Previous work in which religious unbelief is explored using qualitative interviews tends to involve an interviewer asking about unbelief,<\/em> in a project concerned with unbelief,<\/em> often with interviewees who are themselves especially aware of or interested in their unbelief.<\/em> While this work contributes enormously to our understanding of certain forms of unbelief, it has two disadvantages. One, it tends to focus on very particular sub-groups, such as members of humanist organisations.* Two, it risks artificially foregrounding religious unbelief as an aspect of interviewees\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n In this audio essay I seek to side-step these two problems by examining religious unbelief through interviews that were recorded with no particular interest in religious unbelief.<\/strong> In an innovative collaboration between National Life Stories<\/a> and the Understanding Unbelief programme<\/a>, I have been able to explore two sound archives held at the British library:<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u2018An Oral History of the Water Industry\u2019 (C1364): 31 interviews, recorded between 2009 and 2012, with staff and former staff at all levels within the UK water industry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u2018NLSC: City Lives\u2019 (C409): 150 interviews recorded between 1987 and 1997 with workers and former workers in the City of London (in the Stock Exchange, the merchant and clearing banks, the commodities and future markets, law and accounting firms, financial regulators, insurance companies and Lloyd\u2019s of London).<\/span><\/p>\n Within these large collections of very long interviews, I have surfaced moments when interviewees talk about not believing in God, lack of interest in and\/or engagement with religion, and existential beliefs held in the absence of religious belief (such as belief in \u2018fate\u2019).\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n In what follows, I highlight two ways in which this work contributes to the Understanding Unbelief programme\u2019s aim to study and improve public understanding of diverse forms of unbelief.\u00a0 Firstly, though the collections cover a relatively narrow \u2018cohort\u2019 (people born in the UK between 1908 and 1959, interviewed between 1987 and 2012 and all \u2018successful\u2019 in their careers, in two different \u2018industries\u2019), the interviews offer rare \u2018data\u2019 on the experience of religious unbelief among those who do not necessarily regard such unbelief as a significant feature of their lives.\u00a0 Secondly, by listening not just to interviewees but also to interviewers, it is possible to explore the relationship between the way in which questions were framed, and the kinds of talk (and silence) about religious unbelief that followed \u2013 vital insights for those conducting their own interviews on unbelief.\u00a0 In the conclusion, I discuss these two features further through a comparison with a third, rather different collection of interviews at the British Library which was recorded with a specific interest in belief (among a set of 16 themes):\u00a0 the \u2018Millennium Memory Bank\u2019 (C900).<\/span><\/p>\n My extracts from the interviews include British Library catalogue references (the C numbers) and, where possible, track numbers and precise timecodes.\u00a0 In the cases where the interviews have online access, I have inserted hyperlinks to the full interviews. In this first section I consider three ways in which attention to religious unbelief (and belief) is avoided<\/em> \u2013 or at least escapes attention \u2013 in the interviews I used. Firstly, in some interviews, religion and religious belief is simply not asked about. The result is either complete silence (no reference to religion anywhere in the interview) or brief references to \u2018church\u2019 that are not followed up by the interviewer, such as this:<\/p>\n …and I had a friend [\u2026] who I knew from Youth Matters at \u2013 and at church and he was an articled pupil to the chief engineer [\u2026] so he was one of these guys who was doing what I thought I\u2019d like to do. [C1364\/4, Track 5, 8:28-8:52]<\/span><\/p>\n Secondly, most interviewers do not ask directly about religious belief. Instead they ask whether interviewees went to church or Sunday School as children, and if so how they felt about going, whether religion was \u2018discussed\u2019 at home and whether or not religion has been \u2018important\u2019 or \u2018played a part\u2019 in their lives. With such questioning, it is possible for interviewees to say quite a lot about the experience of religion without saying very much at all about their belief or unbelief, as in this first clip:<\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\nAvoiding talk about religious unbelief<\/h2>\n
Audio clip 1<\/h3>\n