Book Review: Review of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics

Over the past few decades, the growth of the nonreligious in America has captured the attention of scholars and religious leaders alike. What is driving this rise? How does the expanding size of secular Americans affect political engagement? In Secular Surge, David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and John Green investigate these and other questions. More than just a growing number of Americans shedding religious labels, Campbell and colleagues demonstrate diversity in secular Americans traditionally obscured by past measurement strategies (p. 6). Through an impressive amount of original data collection, Secular Surge begins to uncover the political consequences of our new (non)religious political landscape.

Secular Surge introduces a novel measure of personal secularism drawing from three types of sources: secular theorists, the ‘new atheists,’ and belief statements from avowedly secular organizations. To validate their index, they use online panel surveys (the Secular America Study) and a survey of members of the American Humanist Association (p. 27). With the resulting personal secularism index, in combination with personal nonreligiosity (the inverse of the fields’ standard religiosity measures), they distinguish between four types of actors: non-religionists (those high on personal nonreligiosity and low on personal secularism), religionists (those low on both nonreligiosity and secularism), secularists (those high on both personal nonreligiosity and secularism), and secular religionists (those low on nonreligiosity and high on secularism). This novel measure is perhaps the greatest contribution of this work as existing literature tends only to focus on the first two groups, essentially defining seculars by what they are not. Omitting secularism (the latter two groups) inhibits scholars’ understanding of the political potential secularism has to organize and mobilize members of the American electorate. In other words, the authors demonstrate that traditional measures of (non)religion won't cut it anymore if the goal is to better understand first, what secular Americans are, and second, what secular Americans do.

The novel measure of personal secularism is a core theoretical and empirical contribution. However, the measure falls victim to the authors’ own critiques of past work. Pulling from tried-and-true secular sources for each item enhances measure validity, but also omits a third group of seculars who are more than simply nonreligious but who do not have a strong antipathy toward religion. In other words, there are yet more distinctions to be made among seculars. Qualms about measurement aside, the authors’ assertion that scholars are overlooking distinctions among seculars is well-taken. The personal secularism measure is an excellent place to begin exploring this greater diversity.

With the understanding that secular and nonreligious folk are not alike, the authors examine personal secularism's role in three distinct arenas of research: the debate about the causal arrow between religion and politics, intra- and inter-party ideological debates, and research on political tolerance (which canonically includes a focus on atheists). Secular Surge first explores whether secularism affects politics or vice versa using three survey experiments (the Clerical Campaign Experiment, the Political Pastor Experiment, and the Transactional Religion Experiment). The authors find that accounting for personal secularism, (non)religiosity does not affect political outcomes. Still, as prior work suggests, politics influences (non)religiosity (see Hout and Fischer 2014, Margolis 2018, Putnam and Campbell 2012). The reciprocal relationship instead occurs between secularism and politics (p. 101).

Secular Surge also examines the inter- and intra-party secular-religious divides, using data from a survey of 2016 State Convention delegates in a selection of states and surveys of delegates from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 2012 and 2016. Here we learn that the secular-religious divide is growing, not only between the two parties, but also among party activists. While the composition of this divide looks different in both parties, the authors conclude that it is a politically relevant division both parties will need to consider in the future, although it is perhaps most salient in the Democratic party that is composed of both secular and highly religious party activists. Finally, Secular Surge considers the future for secular political candidates in their Secular Candidate and Partisan Secular Candidate experiments, finding some evidence that identifying as a secular political candidate is less of a nail in a campaign's coffin than at times past.

Overall, this is an exceptionally insightful book, one that generates even more questions than it attempts to answer. While the personal secularism measures are one avenue through which to examine the growing number of seculars in America, the authors invite future work to engage with their main premise to take nonreligious and secular Americans, and their varying political potential, seriously. Ultimately, Secular Surge is successful in its call for scholars to rethink how we measure (non)religion and to think carefully about the diversity of nonreligious and secular experiences in the United States.