Phil Zuckerman

Phil Zuckerman is an American sociologist (b. 1969) and Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies at Pitzer College, where in 2011 he founded the first Secular Studies program at a U.S. institution. Trained at the University of Oregon (PhD 1998), his work brings empirical sociology to bear on atheism, apostasy, and the social conditions of secularity. His ethnographic study of Denmark and Sweden, Society without God (2008), argued that highly secular societies can be morally and socially robust, directly challenging the claim that religion is necessary for ethical life. Faith No More (2011) examined American deconversion narratives, while Living the Secular Life (2014) offered a sociological portrait of nonreligious meaning-making. With Ariela Keysar he co-edited the multi-volume Atheism and Secularity series (2010) and the Oxford Handbook of Secularism (2017), consolidating secular studies as a research field. Zuckerman draws on classical secularization theory (Berger, Bruce) and complicates it with cross-national data. Critics, including sociologists skeptical of secularization theory such as Rodney Stark, have challenged his Scandinavian generalizations and his selective inference from secular outcomes to causal claims. Others note that his work straddles advocacy for secular humanism and descriptive social science. Nonetheless, he is among the principal architects of the contemporary sociological study of nonbelief.