unbeliever

American  

[uhn-bi-lee-ver] / ˌʌn bɪˈli vər /

noun

1. a person who does not believe.

2. a person who does not accept any, or some particular, religious belief.

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unbeliever British  

/ ˌʌnbɪˈliːvə /

noun

1. a person who does not believe or withholds belief, esp in religious matters

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Etymology

Origin of unbeliever

1520–30; un- ¹ + believer ( def. )

Explanation

An unbeliever is a person who is skeptical of a particular religion. Most places of worship welcome all people, even unbelievers. If you're not a believer — that is, if you don't believe in something — you're an unbeliever. This noun usually turns up in religious contexts, either as another word for an atheist (someone who doesn't believe in any god or deity), or simply to denote someone who isn't a follower of a certain religion. If you're a Unitarian, your devout Catholic relatives might consider you to be an unbeliever.

Example Sentences

"Kafir" is one spelling of an Arabic word commonly used for "unbeliever".

From BBC • Nov. 10, 2023

But Eitzel is a more thoroughgoing unbeliever, from a more skeptical age, especially as an AIDS-era gay artist who spent a fair slice of his career half in and half out of the closet.

From Slate • Jan. 30, 2017

How could she be at once such a stringent moralist and an unbeliever?

From Salon • Oct. 8, 2012

Woolf seems to understand this in To the Lighthouse, when she has Mrs Ramsay, who thinks of herself as an unbeliever, suddenly express conventional Christian belief.

From The Guardian • Aug. 26, 2011

As Wotton interpreted Swift, it was Swift, the critic of the moderns, who was the sceptical unbeliever, while Wotton presented himself as an orthodox Protestant.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton