A significant minority of the archive's respondents had no religious framework at the time of their experience, and many still described something that changed them profoundly.
One of the most significant findings in the Hardy Archive is that 159 accounts, nearly 8% of the collection, come from people who had no religious framework at the time of their experience and who wrote about it in explicitly secular or agnostic terms. These are accounts from people who, when the experience arrived, did not reach for a religious vocabulary because they didn't have one, or because they had actively set one aside. And yet they described experiences that share the same core features as the most traditionally framed accounts in the collection: the sense of presence, the noetic certainty, the lasting change in how they understood their lives.
If you had an experience without any prior framework to receive it, you are in good company in the archive, and you may be in the most epistemically interesting position of all. Several researchers have argued that secular accounts are the hardest to explain as simple projection or wish-fulfillment, because there was no prior religious wish to be fulfilled and no framework to project into. The experience arrived despite the absence of the conditions that conventional explanations usually invoke. What you were left with was the experience itself, without a tradition's interpretation already attached.
The archive's secular accounts also document something important about what these experiences do, regardless of framework. The transformations reported, reduced fear of death, increased sense of meaning, changed values, a different relationship to other people, appear in the secular accounts at rates comparable to the religiously-framed ones. The experience does its work whether or not there is a theological container for it. You are not required to adopt a framework in order to take the experience seriously; the archive contains many people who never did, and who found it the most significant event of their lives regardless.
The secular-agnostic category includes respondents who identified as having no religious belief or commitment at the time of their experience, atheists who found themselves reluctantly unable to deny what had happened, agnostics for whom the experience shifted the balance of probability without establishing certainty, and materialists who described their encounters in words that sat uneasily in their own mouths. This group is particularly valuable for the study of religious experience because it strips away the most obvious interpretive scaffolding. When a lifelong Christian describes a divine encounter, the question of whether the experience was shaped by prior expectation is always present. When a committed atheist describes something indistinguishable from what the archive's religious respondents describe, the question becomes harder to answer.
What secular-agnostic accounts consistently reveal is the insistence on the reality and significance of the experience alongside a sustained resistance to theistic interpretation. These respondents may use phrases like 'whatever it was' or 'something I cannot account for' in place of 'God,' but the underlying phenomenological description, the peace, the presence, the noetic quality, the sense of being addressed or held, maps closely onto the explicitly religious accounts. Many describe the experience as the most important thing that ever happened to them, while declining to name what caused it. This combination of experiential certainty and interpretive agnosticism is philosophically distinctive and represents one of the archive's most important contributions to the wider study of religious experience.
Secular-agnostic accounts are recognizable by their characteristic hedging language alongside their insistence on reality: 'for want of a better word,' 'I can only describe it as,' 'this will sound strange from someone who doesn't believe, but.' The effort to maintain intellectual honesty while reporting an experience that resists naturalistic explanation produces a characteristic textual tension. Negative assertions are common: 'I am not imaginative,' 'I am not the sort of person who has experiences like this,' 'I had not been thinking about religion.' These disclaimers serve to pre-empt the dismissal that the writer anticipates and to establish the anomalousness of the experience against the baseline of an ordinary secular life.
Secular-agnostic accounts represent 7.7% of the tradition-identified archive. Their presence in a collection that drew primarily from religiously interested respondents suggests that the experiences are genuine rather than confirmation-seeking, and that Hardy's explicit invitation for non-religious accounts was taken up. These accounts show high rates of meaning-restored as a lasting effect and comparatively modest rates of faith-deepened (which would require a prior faith to deepen). The lasting effects tend to be more existential than doctrinal: a shift in relationship to death, a widening of the sense of what is real, an altered relationship to meaning, without necessarily producing religious commitment.
This is not a sign of hidden religiosity.
The secular accounts are sometimes interpreted as evidence that the experiencer was 'really' religious without knowing it, that the experience exposed a latent faith. The archive doesn't support this reading. Many accounts describe people who remained secular or agnostic after their experiences, who continued to resist religious frameworks, and who found ways to take the experience seriously that didn't involve adopting theological commitments. The experience is not a diagnostic for covert belief.
This is not easily explained as emotional overload.
The hypothesis that overwhelming experiences in secular people are simply misinterpreted emotional states runs into difficulty with the specificity and consistency of what the archive describes. Secular accounts typically describe not just intensity but content, a sense of presence, a clarity of understanding, a shift in the relationship to time and self, that goes beyond emotional agitation. Hardy and subsequent researchers found the phenomenological precision of these accounts, coming from people who had no pre-existing template to fill in, particularly striking.
This is not less valid than religious-framed accounts.
There is no basis in the Hardy data for treating religiously-framed experiences as more real or significant than secular ones. The quality measures researchers have applied, noetic quality, depth of transformation, lasting effect, confidence in the experience's reality, do not systematically favor one framing over another. An account that resists all available frameworks is not a lesser account; it is, in some respects, an especially important one.
Does having this experience mean I should become religious?
Nothing in the archive supports this as a necessary conclusion. Many of the secular and agnostic respondents remained secular and agnostic for the rest of their lives after their experiences, and their accounts do not describe this as a lack. Some found engagement with particular traditions useful, reading contemplative literature, sitting with Buddhist or Christian practices, without adopting institutional affiliation or doctrinal commitment. The experience may open questions; it does not determine the answers.
Is my experience less real because I don't believe?
No. The archive's secular accounts are not characterized by less intensity, less specificity, or less transformative effect than the religiously-framed ones. Hardy himself was struck by the fact that the experience appeared to be a human capacity independent of prior belief, that it arrived for people who had given it no reason to arrive, and that those people were often among the most precise in describing what they encountered. The absence of a framework to project into is, if anything, a methodological asset in describing the experience as it was rather than as it was expected to be.
What do I do with this if God doesn't fit my framework?
The archive suggests several approaches that secular respondents found workable. Some treated the experience as important data about the nature of consciousness or reality, without committing to theological interpretation. Some engaged with contemplative traditions selectively, using their practices, reading their accounts, without adopting their metaphysics. Some simply held the experience as a significant fact about their own history that pointed toward questions they continued to live with. The archive does not require you to resolve the question; it only requires you to take it seriously.
How do secular accounts compare to religious ones in the archive?
Across the key dimensions researchers have measured, the differences are smaller than might be expected. Secular accounts show comparable rates of what Hardy called awareness of the presence of God or of a power, though many secular respondents preferred different language — comparable rates of lasting change, and comparable confidence in the experience's significance. Where differences appear, they tend to be in the language of interpretation rather than in the phenomenological content of what happened. The experiences themselves show a striking convergence across frameworks; the divergence is primarily in how that convergence is named.