In the last 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of people who identify as having no religion. In many countries where Christianity has traditionally made up the religious majority, nonreligious populations are now significant. Many approaches equate nonreligion with atheism or reduce it to "the secular", which limits nonreligion to only a small part of the phenomenon this project is investigating. More than atheism, nonreligion includes agnosticism, humanism, spiritual but not religious, indifference, and other varieties of nonbelief. More than just the secular, there are many ways to understand nonreligion and its links to concepts such as nationhood, democracy, secularism, laïcité, values, morality, culture, and heritage. The Nonreligion Project investigates the shape of nonreligion, observes how nonreligion and religion are negotiated in society, and develops evidence-based constructive policies to address the tensions that arise from those negotiations. This touches health policy, ethics, and law—for example, in the debates over medical assistance in dying.
