Difference and Belonging: Summer Camps Aid in Creating Nonreligious Identities in the United States

The United States of America is ostensibly a secular country.  In a seemingly paradoxical way, religions and religious beliefs have thrived within this secular environment, with Americans being some of the most religious people in the world.  This leads us to question the place of nonreligious Americans within this secular but overwhelmingly religious country.  To begin answering this question, ethnographic work was carried out at a nonreligious summer camp called Camp Quest in the summer of 2011.  Camp Quest is an explicitly nonreligious summer camp that welcomes children of all ages as well as their parents for a weeklong camping experience.  The nonreligious people who attended Camp Quest Montana in 2011 are engaged in a complex process of identity formation where they seek to distance themselves from their religious neighbours while adopting discourses that create feelings of belonging in a religion-filled America. The camp’s explicit nonreligious position provides a space for the open discussion about participants’ rejection of religious belief, while, in a seeming contradiction, Camp Quest Montana also encourages the participants to talk about nonreligious beliefs that are not dependent on religious beliefs as a frame of reference.  The analysis of the data gained through ethnographic fieldwork at Camp Quest provides a clearer picture of the process of creating a nonreligious identity as well as the tension between these nonreligious Americans and the religious Americans that make up a majority of the population.