The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity by Rebekka King: Author Meets Respondents Session.

Rebekka King’s The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity (2023) is the culmination of a three-year ethnographic study of North American Christians who embrace their religious identities while simultaneously questioning the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, and the accuracy of the Bible. King proposes the concept of “lived secularity” as a category with which we can examine the ways in which religiosity is entangled with and subsumed by secular identities over and against religious ones. King’s theoretical framework provides insight into the study of contemporary religious and cultural hybridity, emergent groups such as “the nones,” atheism, religious apostasy, deconversion, the ethics of belief, and multi-religious identities. In this session, three respondents with ethnographic expertise and affiliation with the Anthropology of Christianity, Secularism Studies, and the Critical Theory for the Study of Religion will discuss The New Heretics, followed by a response from the author, Rebekka King.