Rediscovering organized non-religious discourses in the United States and the United Kingdom, 1881-2019

Non-religion studies constitute an emerging sub-field within the broader context of sociology of religion. For this group of scholars the question is no longer whether religion is or not on its way out, but rather what is progressively replacing it. However, the sudden mismatch between new theoretical interests and former goals of data collection makes the existing data largely sub-optimal for the tasks currently at hand. Indeed, for decades researchers collected data about (non-)religion in an attempt to map the decline of religious beliefs and practices. Understanding the otherness of non-religion was never the goal. This project proposes to use text mining techniques on a large collection of non-religious popular press published in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1881 and 2019 to comparatively analyze the development of organized non-religious discourses over time. On one side, this approach addresses the issue of availability of long-term and granular data about non-religion. On the other, it allows to open the black box of non-religion and to study the historical changes within this neglected category.