Community Beyond Belief
Community Beyond Belief
As religious affiliation declines in many societies, the human need for community has not disappeared. People continue to seek friendship, belonging, shared meaning, ethical guidance, rituals, mutual support, and opportunities to contribute to something larger than themselves. Increasingly, these needs are being met through secular, humanist, and other nonreligious communities.
Community beyond belief refers to forms of social life that do not require members to share a religious doctrine. Humanist organizations, Ethical Culture societies, secular congregations, student groups, civic organizations, support networks, cultural gatherings, and informal communities demonstrate that strong relationships can develop around shared values and experiences rather than shared theology.
The research and examples collected here show that the distinction between religious and secular life is more complicated than simply believing or not believing. Many of the social functions historically associated with religious institutions—gathering, ritual, service, mentorship, celebration, mourning, moral discussion, and mutual assistance—can also exist in explicitly secular settings.
The Human Need for Belonging
Belonging is a fundamental part of community life. Religious congregations have historically provided regular opportunities for people to meet, develop friendships, exchange assistance, celebrate important events, and maintain relationships across generations.
Research into secular and religious participation suggests that at least some of these benefits come from participation itself rather than exclusively from religious belief. Regular gatherings, repeated interaction, shared activities, cooperation, and mutual care can create social bonds in many different institutional settings.
This distinction becomes increasingly important as the number of religiously unaffiliated people grows. A person who no longer identifies with a religion does not cease needing companionship, recognition, purpose, celebration, support, or community.
Secular Congregations and New Forms of Gathering
Secular congregations provide one of the clearest examples of organized community beyond religion. Organizations such as Sunday Assembly and Oasis have experimented with gatherings that include music, talks, celebrations, volunteering, meals, discussion, and friendship while removing requirements for supernatural belief.
These organizations raise an important question: how much of the value traditionally associated with congregational life comes from theology, and how much comes from people repeatedly gathering together?
Studies of secular congregations have examined belonging, wellbeing, shared identity, emotional connection, ritual, and social support. Their existence demonstrates that congregational forms of community can be adapted to people who identify as atheist, agnostic, humanist, secular, or simply nonreligious.
Leaving Religion and Rebuilding Community
Leaving religion can involve much more than changing one's beliefs. Religious institutions may provide friendships, family connections, routines, identity, celebrations, mentorship, and support networks. Leaving them can therefore produce significant social disruption.
People who leave religion sometimes have to reconstruct several parts of their lives simultaneously. New secular organizations and peer-support networks can help replace lost relationships and provide environments where questioning, doubt, and changing identities can be discussed openly.
Organizations serving former believers illustrate the importance of community during this transition. The challenge is not necessarily finding a replacement theology but finding relationships, understanding, practical support, and a renewed sense of belonging.
Humanism and Shared Ethical Values
Humanism provides an example of a positive worldview that does not define itself solely through the rejection of religion. Humanist traditions emphasize human dignity, reason, compassion, ethical responsibility, freedom, cooperation, and the possibility of creating meaningful lives through human relationships.
Organized humanism demonstrates that communities can develop around shared ethical commitments without requiring agreement about supernatural claims.
Humanist chapters, conferences, educational programs, volunteer projects, and international organizations create networks through which people can meet others who share broadly similar values while participating in wider civic life.
Ethical Culture and Organized Humanism
Ethical Culture represents a particularly long-standing model of nontheistic community. Ethical Societies organize gatherings around human worth, ethical relationships, education, service, reflection, and social responsibility rather than adherence to a creed.
These communities demonstrate that institutions centered on ethics can provide many familiar features of congregational life, including regular meetings, ceremonies, children's programs, social events, volunteering, discussion, and multigenerational relationships.
Their history also shows that community beyond traditional religious belief is not simply a recent response to declining religious affiliation. Organized attempts to create ethical and human-centered communities have existed for generations.
Ritual Without Religion
Ritual is sometimes assumed to require religion, but secular communities demonstrate otherwise. Weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies, memorials, music, storytelling, public celebrations, and symbolic acts can create powerful shared experiences without supernatural beliefs.
Humanist ceremonies often focus on people's relationships and personal histories. A wedding can celebrate commitment and community; a naming ceremony can welcome a child into a network of supportive relatives and friends; a funeral can gather people to remember someone's life and comfort one another.
The emotional power of these ceremonies comes partly from gathering, storytelling, symbolism, participation, and shared memory. These are human social practices that can exist in both religious and secular settings.
Humanist Chaplaincy and Secular Care
Chaplaincy is another institution being adapted beyond traditional religious boundaries. Humanist and nonreligious chaplains increasingly serve universities, hospitals, prisons, military communities, and other institutions.
Their work emphasizes listening, presence, compassion, meaning, relationships, and support rather than theological instruction.
This development illustrates a broader principle of community beyond belief: people facing grief, illness, uncertainty, isolation, or major life transitions may need companionship and reflection even when they do not interpret their experiences religiously.
Secular Community on College Campuses
Universities provide important settings for the development of secular identity and community. Students frequently encounter new ideas, question inherited beliefs, and develop identities different from those of their families or hometown communities.
Secular student organizations can provide friendship, discussion, leadership opportunities, activism, education, and social events for atheists, agnostics, humanists, skeptics, freethinkers, and other religiously unaffiliated students.
Humanist and nonreligious chaplaincies can similarly provide spaces where students explore questions of meaning, ethics, identity, relationships, and responsibility without assuming religious belief.
Social Capital Beyond Religion
Community produces forms of social capital: networks of trust, cooperation, information, assistance, and relationships that people can draw upon throughout their lives.
Researchers commonly distinguish between bonding social capital, which strengthens relationships within groups, and bridging social capital, which connects people across different communities and identities.
Religious institutions can generate both forms, but they do not have a monopoly on them. Neighborhood organizations, volunteer groups, secular associations, cultural institutions, online communities, clubs, humanist organizations, and civic groups can also create durable networks.
The important factor is often sustained participation. Relationships become stronger when people encounter one another repeatedly, cooperate on meaningful activities, and develop expectations of reciprocity and trust.
Pluralism and Community Across Belief Differences
Community beyond belief does not necessarily mean creating exclusively nonreligious spaces. Another model emphasizes pluralism: communities in which religious and nonreligious people cooperate despite holding different worldviews.
Pluralistic civic institutions recognize that citizens do not need identical beliefs to share neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, public institutions, or democratic responsibilities.
Interfaith initiatives increasingly include atheists, humanists, agnostics, and other nonreligious participants. This broader approach treats worldview diversity as including both religion and nonreligion.
Such cooperation can create communities based on shared civic responsibilities and common human interests rather than theological agreement.
The Global Growth of Nonreligion
The religiously unaffiliated constitute a substantial and growing population in many countries. This category includes atheists, agnostics, people with no particular religion, secular humanists, spiritual-but-not-religious people, and others whose identities do not fit traditional institutional categories.
These populations are internally diverse. Nonreligious people do not necessarily share the same philosophy, politics, morality, spirituality, or attitudes toward religion.
As nonreligious populations grow, societies face an institutional question: where will people find the community structures that religious institutions historically supplied?
The emergence of secular organizations, humanist ceremonies, nonreligious chaplaincy, support networks, and new forms of gathering represents one response.
Digital Communities and New Forms of Connection
Community beyond belief also extends into digital spaces. Online communities can connect people who might otherwise remain geographically or socially isolated.
Digital networks can provide information, recognition, discussion, peer support, and relationships among people sharing experiences or identities. They can be particularly important for individuals leaving religious communities or living in places where openly nonreligious identities carry stigma.
However, digital connection does not eliminate the importance of sustained human relationships. Successful communities—online or offline—depend on participation, reciprocity, recognition, trust, and the feeling that one's presence matters to others.
Building Strong Secular Communities
The evidence and organizations represented in this collection suggest that successful secular communities require more than simply gathering people who do not believe in religion.
Durable communities generally need positive reasons for people to participate. Friendship, service, ethical reflection, learning, celebration, music, shared meals, volunteering, mutual assistance, cultural identity, and meaningful traditions can provide those reasons.
Inclusive secular communities also need room for diversity. Atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, religiously unaffiliated people, and people who retain some spiritual practices may have very different understandings of life.
Community becomes stronger when membership is built around relationships and shared participation rather than demanding complete ideological agreement.
A Shared Human Future
The growth of nonreligion does not necessarily represent the disappearance of community, morality, ritual, or meaning. Instead, it may contribute to the diversification of the institutions through which people experience them.
Human beings can organize around many sources of shared identity: neighborhoods, ethical commitments, cultural traditions, service, friendship, family, civic responsibility, education, creativity, and common experiences.
Religious communities will continue to provide belonging for billions of people. At the same time, secular and pluralistic institutions can provide additional pathways for people whose lives are not organized around religious belief.
Conclusion
Community does not ultimately depend upon everyone believing the same things. It depends upon people forming relationships, gathering repeatedly, caring for one another, creating shared experiences, marking important moments, cooperating toward common purposes, and recognizing their responsibilities to others.
Secular congregations, humanist organizations, Ethical Societies, nonreligious chaplaincies, student organizations, ceremonies, support networks, and pluralistic civic institutions demonstrate that these practices can flourish without shared theology.
As societies become more religiously diverse and, in many places, increasingly secular, the challenge is not simply to replace religion. It is to preserve and expand the human practices that make community possible: friendship, trust, participation, service, ritual, compassion, conversation, shared responsibility, and belonging.
Community beyond belief is therefore less about what people do not believe and more about what people can build together.
Secular Identity, Belonging, and Community
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | July 24, 2026
Secular leaders describe community, democratic participation, civil liberties, and humanist values as foundations for cooperation among people regardless of religious belief.
| American Humanist Association | Humanism Today | July 24, 2026
An exploration of pluralism and secular society that argues communities can accommodate profound differences in belief while maintaining shared civic and ethical commitments.
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | July 24, 2026
Humanism presents an ethical, democratic worldview in which people take responsibility for giving meaning to their lives and building humane communities without relying on supernatural belief.
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | July 24, 2026
Humanist conferences bring together thinkers, activists, creators, and community members for conversation, relationship-building, learning, and collective action.
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | July 24, 2026
Local humanist chapters provide atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, and others with opportunities to meet neighbors, form friendships, volunteer, learn, and build lasting secular communities.
| American Humanist Association | Humanism Today | July 2026
Examines the importance of interaction within humanist communities and how shared exploration, mentorship, and relationships can contribute to personal and collective development.
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | June 30, 2026
The National Day of Reason demonstrates how shared civic observances centered on truth, reason, and democratic values can function as communal traditions outside religious structures.
| Human Flourishing Program | Harvard University | June 8, 2026
A collection of Global Flourishing Study research examining belonging, hope, community participation, relationships, meaning, character, and flourishing across many societies.
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | May 6, 2026
Examines secular movements that have developed communities, moral visions, narratives, and shared purposes resembling some social functions historically associated with religion.
| National Secular Society | National Secular Society | March 25, 2026
Discusses a society in which respect for private religious belief coexists with increasingly secular public values, offering a model of civic belonging not dependent upon common faith.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | March 19, 2026
Highlights the importance of humanist funerals and nonreligious pastoral support, showing how communities can provide ritual, remembrance, comfort, and solidarity without theology.
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | February 10, 2026
Explores whether secularized mindfulness can move beyond individualized self-help toward social responsibility, solidarity, collective action, and genuine community.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | January 13, 2026
Reports the 5,000th legally recognized humanist marriage in Northern Ireland, illustrating growing demand for meaningful communal rituals that do not require religious belief.
| Carine P. Mukamakuza et al. | African Digital Humanism Summer School | January 11, 2026
Explores digital humanism in Africa and argues for technology centered on human dignity, cultural understanding, cooperation, social equity, and relationships.
| Claudia Lazzari et al. | Frontiers in Public Health | 2026
Investigates compassion through religious and secular frameworks and considers how interpersonal compassion can strengthen community resilience and supportive institutions.
| Lauren K. Kulisch et al. | Scientific Reports | 2026
Examines cultural change, religion, and childhood anxiety while raising the broader question of how societies can provide belonging, mentorship, social structure, and support outside religious institutions.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | 2026
Describes efforts to include nonreligious citizens in community cohesion, intercultural dialogue, local government, and civil society rather than treating community life as primarily faith-based.
| Mikael Stenmark et al. | Journal of Beliefs & Values | 2026
Examines secular worldviews and the large population of people who identify as secular without belonging to organized secular institutions, raising important questions about identity and community.
| The Humanist | The Humanist | September 23, 2025
Examines the rapidly growing population of secular Latinos and illustrates how ethnic and cultural identity can remain meaningful even as religious affiliation declines.
| Nasser Yousefi | The Humanist | September 19, 2025
Describes humanistic education as an approach centered on dignity, inquiry, relationships, creativity, personal growth, and participation rather than obedience to authority.
| Katey Warran | Frontiers in Social Psychology | May 30, 2025
Develops a theory of arts participation as secular ritual, arguing that shared cultural experiences can create social bonds, collective emotion, identity, and health benefits.
| Chron | Houston Chronicle | February 2025
Describes secular Texans organizing collectively around civic participation and religious liberty, showing that political community need not depend on shared theological belief.
| Ying Chen et al. | Scientific Reports | 2025
Compares community participation in secular and religious settings across 22 countries, emphasizing the capacity of social participation to foster agency, belonging, and fulfillment.
| Ying Chen et al. | Scientific Reports | 2025
Studies childhood experiences associated with later participation in secular and religious communities across 22 countries and highlights community participation as an important source of connection.
| Andrew Eungi Kim et al. | Religions | 2025
Examines the diversity of religiously unaffiliated people and demonstrates that being outside organized religion encompasses many different identities, beliefs, values, and practices.
| T. Min et al. | Religions | 2025
Investigates the transformation of ritual spaces from sacred to secular uses and finds that public activities can strengthen community cohesion and collective identity.
| Astrid Mattes et al. | Frontiers in Political Science | 2025
Examines religion and political belonging among young people in increasingly diverse and secular societies, highlighting how identities are negotiated across belief differences.
| S. Dix et al. | Religions | 2025
Explores religious diversity and nonreligion, including atheists, agnostics, indifferent people, and those who believe without belonging to organized religion.
| Arie Sujito Wardana et al. | Frontiers in Sociology | 2025
Examines changing religious participation and the continuing importance of nonreligious social and cultural organizations as settings for belonging.
| Human Flourishing Program | Harvard University | 2025
The Global Flourishing Study investigates relationships, community, meaning, character, health, spirituality, and other factors associated with human flourishing around the world.
| Human Flourishing Program | Harvard University | 2025
Reviews pathways through which communities may contribute to flourishing, including shared practices, relationships, meaning, mutual care, and social support.
| Claire A. Sharp et al. | Current Opinion in Psychology | 2025
Argues that religion and nonreligion can both function as meaningful social identities and influence how people understand themselves, other groups, and society.
| Haldun Gülalp | Frontiers in Sociology | 2025
Revisits secularization theory and examines how modernization changes the social significance of religious institutions, creating space for alternative forms of association and identity.
| American Humanist Association | The Humanist | December 18, 2024
Presents a vision of humanism built around belonging, shared meaning, mutual support, and collective action rather than simply opposition to religion.
| Nicole Carr | The Humanist | September 19, 2024
Describes a national gathering where humanists explored relationships, social justice, science, parenting, democracy, and ways of building a flourishing humanist community.
| The Humanist | The Humanist | September 5, 2024
Profiles a humanist organizer whose work focuses on belonging, youth programs, education, mental health, and creating secular spaces in which people can flourish.
| The Humanist | The Humanist | July 11, 2024
Argues that secular humanism can help organize cooperation across nations and communities around empathy, reason, mutual aid, peace, and shared human interests.
| The Humanist | The Humanist | June 20, 2024
Explores how naturalism can provide awe, meaning, purpose, gratitude, and belonging without requiring belief in the supernatural.
| Corrie Waters | The Humanist | February 22, 2024
Argues that African American humanism needs intentional communities of belonging where people can explore atheism, identity, culture, and relationships outside church settings.
| Cassandra Peneycad et al. | Psychology of Religion and Spirituality | 2024
Examines religious and nonreligious identities, coping, stress, and wellbeing and demonstrates the importance of recognizing multiple pathways through which people construct meaning.
| Jack Jenkins | Religion News Service | July 12, 2023
Examines secular political organizing and illustrates how nonreligious identity can become a basis for solidarity, representation, and participation in public life.
| Nicholas Beider et al. | Religion, Brain & Behavior | 2023
Examines how childhood religious experiences can continue to shape adults who later become nonreligious, showing that disaffiliation does not instantly erase inherited practices or identities.
| Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme | Sociology of Religion | 2023
Studies regional patterns of nonreligion and shows that many unaffiliated young adults do not adopt formal atheist or secular labels despite living outside organized religion.
| American Atheists | American Atheists | December 9, 2022
Highlights cooperation among secular organizations defending atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and nonbelievers and frames freedom of belief as a shared civic concern.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | September 26, 2022
Challenges stereotypes about nonreligious people and emphasizes that humanist and other nonreligious worldviews can offer positive ethical identities rather than merely rejection of religion.
| Anthony Cruz Pantojas | The Humanist | September 20, 2022
Describes humanist chaplaincy as a way of creating inclusive spaces where students can discuss values, identity, meaning, relationships, and social responsibility.
| Nathan TeBlunthuis et al. | arXiv | January 12, 2022
Examines why people participate in overlapping online communities and finds that different communities can provide information, socialization, recognition, and other distinct forms of connection.
| Rebecca Blackburn et al. | Mental Health, Religion & Culture / PMC | 2022
Studies Sunday Assembly participants and examines whether secular congregations can give people the experience of being part of something larger than themselves.
| Nikolina Hazdovac Bajić | Religions | 2022
Examines how nonreligious people in Croatia negotiate identity and belonging in a society where religion remains strongly connected to collective culture.
| Christel Gärtner | Religions | 2022
Explores secular and nonreligious worldviews as positive orientations toward life rather than defining them solely by what they reject.
| Janne Kontala et al. | Springer | 2022
Compares nonreligious worldviews among young adults from multiple countries and shows that secular identities contain diverse moral priorities, values, and understandings of life.
| Amy Fallon | The Guardian | July 17, 2021
Profiles Australia's growing humanist movement and people seeking ethical living, meaning, friendship, and community outside organized religion.
| Guardian Readers | The Guardian | January 23, 2021
Presents diverse accounts from atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, skeptics, and other nonbelievers describing how they construct meaning in their lives.
| Filip Uzarevic et al. | Current Opinion in Psychology | 2021
Reviews the psychology of nonbelievers and finds that many hold positive humanistic and rationalistic worldviews capable of supplying meaning and values.
| Domenico Balazka et al. | Patterns | 2021
Reviews the expanding field of nonreligion research and emphasizes the diversity hidden within broad labels such as atheist, humanist, agnostic, and religiously unaffiliated.
| Domenico Balazka et al. | Patterns | 2021
Argues that large datasets can improve understanding of diverse nonreligious identities and the different communities, values, and practices associated with them.
| Kirsten Weir | Monitor on Psychology | July 2020
Reviews psychological research showing that people without traditional religious beliefs hold a wide variety of identities, values, worldviews, and approaches to meaning.
| Melanie E. Brewster et al. | The Counseling Psychologist | 2020
Examines atheist minority stress and finds that participation in atheist communities may provide benefits such as social support and stronger self-esteem.
| David Smith | The Guardian | August 3, 2019
Explores the reluctance of American public figures to openly identify as atheists and the continuing cultural pressures surrounding nonreligious identity.
| Bert Gasenbeek | Free Inquiry | 2019
Describes Belgium's extensive secular-humanist infrastructure, including community organizations and professional humanist counselors working in hospitals, prisons, and the armed forces.
| Harriet Sherwood | The Guardian | August 13, 2018
Examines the dramatic growth of humanist weddings and shows how rituals centered on love and community can flourish without traditional religious belief.
| Sabrina Faramarzi | Medium | 2018
Examines Sunday Assembly as an attempt to preserve collective ritual, gathering, celebration, and community after supernatural belief has disappeared.
| Jake Saleam and colleagues | Frontiers in Psychology | 2016
Investigates religion and prosocial behavior and contributes to the debate over whether morality and cooperation require supernatural beliefs or can emerge through secular social processes.
| Laurence Quinn | National Secular Society | 2016
Argues that nonreligious people can need philosophical, emotional, and pastoral support just as religious people do and advocates humanist care within traditionally religious institutions.
| Jamie Hughes and colleagues | PLOS ONE | 2015
Examines prejudice toward atheists and helps explain why supportive secular communities may be particularly valuable to people living where religious belief is considered socially normative.
| Suzanne Moore | The Guardian / New Humanist | December 27, 2013
Argues that nonbelievers also need ritual, celebration, poetry, social gathering, and traditions that express common humanity.
| The Humanist | The Humanist | May 15, 2013
Discusses different interpretations of Humanism and the ways nonbelievers can still value ritual, meditation, music, nature, service, and congregational support.
| James Wood | The New Yorker | August 15, 2011
Explores the possibility of a rich secular life in which wonder, meaning, morality, intellectual inquiry, and human relationships provide forms of fulfillment sometimes associated with religion.
| Jessica Abrahams | The Guardian | October 22, 2010
Discusses remembrance from a humanist perspective and argues that nonreligious people should participate fully in communal rituals of memory.
| The Guardian | The Guardian | February 2, 2000
Examines the early growth of nonreligious celebrants conducting funerals, weddings, and naming ceremonies for families seeking meaningful rituals outside religion.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | Undated
Describes humanism as an ethical worldview focused on human agency, compassion, reason, dignity, and responsibility for building better lives together.
| Oasis Network | Oasis Network | Undated
Explains the Oasis model of secular community built around people, reality, meaning, acceptance, and improving the world through shared action.
| Ethical Society of St. Louis | Ethical Society of St. Louis | Undated
Demonstrates how a long-standing nontheistic congregation can provide education, celebrations, social groups, ethical reflection, service, and multigenerational community.
| Baltimore Ethical Society | Baltimore Ethical Society | Undated
Provides an example of an Ethical Culture community where people gather around humanist values, discussion, friendship, and social responsibility rather than creed.
| Ethical Society of Northern Westchester | Ethical Society of Northern Westchester | Undated
Shows how secular ethical communities provide regular gatherings, educational programs, celebrations, service, and opportunities for meaningful interpersonal connection.
Leaving Religion, Religious Switching, and New Community
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | November 27, 2025
Profiles a support community for women leaving high-control religions and shows how peer relationships can replace some of the social networks lost when people leave faith communities.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | October 16, 2025
Reports evidence that nonreligious people in Northern Ireland feel less socially integrated than major religious communities, highlighting the need for stronger secular institutions of belonging.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | September 15, 2025
Shows the rapid growth of humanist weddings in Northern Ireland and how nonreligious ceremonies are becoming an established part of community and family life.
| Kavita Narayan | The Humanist | September 2, 2025
Calls on secular and humanist communities to become places of active inclusion, solidarity, dignity, and support for people who may feel marginalized elsewhere.
| Rachel Berkebile | Interfaith America | August 20, 2025
Examines the growth of nonreligious chaplaincy as atheists, agnostics, and humanists seek compassionate care, conversation, guidance, and companionship without theological assumptions.
| Religion News Service | Religion News Service | August 8, 2025
Describes how humanist and religiously unaffiliated chaplains are redefining pastoral care by focusing on presence, listening, meaning, relationships, and human connection.
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | August 5, 2025
Profiles a humanist chaplain developing programs to create belonging for college students who are nonreligious or spiritual but not religious.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | June 9, 2025
Documents the growth and changing composition of religiously unaffiliated populations worldwide while showing that nonaffiliation does not necessarily mean an absence of spiritual belief or practice.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | June 9, 2025
Provides a global picture of changing religious affiliation, including the expansion of populations that do not identify with an organized religion.
| American Psychological Association | Monitor on Psychology | June 2025
Examines how people rebuild meaning, identity, relationships, and community after leaving organized religion and how psychologists can assist people navigating that transition.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | March 26, 2025
Examines religious switching in 36 countries and documents the substantial number of adults who have moved away from the religions in which they were raised.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | March 26, 2025
Examines movement into and out of atheism, agnosticism, and having no particular religion and provides context for understanding communities formed after religious disaffiliation.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | March 26, 2025
Finds that many people leaving Christianity become religiously unaffiliated, creating a growing population that may seek community outside traditional congregations.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | March 26, 2025
Shows how religious affiliation changes across adulthood and contributes to broader understanding of identity and community beyond inherited traditions.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | March 26, 2025
Examines religious switching among Muslims across several countries, providing comparative evidence about the persistence and transformation of religious identity.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | March 26, 2025
Explores changing Jewish affiliation and illustrates how cultural, communal, and family identities can sometimes endure even when religious identification changes.
| Axios | Axios | March 5, 2025
Reports that many Americans remain interested in spirituality, awe, nature, kindness, and sacred experience even as participation in organized religion declines.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | February 26, 2025
Summarizes major changes in the American religious landscape, including the large population of adults who now identify with no organized religion.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | February 26, 2025
Examines religious identity in the United States and the growth of atheists, agnostics, and people who describe their religion as nothing in particular.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | February 26, 2025
Tracks movement into and out of religious traditions and shows that increasing numbers of people raised without religion remain unaffiliated as adults.
| Guardian staff and contributors | The Guardian | February 15, 2025
Explores Black atheist and humanist organizations that are creating culturally relevant communities around social justice, friendship, identity, mutual support, and shared experience.
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | January 23, 2025
Describes new efforts to help humanists find one another, develop relationships, organize locally, and create places of belonging beyond traditional religious institutions.
| Y. David et al. | Psychology of Religion and Spirituality | 2025
Studies the search for meaning and belonging following religious disaffiliation and highlights loneliness and lost social support as important challenges for people leaving religion.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | May 16, 2024
Highlights volunteers providing peer support, social events, specialist referrals, and a sense of belonging for people rebuilding their lives after leaving restrictive religious communities.
| Humanists UK | Faith to Faithless | Undated
Describes a peer-led community supporting people who leave high-control religions and may experience isolation, family estrangement, homelessness, or loss of their previous social world.
Secular Congregations and the Social Power of Gathering
| Melissa Santos | Axios Seattle | December 5, 2024
Profiles Sunday Assembly Seattle and its effort to address loneliness by providing secular fellowship, music, talks, social activities, and opportunities for friendship.
| Sigal Samuel | Vox | October 20, 2024
Considers how parents can cultivate morality, gratitude, awe, service, ritual, and community without accepting traditional religious doctrines.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | February 15, 2024
Describes research into how humanists and other nonreligious people contribute to trust, wellbeing, volunteering, and participation in their communities.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | January 24, 2024
Provides a detailed portrait of American religious “nones,” including their beliefs, values, civic involvement, demographics, and attitudes toward organized religion.
| Kathryn Post | Religion News Service | January 19, 2024
Profiles secular congregations that borrow some organizational features of churches while building communities based on relationships, shared values, music, learning, and service rather than supernatural belief.
| C. Miller et al. | Religions | 2024
Investigates nonreligious understandings of death and the afterlife, illustrating how people construct meaning around mortality outside conventional religious systems.
| Olga Breskaya et al. | Religions | 2024
Compares religious nones and spirituality and demonstrates the diversity found among atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, spiritual seekers, and the unaffiliated.
| StudySmarter | StudySmarter | 2024
Introduces secular rituals as symbolic collective practices capable of transmitting values, reinforcing social identity, and strengthening community ties without necessarily involving religion.
| Faith Hill | The Atlantic | July 21, 2019
Examines the successes and difficulties of secular congregations such as Sunday Assembly and Oasis as they attempt to preserve community, moral reflection, and wonder without theology.
| Leigh Eric Schmidt | Vox | June 4, 2019
Explores how Americans outside traditional religion continue to pursue spirituality, meaning, ritual, and forms of community in an increasingly secular culture.
| National Secular Society | National Secular Society | February 19, 2019
Examines the difficulty of defining community identity through inherited religious labels when substantial numbers of people no longer share those beliefs.
| Brian J. Grim and Melissa E. Grim | Journal of Religion and Health | 2019
Reviews evidence concerning the role of belief, behavior, and belonging, making it useful for distinguishing the communal effects of religious participation from belief itself.
| Sunday Assembly | Sunday Assembly | 2018
Collects research on secular congregations and their attempt to provide community, celebration, friendship, wonder, and mutual support without religious doctrine.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | June 15, 2017
Reports widespread humanist values among people who may not consciously identify as humanists, illustrating the possibility of communities organized around shared ethics rather than theology.
| Peter Wogan | Greater Good Magazine | January 26, 2017
Uses a familiar secular ritual to explore collective meaning, shared emotion, social symbolism, and the human desire for communal belonging.
| Jesse M. Smith | Qualitative Sociology | 2017
Uses ethnographic research on Sunday Assembly to examine how secular people construct communal meaning, shared values, ritual, emotional connection, and belonging.
| Katie Cross | Practical Theology | 2017
Studies the Sunday Assembly in Scotland and considers how a secular congregation adapts forms inherited from religious community life.
Describes Houston Oasis and offers practical lessons for building humanist community among believers, nonbelievers, former church members, and others seeking connection.
Secular Organizations and Community Infrastructure
| Alemitu Bezabih et al. | arXiv | June 12, 2025
Explores how online communities might provide spiritual and existential care and examines whether relationships traditionally associated with chaplaincy can extend into digital spaces.
| Religion News Service / Interfaith America | Interfaith America | June 5, 2025
Reports increasing participation in nontheist organizations, demonstrating that secular citizens are forming institutions through which they can organize, socialize, advocate, and find community.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | May 7, 2025
Reports strong nonreligious identification among younger people in Jersey and highlights the growing importance of ceremonies, pastoral care, and community services designed for secular populations.
| Secular Humanism | Free Inquiry | May 2025
Considers whether humanism can provide meaning, ethics, community, social trust, and institutions powerful enough to fulfill some functions traditionally supplied by religion.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | April 17, 2025
Argues that declining religious identification among young adults does not mean declining interest in meaning, belonging, ethics, and connection.
| Religion News Service | Religion News Service | April 1, 2025
Examines how the growth of atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other secular Americans is reshaping civic identity and public participation.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | March 26, 2025
Discusses demographic changes showing the growing size of Britain's nonreligious population and the need for institutions that represent and connect these citizens.
| Secular Organization Leaders | American Atheists | April 2, 2013
Calls for a secular movement characterized by respectful discussion, evidence-based disagreement, openness, and a welcoming culture capable of sustaining genuine community.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | Undated
Supports student communities in which atheists, agnostics, humanists, skeptics, and religiously unaffiliated young people can build friendships, organize activities, and advocate together.
| American Atheists | American Atheists | Undated
Provides resources for local atheist communities and demonstrates how shared secular identity can lead to friendship, mutual aid, advocacy, and collective participation.
| Black Nonbelievers | Black Nonbelievers | Undated
Builds community among Black atheists and other nonbelievers through local groups, gatherings, support networks, education, and social activities.
| Recovering from Religion | Recovering from Religion | Undated
Provides peer support and community resources for people questioning or leaving religion, helping address the isolation that can accompany loss of a faith community.
| The Clergy Project | The Clergy Project | Undated
Creates a confidential community for current and former religious professionals who no longer hold supernatural beliefs and may face profound social and professional isolation.
| Sunday Assembly | Sunday Assembly | Undated
Organizes secular gatherings centered on living better, helping often, wondering more, music, friendship, celebration, volunteering, and community.
| Oasis Network | Oasis Network | Undated
Offers secular communities organized around human connection, reality-based thinking, compassion, meaning, and mutual support.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | Undated
Connects humanist, atheist, rationalist, secularist, and freethought organizations around the world into an international community based on shared humanist values.
| American Atheists | American Atheists | Undated
Explains why strong secular communities matter to atheists, providing friendship, mutual support, shared values, and a sense of belonging that can replace social functions traditionally supplied by religious institutions.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | Undated
Offers practical guidance for intentionally creating communities in which people are welcomed into friendship, cared for, and given a genuine sense that they belong.
| American Atheists | American Atheists | Undated
Connects atheists, humanists, and other nonreligious people with local groups where they can develop friendships, participate in activities, and become part of a supportive community.
| Humanists UK | Understanding Humanism | Undated
Examines humanist ideas about freely chosen communities, mutual responsibility, inclusion, and the importance of creating support networks for people whose beliefs change.
| American Atheists | American Atheists | Undated
Discusses the variety of labels used by people without belief in gods, including atheist, humanist, freethinker, and other identities that can become bases for collective belonging.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | Undated
Uses conversations with secular activists and organizers to explore atheist identity, student life, organizing, relationships, and the experience of living without religion.
Humanist Care, Chaplaincy, and Wellbeing
| Zara Abrams | American Psychological Association | November 2023
Examines the diverse ways religion, spirituality, nonbelief, identity, and meaning can enter psychological care and emphasizes respecting each person's worldview.
| Religion News Service | Religion News Service | September 8, 2023
Explores humanist, atheist, and spiritual-but-not-religious chaplaincy and how nonreligious caregivers provide meaning-centered emotional and existential support.
| The Humanist | The Humanist | July 19, 2023
Describes the expansion of humanist chaplaincy across universities, hospitals, prisons, and the military as a source of connection and care for people without religious belief.
| Kathryn Post | Religion News Service | June 28, 2023
Profiles a humanist chaplain creating rituals, conversations, and service projects that bring religious and nonreligious students together.
| Harmeet Kaur Kamboj | Interfaith America | June 28, 2023
Includes humanist perspectives on creating campus environments where students of faith and no faith can explore identity, meaning, values, and community together.
| Kathryn Post | Religion News Service | April 10, 2023
Argues that interfaith and civic coalitions become more genuinely inclusive when atheists, humanists, and other nonreligious citizens participate alongside religious communities.
| Débora Rey | Associated Press | 2023
Reports on Argentines who have moved away from organized Catholicism while continuing to seek spirituality, personal meaning, shared practices, and connection outside conventional institutions.
Challenges simple religious-versus-secular categories and examines secularity as a lived cultural environment rather than merely the absence of religion.
| Jonathan E. Brown et al. | Psychology of Religion and Spirituality | 2021
Directly compares participation in religious and secular congregations to investigate whether social and psychological benefits commonly associated with church require religious belief.
| Zachary D. Schmoll | Journal of Sociology and Christianity | 2021
Analyzes Sunday Assembly sociologically and asks whether a community can reproduce the social structures of congregational religion while explicitly rejecting supernatural doctrine.
| Jenni Spännäri and Hanne Laceulle | Frontiers in Psychology | 2021
Studies meaning-making among older adults and emphasizes the interplay between individual searching and communal bonds in religious and nonreligious forms of spirituality.
| Lene Arnett Jensen | Current Opinion in Psychology | 2021
Reviews the cultural psychology of religion, spirituality, and secularism and demonstrates that each can shape identity, morality, relationships, and people's understanding of life.
| Secular Hub | Secular Hub | 2021
Presents a practical model for a member-run secular community offering friendship, education, meals, recreation, volunteer projects, youth activities, and mutual support.
| Steve Nolan | Health and Social Care Chaplaincy | 2021
Examines nonreligious forms of spiritual care through practices such as connection with nature, gentle touch, presence, and other nontheistic responses to human need.
| Harvard Divinity School | Harvard University | October 15, 2020
Discusses religion and public life through the broader question of human and planetary flourishing and the need for collaboration across different sectors and worldviews.
| Chaplaincy Innovation Lab | Chaplaincy Innovation Lab | Undated
Provides resources for chaplains unaffiliated with religious traditions and demonstrates the institutional emergence of secular forms of pastoral care.
| Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and MIT | Humanist Chaplaincy | Undated
Describes a mission to create an inclusive community for atheists, agnostics, humanists, and allies centered on compassion, reason, leadership, and celebration.
| Non-Religious Pastoral Support Network | NRPSN | Undated
Explains why some nonreligious people prefer pastoral support explicitly identified as nonreligious rather than services framed through traditional religious chaplaincy.
Secular Rituals, Ceremonies, Marriage, and Memorials
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Provides a framework for creating a secular welcoming ritual that brings relatives and friends together around a child's arrival and future.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Explains how families can create meaningful celebrations centered on the child and the network of people committed to loving and supporting them.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Offers examples of personalized secular rituals that formally welcome children into their families and wider communities.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Shows how promises, music, family participation, and celebration can provide communal meaning without reliance on religious doctrine.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Describes how secular families can surround a child with supportive friends and relatives through a deliberately created rite of belonging.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Contrasts religious initiation with a humanist ceremony emphasizing relationships, family values, mentors, individuality, and community support.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Describes humanist weddings as celebrations focused on relationships, personal values, commitment, and the couple's shared story instead of prescribed religious doctrine.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Shows how couples can construct meaningful wedding rituals around love, relationships, family, and commitment without religious content.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Provides practical ideas for turning a secular wedding into a shared community celebration centered on the people and values important to the couple.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Demonstrates that rituals such as handfasting, symbolic actions, readings, and music can remain powerful even when separated from supernatural beliefs.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Explains how humanist weddings place greater emphasis on storytelling, relationships, shared values, and communal meaning than a purely administrative civil ceremony.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Shows how couples can create new symbolic rituals around nature, growth, change, and commitment while keeping ceremonies entirely nonreligious.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Explains how a secular funeral can create meaning through storytelling, relationships, memory, legacy, and the gathering of people whose lives were touched by the deceased.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Explores poetry as a nonreligious means of expressing grief, love, remembrance, and shared human experience during communal mourning.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Shows how readings and stories can provide emotional and communal meaning at funerals without appeals to an afterlife or supernatural belief.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Places shared memory and storytelling at the center of secular mourning and shows how a person's life can become the organizing focus of a community ritual.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2025
Demonstrates how families can find comfort, hope, and solidarity through literature and shared remembrance without relying on religious explanations of death.
| Killian Fox | The Guardian | October 27, 2024
Interviews humanist chaplain Greg Epstein about technology, meaning, morality, and the need to preserve genuinely human relationships in an increasingly digital society.
| Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network | NSRN | June 19, 2024
Examines humanist weddings in Poland and demonstrates how secular ceremonies can still feel profound, symbolic, communal, and emotionally meaningful.
| RE:ONLINE | RE:ONLINE | 2024
Explains how humanist identity creates ethical affiliation and a sense of belonging even without obligatory rituals, sacred authorities, or supernatural doctrines.
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | February 10, 2023
Shows how people who are not religious may continue to find identity, family connection, memory, and cultural belonging through symbols inherited from religious traditions.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Explains how humanist naming ceremonies create meaningful occasions for family and friends to welcome children without requiring religious beliefs.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Explores how personalized rituals, vows, music, readings, and gathering together can make a wedding deeply meaningful without religious worship.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Profiles a personalized same-sex humanist wedding and illustrates how secular ceremonies can provide affirmation, celebration, and communal recognition of relationships.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Shows how couples can consciously construct ceremonies around their own histories, personalities, relationships, and values instead of inherited religious scripts.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Demonstrates how symbolic acts can give secular ceremonies emotional depth and create shared memories among couples, families, and friends.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Describes funerals centered on the value of an individual's life, their relationships, their accomplishments, and their continuing influence on other people.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Explores nonreligious funerals that locate meaning in human achievements, relationships, shared experiences, and the memories carried by surviving friends and family.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Explains how memorial gatherings honor someone's life and legacy through human relationships rather than beliefs about supernatural continuation.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Shows how humor, poetry, stories, and shared memories can bring people together in grief and celebration without a religious framework.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | 2021
Examines how a humanist ceremony can help families and communities recognize loss, affirm a child's significance, and support one another during profound grief.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | Undated
Presents weddings, funerals, memorials, and naming ceremonies as nonreligious ways of marking major life transitions through shared stories, relationships, values, and community.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | Undated
Explains how trained celebrants help people create authentic nonreligious ceremonies built around personal stories, relationships, values, and significant moments in human life.
| Humanists UK | Humanist Ceremonies | Undated
Describes naming ceremonies that welcome children into families and communities through promises, relationships, celebration, and shared hopes rather than religious initiation.
| Greater Good Science Center | Greater Good Magazine | Undated
Discusses secular approaches to cultivating compassion and ethical behavior and illustrates how practices once associated with religion can be adapted to universal human goals.
| Greater Good Science Center | Greater Good Magazine | Undated
Introduces mindfulness as a practice of attention and awareness that can be used independently of religious doctrine and incorporated into secular approaches to wellbeing and community life.
Ethical Culture, Humanist Values, and Shared Ethics
| Jill Suttie | Greater Good Magazine | January 15, 2015
Reviews evidence that shared music encourages cooperation, synchronization, empathy, cultural cohesion, and a sense of belonging—functions often incorporated into both religious and secular gatherings.
| Linda Mercadante | Collegeville Institute | October 2, 2014
Explores the beliefs and experiences of people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious and their search for meaning beyond institutional religion.
| Chris Stedman | Religion News Service | October 1, 2014
Introduces Ethical Culture as a long-established nontheistic community tradition centered on ethics, fellowship, education, social responsibility, and human relationships.
| Chris Stedman | Religion News Service | April 10, 2014
Discusses humanist participation in Unitarian Universalist communities and the possibility of congregational life centered on justice, compassion, relationships, and collective action without theism.
| Kimberly Winston | Time | 2014
Profiles secular congregations such as Houston Oasis that provide music, talks, friendships, and social support to people who no longer accept traditional religious beliefs.
| American Ethical Union | American Ethical Union | Undated
Explains Ethical Humanism as a worldview that does not require supernatural belief and instead emphasizes ethical relationships, personal fulfillment, human dignity, and the greater good.
| Humanists UK | Understanding Humanism | Undated
Traces rationalist, Ethical Culture, secularist, and humanist traditions that sought to unite people of different beliefs around reason, empathy, moral education, equality, peace, and community.
| Fred Edwords | American Humanist Association | Undated
Provides an introduction to modern Humanism and its religious and secular strands, emphasizing human responsibility for building meaningful and ethical lives.
| American Humanist Association | American Humanist Association | Undated
Examines common ground between Humanism and Unitarian Universalism and discusses efforts to foster local secular and humanist communities.
| National Secular Society | National Secular Society | Undated
Explains secularism as a framework that protects both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, enabling citizens with very different beliefs to participate equally in a common civic society.
| American Atheists | American Atheists | Undated
Presents community building and social inclusion as central parts of creating a pluralistic society where atheists and nonreligious citizens can participate fully.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | Undated
Focuses explicitly on belonging and community without religion and asks how nonreligious people can create enduring social bonds in increasingly secular societies.
| RE:ONLINE | RE:ONLINE | Undated
Summarizes research into Sunday Assembly as an inclusive secular congregation focused on community, service, celebration, and shared experience rather than doctrine or deity.
| American Ethical Union | American Ethical Union | Undated
Introduces Ethical Culture as a movement organized around human worth, ethical relationships, community participation, education, and social action rather than theological conformity.
| American Ethical Union | American Ethical Union | Undated
Describes local Ethical Societies where people gather for education, ceremonies, volunteering, conversation, social relationships, and ethical reflection.
| American Ethical Union | American Ethical Union | Undated
Shows how Ethical Culture communities translate shared values into cooperative service and social action.
Secularism, Civic Life, Pluralism, and Social Capital
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | October 19, 2023
Profiles young leaders developing community projects based on cooperation across religious, spiritual, and secular differences.
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | April 12, 2022
Describes Americans exploring meaning outside inherited traditions and notes that some find fellowship and reflective community in humanist organizations.
| Saeed Nosratabadi et al. | arXiv | December 7, 2020
Reviews how social capital helps communities share information and resources, build resilience, and reduce vulnerability, illustrating practical benefits of strong community networks independent of belief.
| Religion News Service | Religion News Service | October 15, 2020
Profiles Black skeptics who connect secular humanism with community organizing, social justice, education, and the experiences of Black nonbelievers.
| National Secular Society | National Secular Society | September 17, 2020
Documents declining religious belonging in Scotland and raises questions about how public institutions should adapt when community identity is no longer predominantly religious.
| Religion News Service | Religion News Service | May 4, 2020
Reports findings from a large survey of nonreligious Americans and highlights the importance of supportive secular organizations for people experiencing stigma or isolation.
| Linda Mercadante | Religions | 2020
Studies spiritual struggles among religiously unaffiliated and spiritual-but-not-religious people, demonstrating that existential questions continue beyond formal religious affiliation.
| Domonkos Sik | Sociology of Health & Illness | 2020
Examines online mental-health communities as forms of secular ritual in which storytelling, recognition, and repeated interaction can provide social and emotional support.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | January 31, 2019
Compares religious participation, nonaffiliation, happiness, health, and civic engagement, helping distinguish the possible effects of social participation from religious belief itself.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | August 29, 2018
Identifies groups such as the Solidly Secular and Religion Resisters, demonstrating that Americans' identities cannot be understood through a simple religious-versus-atheist division.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | April 12, 2016
Examines volunteering, relationships, social behavior, and everyday religious practice, providing useful comparisons for understanding what secular communities may need to reproduce.
| Ahmed M. Alaa, Kartik Ahuja and Mihaela van der Schaar | arXiv | November 8, 2015
Develops a model of bonding, bridging, and popularity social capital and explores how different network structures affect the relationships available to community members.
| UK Parliament | Hansard | July 25, 2013
Records a parliamentary discussion of the contributions made by atheists and humanists to charities, public institutions, ethical debate, civic life, and society.
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | October 9, 2012
Documents the early rapid growth of America's religiously unaffiliated population and shows that people classified as nones have long represented a diverse range of beliefs and identities.
| Joanna Maselko, Cayce Hughes and Rose Cheney | Social Science & Medicine | 2011
Examines religious social capital and distinguishes bonding, bridging, trust, integration, and social support—concepts equally useful for understanding how nonreligious communities can create durable social ties.
| S. S. Phulari et al. | arXiv | February 5, 2010
Investigates how online communities create bonding, bridging, and maintained social capital and why sustaining participation is essential for successful communities.
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | Undated
Presents pluralism as active cooperation among people with different religious and nonreligious identities in pursuit of stronger communities and a shared common good.
| Interfaith America | Interfaith America | Undated
Collects research on belief, spirituality, health, ethics, and care that can inform inclusive institutions serving people across both religious and nonreligious worldviews.
| Humanists UK | Humanists UK | Undated
Describes humanists participating in faith-and-belief forums and local civic activities that bring religious and nonreligious citizens together to strengthen social cohesion.
| National Secular Society | National Secular Society | Undated
Reviews arguments that greater interaction among people from different backgrounds can strengthen social cohesion and reduce exclusionary group divisions.
Secular Community on College Campuses
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | 2025
Shows how secular students gather around community organizing, humanism, evolving identities, activism, friendship, and conversations among people who identify in many different ways.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | 2025
Highlights young secular activists supported by atheist, humanist, freethought, and community organizations working to build stronger networks on campuses and beyond.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | 2024
Profiles students engaged in secular leadership and demonstrates how local organizations can support the next generation of community builders.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | 2023
Documents student activism supported by atheist, humanist, and freethought groups and illustrates the role of networks in sustaining secular civic participation.
| Secular Student Alliance | Secular Student Alliance | Undated
Includes examples of organizers who have worked to create diverse communities among atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and other nonreligious people.
Global Nonreligion and Humanism
| Humanists International | Humanists International | August 29, 2025
Traces the development of an international humanist movement and describes support for organizations building secular communities in countries around the world.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | January 30, 2025
Describes international cooperation among humanist organizations defending freedom of belief and building solidarity with nonreligious people living under restrictive laws.
| J. Frost et al. | Social Psychological and Personality Science | 2025
Examines different kinds of nonreligious experience and challenges assumptions that people without religion form a psychologically or socially uniform population.
| Humanists International | Freedom of Thought Report | 2025
Documents discrimination and restrictions facing atheists, humanists, and other nonreligious people worldwide, demonstrating why independent secular communities can provide vital solidarity and support.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | August 17, 2023
Highlights international support networks for humanists facing persecution and demonstrates how shared values can create solidarity across cultures and borders.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | Undated
Demonstrates international solidarity among humanists through assistance for people facing persecution or discrimination because of their nonreligious identities.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | Undated
Provides networks and practical resources for humanists at risk, showing how secular organizations can perform mutual-aid functions across national boundaries.
| Humanists International | Humanists International | Undated
Presents human solidarity, equality, freedom, dignity, and self-determination as shared principles around which diverse people can organize collectively.
| Humanists International | Freedom of Thought Report | Undated
Defines contemporary Humanism as more than disbelief, emphasizing democracy, dignity, freedom of expression, and responsibility toward other human beings.
| European Humanist Federation | Humanists International | Undated
Describes a European network connecting humanists, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, skeptics, rationalists, and other nonbelievers across national boundaries.
| European Humanist Federation | Humanists International | Undated
Defines Humanism as a democratic ethical life stance based on human responsibility for creating meaning and building a humane society.
Humanism, Culture, Meaning, and Inclusive Community
| Matthew Engelke | Current Anthropology | 2014
Examines British secular humanists ethnographically and shows how organized humanism develops identity and community partly through its interaction with surrounding religious culture.
