His research focuses on secularism and atheism, primarily in the United States, and relies on a range of empirical methods, including ethnography, archival and oral history, and quantitative analysis. Most recently, he has published essays in Public Culture and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and he is currently revising his book manuscript, tentatively titled, Purely Secular: Organized Nonbelievers and the Negated Tradition, which argues that scholars of religion should study secular people as inheritors of a religion-like tradition. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and he is also co-founder and co-chair of the AAR’s Secularism and Secularity group. He received his Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University and his M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine.