Secular people are strangely ambiguous. They are by definition not religious, and yet they find religion hard to avoid. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, The Secular Paradox explains why. Each of the book's chapters focuses on a different aspect of religion toward which secular people are ambivalent: belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. Taken together, they show that secular people inherit an ancient tradition that includes beliefs, institutions, and embodied practices. By recovering the secular tradition and detailing the effects of the contradictions that conceal it, The Secular Paradox offers a radically new understanding of what it means to be secular and gives secular people a place in the pantheon of American religion.