Building a better survey of religion: A proposal to capture the religious life of the nonreligious

In the study of religion, many scholars have engaged in the difficult work of developing theoretical models that can promote clearer understandings of some forms of nonreligiosity. Despite these theoretical expansions, survey measures of religion have yet to reflect these changes, maintaining a lexicon of religion based in Christianity. Surveys of religion operate with the assumption that respondents have a singular affiliation, belief in heaven and hell, opinions on the literal interpretation of the Bible, belief in God or a universal spirit, communal worship attendance, and individual prayer. These measures ignore the vibrant ways people who identify as nonreligious understand themselves and perform religiosity through their nonreligious lives. I propose a new model for surveying religiosity that shifts the focal point of a person’s religiosity from affiliation to a web of “religious-like” things which respondents identify as special or important. This web allows for a person to have incongruent and diverse systems of religious-like lives while collecting clusters of shared religiosities. By allowing for incongruence and wider variations it becomes possible to capture the ways that lived religious lives of the nonreligious negotiate the space between the secular and religious. The benefits of this expansion could also improve scholars’ ability to capture the lived religion of minority religiosities. In shifting the questions that surveys ask, scholars could better understand the religious landscape of the US in a substantive way that allows for diverse research questions centered on various aspects of religious life besides affiliation.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Religion

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Folkenroth, Emma

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ebel, Jonathan

• nonreligion
• religiosity
• religious survey research
• nonreligiosity
• religious survey measures
• religion in the US

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Emma Folkenroth

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115626

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115626