Atheists in America: Groundbreaking Study on Nonbelievers | Explore Secular Perspectives & Modern Beliefs

For all of the social science research that's been done on religious belief, far too little has been done on religious unbelief. This work stands as a useful corrective. The study is not without its (self-acknowledged) limitation, but it strikes me as being pioneering work in a very important field. After all, across Europe, even nominal religious belief has sunk to historic lows (in my last trip there I was struck by the number of parish churches and even large urban cathedrals that had been converted to pubs, discos, boutiques, and condominiums). The U.S., too, at least outside the "Bible Belt," is very slowly drifting from belief to dead orthodoxy to nominal faith to (at least) agnosticism. More sociologists need to be exploring and explaining this phenomenon.So I'm glad a commenter on another review I wrote pointed me to this book. It seems to be the first sociological attempt to find out why people become atheists and what they actually think -- and answers to both questions were interesting, surprising, and contrary to what some theorists might predict.While I think this study has some flaws -- which the surviving writer, Bob Altemeyer, incorporates into his writing (Bruce Hunsberger, sadly, passed while the work was in progress) -- I think it deserves a near-top rating for the following reasons:*The writers do a remarkable job of presenting their material to a general, educated, adult audience. It is so easy for academic researchers to slip into the jargon and familiar constructions of their discipline, but somehow these writers stepped back from the dense language and conceptual smoke that so many academics use as badges of authority.*The study seems well constructed, and conducted with the utmost of integrity.*The clear and unambiguous spirit of the work is to figure out "what really is out there?" rather than to reach preconceived conclusions.As I wrote above, this appears to be pioneering work, and some others now need to follow on. The authors acknowledge the geographic and numerical limitations of their results, meaning that more and larger scale work is due. Given the West's major shifts in religious belief in this age, I hope that work is underway now.(So why not five stars? Well, I reserve five for books that knock my socks off. This one didn't, but I'm still glad I read it and learned much from it.)