Lived Experiences of Non-believing Older Adults : Changing Landscapes of Belief

This book investigates the lived experiences of non-believing older adults, showing how their views and identities are deeply bound up in social relationships and social contexts over their lives. Championing the value of research with older non-believing people, this work offers important empirical data to investigate what it means to be non-believing for these older adults, how they understand it and what role it plays in their lives.

Joanna Malone highlights how a clear break away from religion towards secularity has not always been experienced by older adults. Transitions are not linear but intermittent, changing and transformative over a lifetime. This book sheds light on the important role social relationships play in shaping non-belief, challenging stereotypical ideas about the loss of religion and individualism, whilst recognizing the influence liberal values, including individualism, have on emerging non-believing worldviews.

Moving beyond binary understandings of religion, belief and non-religion and non-belief, these findings explore a more nuanced understanding of what non-believing looks like, and how it is lived. Importantly, the book delves into both the societal and individual religious changes that older adults have experienced over their lives, highlighting the intricacies that can be overlooked in many secularization narratives. Joanna Malone engages with debates about intergenerational change, exploring how other-than-religious views and practices are formed and transmitted across generations and considers important reflections around end-of-life for non-believing older adults.