Review of None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rapid rise of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States has captivated scholars and the public alike, but is rarely put in comparative perspective. In None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada, Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme trace what’s been happening in Canada in relation to the United States. Throughout the book, the authors make the case that Canada and the United States are both following a similar religious trajectory that they situate as “stages of decline” in a secularization framework, arguing that in both countries “religious none growth has transpired gradually across time and generations” (p. 171 of the NYU Press edition). In addition to combining an analysis of two countries, this book also combines two forms of data: national surveys and in-depth interviews. The book therefore provides broad big-picture overviews and concrete narrative explanations for general patterns, which makes for an engaging read. It traces reasons people become disaffiliated, the diversity of perspectives and experiences of the unaffiliated, and considers the social and political implications of disaffiliation. Many of the patterns are in line with what we know from research on the United States: the unaffiliated leave religion for a variety of reasons, are still moral people, are a diverse group who are not uniformly secular, are generally more politically liberal than their more religious counterparts, and are more civically engaged than the moderately religious. I especially appreciated when the book compared and contrasted Canadian and US nones, showing patterns less covered in the literature: for example, Canadian nones are more liberal and less spiritual than US nones.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".