Religious non-realism: expanding an idea

Abstract In this study, I seek to rehabilitate the notion of ‘religious non-realism’, which is misunderstood in the philosophy of religion and significantly underdeveloped. I begin by widening the scope of the idea to encompass both propositional and non-propositional phenomena, and then focus on non-realist religious practice, expanding beyond what I call discourse-centred practices – focused on mobilizing substitutes for realist interpretations of religious discourse; expressivism and fictionalism suggest examples – to practices whose non-realism is discourse-independent. Once discourse-independent non-realist practices are acknowledged, a further distinction presents itself. Non-realist religious practice may be governed by a single idea – such as an expressivist or fictionalist idea – or it may integrate multiple such ideas. I call the former sort of non-realism monist and the latter mixed . Taken together, these distinctions reveal a range of structurally distinct forms of non-realist (and thus non-believing) religion, including mixed possibilities that have received no attention in the literature. By bringing the latter into view through concrete examples drawn primarily from Christianity, the study shows that the discussion of non-realist religious practice admits of a richer depiction, and one perhaps also more true to life, than philosophy of religion has so far supplied.