Choosing Our Religion The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones Elizabeth Drescher New York, NY: Oxford University Press, April 2016. 344 pages. $29.95. Hardcover. ISBN 9780199341221. For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website. Review READ INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR HERE Every semester in my undergraduate courses at the University of San Diego, I task my students with completing an assignment called “Religion in the News.” The prompt is relatively simple: students are to pick a news article that has to do with religion in today’s world, write a short summary and analysis of it, and then present the article to the rest of the class for discussion. There are two things in particular that I like about this exercise. First, it helps students see that our class lessons have real, pragmatic application in understanding our contemporary world. Second, this assignment gives me insight into the sorts of issues, trends, and events that my students find interesting. Over the past year and a half, there has been one topic that students have gravitated toward more than any other: the rise of the religious Nones—those who select “none” as their religious affiliation—in the United States. Each time an article on this trend comes up in class, we inevitably land upon the same set of questions: What factors are driving some Americans to move away from historically prevalent forms of religious affiliation? Is this trend proof that the secularization thesis— which postulates that the rise of science and technology will lead to a decline in religious belief—is true? And, do human beings need religion in order to live moral and ethical lives? Elizabeth Drescher’s Choosing Our Religion provides the groundwork for much deeper and more interesting conversations about who Nones are and how they live their lives. Her book, which is based on narrative surveys with more than a thousand religiously affiliated and unaffiliated Americans as well as extended interviews with more than one hundred Nones from across the country, strives to paint a human portrait of this increasingly important demographic. In doing so, Drescher challenges many of the stigmas that currently exist against the religiously unaffiliated in the United States, such as notions that Nones are a homogenous