functions—in names of departments, scholarly organizations, conferences, and journals, for e...
Ryan T. Cragun1*, Joseph H. Hammer2, Michael Nielsen3
...ividuals who identify as nonreligious and nonspiritual. There is a need to develop a valid and reliable measure of (non)religiousness and (non)spirituality. This article discusses these problems, and presents the development and initial validation of a 17-item Nonreligious-Nonspiritual Scale (NRNSS) across three studies. The NRNSS exhibited high internal consistency (α > .94) and high test-retest reliability (r = .92). Two exploratory and one confir...
John Stinespring, Ryan T. Cragun*
...f the population that is nonreligious. The model setup and solution are shown to be both intuitive and determined by three parameter values. The authors illustrate its use by estimating these parameter values using biannual data from the 1973 to 2012 General Social Surveys (GSS). The parameter estimates from the first half of the GSS data series, 1973-1991, provide a good fit to the 1993-2012 data. Calibrating the model to the latter half of the data, 1993-201...
David F. Bradley*, Julie J. Exline, Alex Uzdavines
...ticipation in explicitly nonreligious activities, and greater desire for gods to exist. Basing a hypothetical god on a previous personal image of god was associated with imagining a more loving and less distant god, while using a culturally popular image of god was associated with a more cruel god. Our findings suggest nonbelievers, when prompted to imagine a hypothetical god, do not uniformly imagine cruel gods, but a diverse array of deities based partly on ...
