<i>American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems,</i>by Joseph O. Baker and Buster G. Smith
Bibliographic record
Abstract
American Secularism introduces a comprehensive, groundbreaking approach to understanding the rise of secularism in the United States. As stated in the Introduction, the number of Americans who state that that they are nonreligious has increased 3.5 times in the last three decades, and they now make up about one-quarter of our population. The authors attribute this significant change in the American religious landscape to shifts in the political meanings of religion in American culture. Employing rigorous analyses of the General Social Survey from 1972 through 2012 and the Pew Religious Landscape Survey (2007), Baker and Smith first identify three dimensions of secularity: affiliation, belief, and practices. From these dimensions, they categorize the nonreligious into four classes: (1) atheists; (2) agnostics; (3) nonreligious believers; and (4) culturally religious. Those in the third category are often termed ‘spiritual but not religious’ in that they maintain religious beliefs but eschew organized religion. Those in the fourth category are those who retain affiliation but do not share in beliefs and practices. Although the nonreligious may be lumped together as all secular, they each reflect distinct cosmic belief systems that enable them to be studied in the same way as the religious.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".