It’s going to get awkward that the U.K. still uses “God Save the King” as their national anthem:

For the first time in history, the UK now has more atheists than people who believe in the existence of a god, researchers have found.

This eyebrow-raising conclusion comes from Explaining Atheism, a collaborative research project on secularism by several British universities. As researchers put it, the nation is entering its “atheist age“.

Although it’s a right-wing tabloid, the Daily Mail has a surprisingly comprehensive and sympathetic report:

Figures from 2008 showed that 41.8 per cent of Britons believed in God while 35.2 per cent did not.

Within a decade, by 2018, this had reversed, with 35.2 per cent believing and 42.9 per cent not believing.

This project was funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, which normally pays scientists to praise religion. The fact that Templeton-backed researchers are reporting this result is a good indicator of its reliability. It fits the criterion of embarrassment.

It also fits the pattern of previous studies, like the one which found the U.K. was up to 25% atheist a few years ago. In 2019, only 1% (!) of young people belonged to the Church of England, and we’re seeing the fruits of that.

The rapid rise of atheism in the United Kingdom, mirroring similar trends in other countries, pours cold water on the claim that humans are genetically hardwired to believe in God. If that were true, we might see different religions rise and fall, but the number of out-and-out atheists would remain statistically insignificant. It would just be the tiny minority of mutants who lacked the god gene.

That’s not what’s happening. Religion is fading, and it’s not being replaced with anything else. This is conclusive evidence that religious belief is a cultural trait, one that can rise or fall like any other. It’s not an immutable part of our genetics, much less a spiritual longing implanted in us by a divine creator.

The Explaining Atheism project isn’t just a demographic survey. It also studied what causes lead people to become atheists, what atheists do believe in if they don’t believe in gods, and their general outlook and how they live their lives. While results like this will be extremely obvious to us, it’s something that many people still don’t know:

The team also discovered that the stereotype of the ‘purposeless unbeliever’ – that atheists lead lives devoid of meaning, morality and purpose – simply isn’t accurate.

Instead, many atheists and agnostics endorse objective moral values, human dignity and rights, and see family and freedom as important for finding meaning in the world, the study showed.

Another thing atheists might have guessed, but that it’s good to get confirmation of, is that religion doesn’t persist because it satisfies deep-seated needs, like assuaging the fear of death, or giving rules and structure to life. Rather, it persists mainly because parents pass it on to their children. This, too, fits with the theory of religion as an arbitrary cultural trait:

Common explanations for why people believe in God or not, such as intelligence, fear of death, or need for structure, have little empirical support.

The strongest influences on belief are parental upbringing and societal expectations regarding belief in God.

As for what this might mean for British politics, I’m not an expert. I’d guess the impact will be limited, since the U.K. doesn’t have a religious right that acts as a cohesive political force in the same way that the U.S. does.

However, there are still official privileges for Christianity enshrined in the British government. (I’m looking at you, bishops in the House of Lords.) As the U.K. becomes a majority atheist state, these archaic measures are ripe for disestablishment.

The U.K. may be leading the pack, but given its cultural similarities to the U.S., this is a herald of what’s coming here too. All the industrialized countries are moving along the same secularization curve, some further ahead, others behind. The religious right has been a more powerful and noxious force in America, but its time is drawing to a close. We can see it coming, and it may not be as far off as you think.

Image credit: geishaboy500, released under CC BY 2.0 license