Secularism and Nonreligion: Making Sense of Confusing Concepts

Secularism and nonreligion are confusing concepts. Over time, with strategic redefinition, they have accreted several, sometimes contradictory meanings. Today, their semantic excess creates confusion, both among scholars and between scholars and the public. This confusion undermines their analytic value and makes the rich conversations they generate unnecessarily obscure. By building on scholarship from several subfields, this essay observes key moments in these concepts' redefinition and describes the strategies their new meanings have supported. Understanding how different subfields approach secularism and nonreligion—and how those approaches relate to one another—helps us rethink our basic assumptions and overcome our field‐specific path‐dependency. Making sense of secularism and nonreligion is important because doing so helps describe enormous changes as disparate as declining rates of religion and the crisis of political liberalism. We cannot do without “secularism” and “nonreligion,” so we must do better.