---
title: "I’m not a ‘None’"
date: "2012-04-26T19:55:52+01:00"
modified: "2013-09-07T21:14:00+01:00"
url: "https://andrewcopson.com/2012/04/im-not-a-none/"
post_id: 1223
categories: ["Blog"]
---

# I’m not a ‘None’

Andrew Brown at *The Guardian* has written [an article about a seminar at which I spoke](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2012/apr/26/persistence-superstition-irreligious-britain?CMP=twt_gu) which was convened by academics (sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, and educationists) engaged in the emerging filed of studying the non-religious.

> [Andrew Copson](http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/andrewcopson), who runs the [British Humanist Association](http://www.humanism.org.uk/home), is a third generation post-Christian. “I grew up in a post-religious society in the Midlands. I went to an entirely secular primary school and secondary school; the popular culture I imbibed was things like Star Trek. I read fantasy and science fiction. I studied classics at university and some modern history.”
> 
> He was talking at a small conference on the study of non-religion and secularity last week. Sociologists and anthropologists have done a great deal of research on different forms of belief. But unbelief, or at least a life untouched in any serious sense by organised religion, is only just coming into scope for this kind of social scientific inquiry.
> 
> Copson had a varied intellectual and social experience when he was growing up, but he says: “What didn’t feature in any way in my account was religion. What’s not in any sense contributed to making me what I am is religion, and I think that story is increasingly typical of non-religious people.”

What I said in my opening remarks at the seminar was that I was the child of a humanist mother and non-religious grandparents, that the community institutions of the working class town where I grew up were municipal or secular cooperative ones, that the multi-ethnic primary school I went to was very secular, that the secondary school I went to on a scholarship aged 11 was the same, the the popular culture I imbibed was humanistic, that the academic subjects I studied by choice at school and at university were the culture of ancient Greece and Rome and Enlightenment Europe. As a result of these combined factors – the secular working class culture of my family and the liberal academic culture of my schooling – there was nothing at all of religion of any sort in the formative aspects of my upbringing.

(I think the whole conceit of ‘religion’ as a category is in any case tendentious. Whether it is being used to describe a worldview, a set of practices, or an identity, I think it is always a sub-category of some other larger category of thing.)

The point that I was trying to make was that this emerging discipline, as embodied in research networks like the [NSRN](http://nsrn.net/) or units like [that just established at LSE](http://www2.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/research/PRNR/Home.aspx) field should not be too obsessed with defining humanist approaches to life by what they’re not. It is true that many non-religious people in the past were non-religious as a result of having rejected religion but today many are non-religious by default. I’m not non-religious in the sense that I was raised religious and turned against it. Religion has just been an unheard of irrelevance throughout my life. It is absent from my background, my worldview, my culture. I don’t want to tick ‘None’ to the ‘What is your religion?’ question on a form – I want to cross out the question.