{"id":4393,"date":"2018-02-12T15:57:32","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T15:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/upgrade-understandingunbelief\/?page_id=4393"},"modified":"2020-09-07T09:22:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T08:22:46","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-unbelief","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/blogs\/who-cares-about-unbelief\/we-need-to-talk-about-unbelief\/","title":{"rendered":"We need to talk about Unbelief"},"content":{"rendered":"<nav class=\"breadcrumb \"><a href=\"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/publications\/blogs\/\/\">Blogs<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/blogs\/who-cares-about-unbelief\/\">Who Cares About Unbelief<\/nav>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/blogs\/who-cares-about-unbelief\/we-need-to-talk-about-unbelief\/alice\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-4394\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-4394\" src=\"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1816\/2018\/02\/alice-300x190.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"190\" srcset=\"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1816\/2018\/02\/alice-300x190.png 300w, https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1816\/2018\/02\/alice-768x486.png 768w, https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1816\/2018\/02\/alice-1024x648.png 1024w, https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1816\/2018\/02\/alice.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>\u201cSpeak English!\u201d said the Eaglet to the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, \u201cI don\u2019t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what\u2019s more, I don\u2019t believe you do either!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cI know what \u201cit\u201d means well enough, when I find a thing,\u201d said the Duck.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Researchers I\u2019ve spoken to within the growing academic field of Unbelief would agree that they are still finding out what this thing is \u2013 they speak of it as a slippery term \u2013 and debate the relationship between the categories of Non-religion and Unbelief \u2013 terms which still probably don\u2019t mean much outside academic circles.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDo you mean atheist?\u201d asked a friend. Not just atheist \u2013 I said \u2013 it\u2019s more non-religion. And what is it about non-religion that is so interesting? She said. In other words \u2013 what\u2019s the story?<\/p>\n<p>All of this poses a challenge to those of us in the media who are interested in telling people\u2019s stories and communicating the shifting patterns of religion, belief, identity \u2013 and straight away, I know, I have fallen into the same semantic quagmire that academics find themselves in \u2013 and have to ask how appropriate is it to use the terms associated with religion when we\u2019re talking about things which are in contradistinction to it.<\/p>\n<p>I think we all know the overarching narrative of the trends which are taking place in Britain \u2013 growing number of Nones or unaffiliated, an overall decline in church attendance, while at the same time the continued and increasing importance of religion as a marker of identity for certain groups. What we hear less of are the stories of the individuals behind the first of those trends.<\/p>\n<p>In particular I\u2019m interested in how important a non-religion identity is for the Nones? What makes up that identity? Is it a positive one \u2013 as it is for many atheists and humanists \u2013 which says something about who they are as people and what motivates and inspires them? Or is it a negative descriptor which tells me very little about them and which even they may not care about very much?<\/p>\n<p>I become interested in the None identity when it denotes more than a simple label. So, in learning about Unbelief and non-religion, I want to hear from those carrying out qualitative research which tells me about the individuals for whom this is an important descriptor. I want to know how they came to the position they hold, family influences, life events, how their views have changed over time, where they look to for guidance and authority, the communities to which they belong, their daily behaviour and practice. Most of all, though, I want to know whether and how having a non-religious identity makes a difference to the way they live their everyday lives.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing I want to know is how non-religion is changing as a result of being studied and as a result of non-religious people becoming more self-conscious about that identity. Is non-religion becoming a movement? Is it providing communities of belonging? The obvious example of course is the Sunday Assembly where atheists and others meet to sing, hear inspiring talks and socialise. It is a church without God. Are groups such as these developing mechanisms to identify and support the pastoral needs of their members? Are they motivated to look outside of themselves to the neighbourhoods they are part of, to respond to the needs they see there?<\/p>\n<p>For many Christians the church provides the locus out of which they live many aspects of their lives \u2013 spiritual, social, volunteering; they campaign on a range of issues they care about, because (they might say) they are Christians. The church has an infrastructure to help them do that. Does non-religion \u2013 as a category \u2013 aspire to any of this? Do Nones want to hang out with other Nones because of that shared identity, do they want to do their volunteering and campaigning as Nones rather than as members of the other groups to which they belong? Do they feel they lack the resources and infrastructure to do so? To what extent does being a None provide any of the motivation for social activism?<\/p>\n<p>Those are some of the questions I want to know from researchers in this field and which I think my audience \u2013 which most of the time is the BBC Radio 4 listenership \u2013 would also be interested in. Because of their age (average 55), Radio 4 listeners are less likely than the general population to be Nones, but we can probably assume that non-religion and Unbelief will increasingly reflect where they are at. That doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re not interested in religion. 92% of them look to Radio 4 to keep them up-to-date with news and current affairs and you can\u2019t do that if you don\u2019t take account of the role that religion plays for good and ill in the lives of people the world over. An ICM survey last year suggested that only 15% of Radio 4 listeners claimed to listen to programmes on religion, but it wasn\u2019t clear what was meant by programmes on religion \u2013was it worship programmes, or programmes with a specific remit to discuss religion, or any number of one-off documentary series?<\/p>\n<p>This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Dr Lois Lee from University College, London in which she said, \u201cI research an interesting group of non-religious people who think of themselves as not interested in religion and non-religion but demonstrably are.\u201d I\u2019d be interested to know about their listening habits. There\u2019s a really useful piece of research to be done on which general newspapers, websites and broadcast programmes self-conscious Nones feel best cater to their interests and needs. I\u2019m not a None so perhaps am not qualified to comment, but one of the strongest radio contenders I can think of would be selected interviews from a BBC Radio 3 series with Joan Bakewell, which is sadly now no more and was \u2013 ironically \u2013 called Belief.<\/p>\n<p>A new book Religion and Atheism; beyond the divide reflects the overlap between religion and non-religion, belief and Unbelief. I\u2019m grateful to the academics and others who have pushed us beyond the adversarial debates of a few years ago. It seems to me that we are now in a space where a growing number of people are prepared to say \u2013 to paraphrase the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice \u2013 \u201cyou\u2019re not crazy. Your reality is just different to mine.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This blog was originally publish by the William Temple Foundation on 11 January 2017 at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/williamtemplefoundation.org.uk\/we-need-to-talk-about-unbelief\/\">http:\/\/williamtemplefoundation.org.uk\/we-need-to-talk-about-unbelief\/<\/a>\u00a0 and was adapted from a talk given by Rosie Dawson at University College London during a roundtable on Non religion and Unbelief in 2016.<\/p>\n<p>Rosie Dawson is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation and a Producer on BBC Radio 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BlogsWho Cares About Unbelief \u201cSpeak English!\u201d said the Eaglet to the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, \u201cI don\u2019t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what\u2019s more, I don\u2019t believe you do either!\u201d \u201cI know what \u201cit\u201d means well enough, when I find a thing,\u201d said the Duck. Researchers I\u2019ve spoken to within [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"parent":4214,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4393","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4393"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6424,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4393\/revisions\/6424"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/understandingunbelief\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}