Joseph Blankholm's research focuses on the variety among the nonreligious, including atheism and spirituality. His first book, The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious, was published by NYU Press in 2022. It is an ethnography that relies on several years of fieldwork among nonbelievers in the U.S. to explain why being secular can feel so weirdly religious. In the spring of 2021, he fielded the largest survey ever of organized nonbelievers in the U.S. (n=12,370). Relying on that data, he co-authored an essay on the beliefs of nonbelievers, and he is working on several others. In the past he has conducted research among born-again Christians in America and Zambia, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he continues to be interested in how evangelicals and nonbelievers imagine one another.