Phil
Zuckerman is Associate Dean at Pitzer College, Professor
of Sociology. He is the author of Beyond Doubt: The
Secularization of Society (NYU Press, 2023) and What
It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for
Living an Ethical Life (Counterpoint, 2019).
Jens
is in his late sixties. He lives in a cozy house on a quiet
street in a mid-sized city on the east coast of Jutland, Denmark.
He’s many things: a widower, a lover of art and music,
a retired radio journalist and social worker, a father, and
an atheist.
As
for that last part of his identity—the utter lack of
any belief in a God—it isn’t all that important
to him. Being secular in contemporary Denmark, one of the
least pious nations in the world, is simply no big deal. But
when I came to his house one sunny, cold morning to interview
him for my research, he took the time to actively ponder his
lack of religiosity and reflect about how distinct his naturalistic
worldview is from that of his forbearers. As he explained,
his four grandparents were all “real believers.”
What about his parents? Yes, they were religious, too, “but
less so.” And as for Jens’s siblings: “my
younger brother is a very hard atheist, and my sister and
my elder brother are more agnostics.”
In
short: Jens’ grandparents were deeply faithful, his
folks were religious—but much less so than the grandparents—
and today, he and his three siblings are all non-believers.
This generational decline of religiosity in Jens’ family
is nothing remarkable in Scandinavia today. It is, in fact,
the norm. Every single indicator of religion in Denmark has
plummeted over the course of the last century, from church
attendance, baptisms, and confirmations to belief in God,
belief in heaven and hell, and belief in the literal truth
of the Bible.
This
historical process, whereby religion weakens and fades in
society, is known as secularization.
SECULARIZATION
The early founders of sociology—Europeans such as Auguste
Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber—could sense religion’s
impending demise, at least within their own corner of the
world. They spoke of a growing “disenchantment”
within modern society and the dying away of old gods. However,
they didn’t have much in the way of data to support
their predictions. Today, we have data aplenty, and what they
reveal is unambiguous, and in some instances quite precipitous,
decline of religion throughout not only Europe, but much of
the wider world.
To
measure and illustrate religious decline, you need two things:
(1) clear indicators of religiosity that can be measured,
and (2) longitudinal data that reveal trends over time. In
my latest book, Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society,
co-authored with Dr. Isabella Kasselstrand and Dr. Ryan Cragun,
both are provided. For measures of religious decline, we focus
on the “three Bs:” belief, behavior, and belonging.
That is: belief in supernatural entities (God, for example);
behavior in terms of religious activities such as praying,
going to church, baptizing, etc.; and belonging in terms of
basic self-identification, that is, seeing oneself as a Catholic,
Lutheran, Muslim, and so forth, or just simply being a member
of a religious congregation or community. For longitudinal
data, we draw on numerous national and international surveys
going back many decades, which allow us to chart observable
trends over time. Nearly all of them point in the same direction—downwards.
NORTH
AMERICA
Belief in God in the U.S. is at an all-time low: back in the
1940s, 96 percent of Americans believed in God, while today
it is down to 81 percent; more interestingly, the percentage
of Americans who strongly believe in God without any doubt
has fallen from 62 percent in 1990 to 50 percent today. Church
membership is also at an all-time low: in the 1940s 75 percent
of Americans were members of a church, but today it is down
to 47 percent. Finally, more Americans than ever do not identify
as having any religion at all: nearly 30 percent.
In
Canada, religious identification is also at an alltime low:
In the 1960s, 50 percent of Canadians reported attending church
on a weekly basis; by 2015, that was down to 10 percent; in
the 1970s, only four percent of Canadians said that they had
no religion, but today, that is up to 29 percent; In 1985,
84 percent of Canadians said they believed in God; that number
had dropped to 59 percent in 2020.
LATIN
AMERICA
Although much more religious than their neighbors to the North,
Latin Americans have still exhibited notable signs of secularization
in recent decades. Consider the example of Chile: In 1998,
only five percent of Chileans did not identify with any religion,
while today it is up to 22 percent; In 1998, 91 percent said
they believed in God and 75 percent in life after death, but
in 2018 those percentages had slipped down to 87 percent and
68 percent, respectively; in 1990, 20 percent said that they
were “not a religious person,” but that was up
to 42 percent in 2018. Rates of secularity are even higher
in Uruguay, the most secularized nation in Latin America.
Even very devout nations such as Mexico, Guatemala, and Brazil,
have seen an uptick in secularity: back in 1996, less than
two percent of the population of each country identified as
nonreligious, but today it has increased to 15 percent, 14
percent, and 12 percent, respectively.
OCEANIA
In Australia, back in the 1960s, less than one percent of
the population claimed to have no religion, but today that
is up to an all-time high of almost 40 percent; In 2003, 73
percent of people said that they held religious beliefs, but
that was down to an all-time low of 53 percent as of 2020.
In 1950, 44 percent of Australians attended religious services
on a regular basis, but by 2016, only 16 percent of Australians
were regular church attenders. In New Zealand, the percent
of the population with no religion (49 percent) is—for
the first time ever—higher than the percentage who identify
as Christian (37 percent).
EUROPE
Rates of religious decline have been the most dramatic in
Europe. As The Guardian reported in 2018, European
nations today are best described as “post-Christian,”
with a majority of young adults in twelve nations having no
religious faith; the Czech Republic stands out, where a whopping
66 percent don’t believe in God, a historical high.
In
Norway, not only are church membership and church attendance
rates at all-time lows, but so too is theism: In 1991, 10
percent did not believe in God and 12 percent did not know
if there was a God; by 2018, these figures had increased to
26 percent and 19 percent, respectively. Even more dramatic
rates of rising secularity are found in Sweden and Denmark,
where God belief, Jesus belief, baptism, belief in heaven
and hell, church attendance, church membership, teen confirmation,
frequency of prayer, Bible study, and every single other indicator
of religiosity are at all-time lows.
In
Britain, while 77 percent of adults believed in God back in
1967, that was down to 32 percent as of 2015; simultaneously,
while 10 percent of British adults described themselves as
“confident atheists” back in 1998, that figure
was up to 26 percent in 2018. Similar indicators of religiosity,
including those of belief, behavior, and belonging, are at
all-time historic lows in France, Germany, the Netherlands,
Belgium, and Switzerland.
Things
are even most interesting when looking at those Catholic European
nations that seem to resist secularization. Take Ireland:
In 2002, 65 percent attended weekly Mass, but that is down
to 34 percent today; In 2002, four percent said they had “no
religion,” but that is up to 32 percent today—with
a whopping 54 percent of people between the ages of 16 and
29 being nonreligious. In Poland, those who maintain a religious
faith went from 94 percent in 1992 down to 87 percent today;
70 percent attended church weekly back in 1992, but that is
down to 43 percent today, and the percentage of Poles who
are “nonpracticing” grew from nine percent in
1992 and is up to 24 percent today; in 2015, 15 percent of
18-to 24-year-olds were non-believers, that has almost doubled
up to 28.6 percent today.
ASIA
It is tough to measure religiosity in the most populace nation
on Earth, China, for two key reasons. First, like most of
Asia, religion has been constructed and conceived much differently
there than it has in the West, so typical Western measures
of religiosity such as “church attendance,” “frequency
of prayer” or “belief in God” don’t
work. Secondly, China is a Communist Party dictatorship that
is officially atheist, and religion is highly regulated and
repressed, which means that Chinese people have a vested interest
in keeping their true religious feelings hidden, especially
if that would jeopardize their education, career, liberty,
or life. Thus, while most surveys show that a majority of
Chinese people are non-religious today—with many being
explicit atheists—we can’t be sure if this reported
high degree of secularity is accurate, or just how it has
changed over time.
However,
many other Asian nations, with the notable exception of still
strongly religious India, show unambiguous degrees of secularization.
For example, in Japan, back in 1947, 71 percent of adults
said that they held religious beliefs; that had dropped down
to 23 percent by 2005. In South Korea, back in 1982, 47 percent
said they had “no religion” and 31 percent defined
themselves as “atheist” specifically, but those
percentages had risen to 64 percent and 55 percent in 2018,
respectively; the percentage of South Koreans who believe
in the supernatural powers of deceased ancestors has also
gone down, from 45 percent in 1940 to 18 percent today.
AFRICA
AND ARABIA
People in Africa and the Arab-speaking world are generally
quite religious, and secularization is not evident in these
parts world, save for a few indications here and there: back
in 2013, 10 percent of Libyans and 13 percent of Tunisians
said that they had no religion, but by 2019, those percentages
had increased to 25 percent and 30 percent, respectively.
Additionally, younger Arab adults are less religious than
older adults. The percentage of 15-to-29 year-olds who claim
to be religious is 42 percent in Iraq, 36 percent in Egypt,
33 percent in Yemen, 32 percent in Sudan, 28 percent in Palestine,
24 percent in Morocco, 23 percent in Lebanon, 22 percent in
Jordan, and 15 percent in Algeria. And in sub-Saharan Africa,
in the last twenty years, people in Ghana and Rwanda have
ever so slightly decreased their weekly church attendance.
Given the extensive poverty and existential insecurity that
continue to plague Africa and much of the Arab-speaking world,
it makes sense that religion remains strong there.
However,
in most Western societies—and in many throughout the
East—secularization is occurring, and mightily so. The
wide variety of countries that have seen a decline in belief
in God over the previous several decades is notable: Sweden,
South Korea, the Netherlands, Estonia, Norway, Great Britain,
Denmark, Hong Kong, France, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, Australia,
Germany, Iceland, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg,
Austria, the United States, India, Uruguay, Singapore, Italy,
Chile, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, Malaysia,
Turkey, Colombia, and Indonesia all experienced declines of
at least 2.5 percentage points; countries with a decrease
of more than 20 percentage points include the Netherlands,
Norway, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain, Spain,
New Zealand, the United States, Iceland, and South Korea.
In some of these countries, the drop was truly dramatic: belief
in God in Sweden declined from 60 percent in 1982 down to
36 percent in 2017; in Belgium, from 87 percent down to 61
percent in 2009. And more than half of the surveyed countries
in the international data have seen regular religious attendance
diminish over the past several decades, and many countries
in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia have seen
a drop in people belonging to or identifying with a religion
over this same period.
EXPLAINING
SECULARISM
Why
does secularization occur? And why in some countries so dramatically,
while not at all in others? There are at least five factors
at work.
First:
the overall transition from a traditional, rural, non-industrial
way of life to a contemporary, urban, industrial (or post-industrial)
way of life. This modernization process leads to greater differentiation
in society, such as the separation of religion from various
aspects of societies, institutions, or individuals, as well
as the increased rationalization of society—the ordering
of society based on technological efficiency, bureaucratic
impersonality, and scientific and empirical evidence—both
of which result in varying degrees of secularization.
Second:
existential security. When people in a given society live
in a state of fear, hunger, and overall precariousness, they
tend to be more religious. Conversely, when people live in
a society characterized by stability, safety, and overall
well-being, they tend to be less religious. As extensive data
provided by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa
Norris show, those nations that have strong economies, excellent
social welfare programs, affordable housing, heavily tax-subsidized
healthcare and education, democratic government, and low levels
of corruption and crime, are among the most secularized—while
those nations that lack such indicators of progress are the
least secularized.
Third:
religious pluralism. As sociologist Peter Berger explained,
when there is one dominant religion maintaining a hegemonic
monopoly over a given society, religion tends to be strong.
However, when there are multiple religions existing side by
side within society, overall religiosity of the population
tends to weaken. This happens for many reasons, but the main
one is this: in the religious monopoly situation—imagine,
for example, a Portuguese island where everyone is Catholic—
religion enjoys a taken-for-granted status, providing people
with an uncontested religious worldview. By contrast, in a
society where there are many different and distinct religions
existing in the same geographical space, each maintaining
that they have the ultimate truth while others are wrong,
it creates an undermining “crisis of credibility”
for all of them. It’s challenging to maintain an exclusive
religious worldview, believing that you possess the one true
faith and everyone else is wrong, when you live in a metropolitan
environment with close friends, relatives, in-laws, and colleagues
who hold different religious or even nonreligious worldviews.
Fourth:
women working in the paid labor force. In societies where
women are mostly sequestered into roles of unpaid domestic
labor, religion tends to stay strong. However, as historian
Callum Brown documents, those societies with high rates of
women in the paid labor force tend to secularize. This occurs
for various reasons, such as the fact that women, as mothers,
tend to take on the role of socializing children into religion
and keeping religious life afloat at home, but when women
work outside of the home, they often don’t have the
energy, time, or drive to keep it up, and fathers rarely take
up the slack. Also, when women are paid for their labor, they
experience increased autonomy and agency and thus have less
of a need to rely on religious explanations or religious community
support.
Fifth:
education, literacy, and access to and use of the internet.
It has long been established that as more people in a given
society become better educated, and as a larger proportion
of the population is able to read, religion tends to diminish.
More recently, communications professors Greg Armfield and
Lance Holbert have shown the degree to which internet access
and use are corrosive to religion; by providing information
that debunks religious claims, creating social networks and
communities for budding skeptics and apostates, and by simply
offering all that the internet provides, the world wide web
undermines the overall social privilege and potency of religion.
When
all five factors coincide, secularization is most acute. On
top of such large-scale secularizing forces, however, there
are always unique and idiosyncratic nation-specific causes,
as well. For example, the public exposure of numerous scandals,
crimes, abuses, rapes, and murders within the Catholic church
in Ireland has led to a sharp increase of distinctly anti-religious
secularity there. In the U.S., the ever-intimate marriage
between conservative, right-wing Republicans and Evangelical
Christians has caused many mainline religious Americans to
disaffiliate. In Iran, the marked growth of secularism among
the younger generations is often a reaction against the despotic
policies of the reigning Islamic dictatorship.
CONCLUSION
Is secularization inevitable? No. If certain societies experience
marked decreases in existential security— heightened
poverty, political instability, climate crises, and so forth—we
can expect religion to strengthen. Additionally, birth rates
are key: religious people tend to have many more children
than secular people, and highly religious societies tend to
have much higher overall birthrates than highly secular societies.
It is possible that the abundance of religious births could
override current secularizing trends.
As of right now, however, secularization is stronger than
it has ever been—and it is gaining momentum throughout
much of the world. In most modern societies, people are demonstrably
less religious than their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents
were in the past. And for the first time in recorded history,
we now have numerous societies— such as Scotland, Estonia,
the Netherlands, Japan, Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, South
Korea, France, Hungary, and Australia—wherein non-religious
people outnumber religious people.
Whether
we are talking about religious faith and belief, participation
and behavior, or identification and belonging, the best available
data show that, aside from the noted exceptions of the poorest,
least stable nations, religiosity is receding, and more so
than ever before.
