I’ve worked in the area of religion and spirituality for many years now, starting when I got involved in organized Humanism in grad school, and there’s a tendency in trendy spiritual circles I call “reliogiocentrism.” Religiocentrism takes many forms, none of them benign, but basically it is a set of assumptions that puts religion at the center of human life and identity, and views the nonreligious as a deviation from religion, rather than as its own positive expression of values. Religiocentrism distorts our view of the social world and our view of people’s beliefs, including their motivations for switching religions, and should be resisted.
Our language encodes religiocentrism. When people join a religion, we say they “convert to” it. When people leave, they “deconvert.” The conversion is a turn toward and a move into something, while deconversion is a movement away to the outside. People “leave” a religion. They become “lapsed.” They “fall away” or “lose their faith.” The language of moving from a state of religiosity to nonreligiosity is all about leaving and loss. Indeed, even the terms “religious” and “nonreligious” encode religiocentrism, because “religious” is the normative mode, and nonreligion is defined in terms of the absence of religion.
This language carries implicit assumptions and value judgments about the importance of religion in people’s lives. If we instinctively call movement from religion to nonreligion a “loss,” that means we think people who are becoming nonreligious are losing something. Loss is not usually positive - we want to gain not lose. If a person who stops practicing their religion is “lapsed,” that presumes the normal state of affairs is to practice. If becoming nonreligious is “leaving,” that makes nonreligious people outsiders, those who have stepped away from the religious norm.
What if we were to switch this language around? What if, instead of “converting to Christianity,” people “deconverted from secularism”? That gives things an entirely different flavor, right? What if, instead of gaining faith, a convert “lost rationality”? That probably sounds very judgmental and value-laden, but “loss of faith” is already a value laden term - we just tend not to realize it because it is so commonly used, part of our mental furniture. What is we said of practicing believers “They are lapsed atheists”? None of these phrases are inherently ridiculous, but the fact that they jar reveals how deeply embedded is religiocentrism.
We assume religion has a lot to teach us about life just because it is religion. Religiocentrism also operates in how we relate to religious practices, ideas, and communities. We tend to give phenomena with religious roots a sort of “benefit of the doubt,” assuming that they must have some value simply because they come from a religious tradition. Thus, even nonreligious people who are interested in meaning-making and community-building tend to look to religion for inspiration, assuming that there are answers there.
Why do we do this? Sure, some religious traditions have persevered across millennia - but so have many secular ones. Religions promote tons of beliefs and practices which are unscientific, and many which are harmful: even the staunchest believer does not believe that all the beliefs of all religious traditions are literally true, so even very religious people must believe that tons of things taught by other religions are simply false. Religions have been responsible for egregious sins, and are sometimes the most toxic and abusive communities imaginable. So why look there first for inspiration? Why not to secular sources?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t look to religion for inspiration when it works. But we should resist the religiocentric idea that just because a practice or idea is religious, it must have some value. Just like the rest of human culture, religion is a hodgepodge of brilliant and bullshit, and our task is to cast our net widely and take inspiration from the best examples of community and meaning-making, whether we find them in religious spaces or not. Indeed, whether a practice or idea has been traditionally considered “religious” should be irrelevant to us: what matters is that it works. Resisting religiocentrism of this sort would help us see how much meaning-making and community-building happens in the secular world, and would make us appreciate that more, while also opening our eyes to some of the weaknesses of religious approaches.
Religiocentrism distorts our appreciation of secular identities. This is the worst thing: religiocentrism makes nonreligious people seem “less than,” and perpetuates dangerous assumptions about the nonreligious. Consider: the most commonly-used demographic marker for people with “no particular religion” is “none.” We are the “nones.” This says nothing about our actual values, beliefs, practices, or concerns - it just defines us entirely by our lack (religiocentric language again) of religion!
But people who become nonreligious frequently do so because of their commitment to profound positive values: values like a intellectual integrity, honesty, and a belief in social justice. People who become nonreligious because they don’t like the homophobic views of the religion of their upbringing are not moving from a something to a nothing: they are pursuing something positive, a belief in the dignity and worth of LGBTQ people. They are not “nones” or “nothing in particular,” they are justice-seeking allies of LGBTQIA+ equality. Religiocentric approaches obscure the reality that many people who are not religious are not religious because of their own positive choices, and that their perspective isn’t a “lack” or a “lapse” but an active decision about how to live life.
In all these ways religiocentrism distorts our view of religion and the nonreligious, and it persists even in spaces where post-religious people discuss the future of spiritual and meaning-making practice. For this reason, religiocentrism must be resisted.
When someone is cured of cancer, we don't say that they "lost a tumor." (Or "tumour," for you, James.)
I think that is why I prefer to call myself an atheist, while many of my friends prefer to say they are humanists. Answering "none of the above" seems to be a conversation stopper, rather than an invitation to learn more about someone.