Abstract
In the United States, nonreligious people face stigma, prejudice, and discrimination because they are viewed as immoral and distrustful. This is partly because of othering, by which nonreligious people are subjugated to a minority status. Othering also occurs in academic research and writing. Applying feminist principles can improve research about nonreligious populations. Grounded in results of a US-based online study, we recommend two feminist principles to facilitate the study of nonreligion: (1) rejecting othering of minority groups, and (2) intersectionality. As a result of applying these principles, the nuanced differences between nonreligious groups can be better understood and the complex identities of nonreligious people can be more accurately represented. Researchers benefit from increased accuracy and understanding of nonreligion via better informed theoretical and methodological decisions and nonreligious people benefit from their more accurate representation in academic research.
Highlights
The growing number of people in the United States (US) who do not identify with any religion has led to an increased interest in studying these populations (Bullivant 2020)
We argue have not been explicitly applied in the nonreligion field, have been implicitly integrated into studies about nonreligious populations
What do feminist principles accomplish beyond their individual parts? We opened this paper by considering issues researchers in the nonreligion field are facing and addressing
Summary
The growing number of people in the United States (US) who do not identify with any religion has led to an increased interest in studying these populations (Bullivant 2020). By researching nonreligious populations from a different epistemological perspective than empiricism, rejecting othering and accounting for intersectionality are possible as these two principles from feminist scholarship come out of a critical epistemology.
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