Review: The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification, and Locality, by Christopher R. Cotter

Abstract

Christopher Cotter’s text is an admirable contribution to the growing study of non-religion in its various forms. He explores how non-religion as an identification claim works to situate individuals within a complex network of social powers, placing claimants in relation to one another and the structures collectively produced and maintained. Scholars already versed in this subfield may find it valuable to work through the material. The book is dense and difficult, however, and unlikely to be helpful for general usage, either in research or the classroom. This reader often felt bogged down by copious references and citations, which read as survivals from earlier iterations of the content, particularly reflective of a dissertation level of literature engagement; indeed both Cotter’s dissertation and master’s thesis work have been rolled into this monograph.The first half of the book is largely theoretical. Chapter 1 introduces the broad landscape of the field, situating the book in relation to related work on secularism, atheism, “nones,” and “spiritual, but not religious” trends. Cotter sets up his content by explaining that “non-religion is not everything that is not religious” (21, emphasis in original). Instead, it is everything that is postured vis-a-vis religion for its own definition. It is everything that is defined by its non-religiosity—not de facto non-religious, but intentional non-religiosity. In the second chapter, Cotter provides a critical assessment of what he sees as the four dominant approaches to non-religion: subtractionist, context specific, substantial, and discursive. It is this final approach upon which he lands for his own investigation. Chapter 3 moves toward his case study, detailing the value of localities—or practical working environments—which provide somewhat stable, defined communities for investigation. Cotter chose Edinburgh’s Southside neighborhood, a relatively representative area with slightly higher religious and ethnic diversity than the rest of the city. The remaining chapters provide an in-depth application of Cotter’s discursive method, and subsequent theoretical analysis.Where the book is most successful is in its finely detailed application of discursive approaches. Cotter pays close attention to both the language his informants use, and the various contexts and code-switches they employ. He recognizes and explicitly outlines the difficulty in attempting to understand trends and networks as they are developing, but convincingly lays out discursive theory as a potential solution to such problems. Cotter’s commitment to detail is admirable, and incredibly helpful for readers who are similarly inclined to the beautiful minutiae of conversation (and its attendant meanings), but general readers may find themselves overwhelmed. In analyzing religion-related discourses in Edinburgh’s Southside (including non- and anti-religious sentiments), Cotter identifies eight key thematic groups: power, civic space, space and built environment, living, social identity, containment, relationships, and science and meaning.Cotter’s chapter on identity (chapter 5) is similarly successful. He advocates for “shifting from seemingly static identities to the more active claims and counterclaims surrounding them” (139) as a way to reorient discussions of identity toward identification, which he describes as significantly more relational and contextual. In other words, he is sensitive to and aware of the ways in which his informants’ identity claims are in response to a host of contextual circumstances. One participant, Naomi, is a “somewhat secular Jew,” whose “identification as Jewish isn’t something that she is consciously made aware of.” And yet, he points out, there are “spaces where this aspect of her identity is brought more clearly into focus,” specifically the Jewish cemetery in the neighborhood (141). This insistence on not reifying identity is essential to both Cotter’s discursive approach, and his fundamental assertion that employing such a method “provides us with a richer and more critically sound grasp of the machinations, agendas, and vicissitudes at play in the religion-related field…at a time when global politics has become highly polarized around such matters” (160).It is in the final chapter that Cotter confronts a question that haunts the entire book: why study indifference? Essentially, he claims that doing so forces scholars to reconsider the boundaries of our field(s), and the various power dynamics that are at play. As he states, “the study of religious indifference is entangled with several problems with the researcher, many of which are problems associated with the study of religion turned up to eleven” (185). Indeed, what we classify as religion or non-religion prefaces our entire examination with prejudice and may obfuscate otherwise important themes and trends. He reminds readers that just as religion is a permeable category, into and out of which people may move in complex and unpredictable ways, so too is non-religion. Cotter’s conclusion, succinctly, is that “the performance of indifference can serve as a tactic for coping with contextually meaningful difference” (179, emphasis in original). This argument is the heart of Cotter’s project, and the clearest contribution to this emerging subfield.