by Bruce A. Phillips, Sociologist at the University of Southern California and professor of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.
It has been correctly asserted that “Secularity and secular people in America have gone largely unresearched until now.” Indeed, Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar have put secularism back on the scholarly agenda. The qualifer “largely” is important, however. Secularism did not entirely disappear from the sociology of religion, and putting these most recent fndings in the context of previous research raises a number of analytic challenges. In this chapter I look at these fndings in the context of previous research and suggest that the re-emergence of secularism in America needs to be understood in specifc analytic contexts.