Sun, Sand, and Shared Challenges: New Possibilities for Interreligious Encounter at the Interfaithless Beach Party

This paper presents a case study showing an emerging trajectory for the future of interreligious encounter: an Interfaithless Beach Party (IBP) held regularly between 2014 and 2022, which was a striking example of the growing number of initiatives in the United States in which exes from different high-demand religious groups navigate the difficult process of religious exit together. Using data from surveys and interviews conducted with IBP attendees, I argue that associating so-called interfaithlessness with interfaith becomes legible by thinking of interfaithlessness not as peripheral to but rather as a transposition of interfaith. Through this lens, the IBP allowed for interfaith encounter at its best, fostering not just proximity between exes from different religions, but meaningful interreligious exchange that complicates assumptions about America’s growing nonreligious population. The analysis suggests that the current age of religious exit may bring about not less but more opportunity for meaningful connection across (ex)religious difference.