I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend toward a more secular world – which, despite all the frightening headlines and discouraging developments in American politics, is continuing.
A new survey examines how the global religious landscape shifted between 2010 and 2020. It found that traditional religion continues to wane, such that that “no religion” is now the third most-common religious demographic in the world, behind only Christianity and Islam. While China has the most nonreligious people of any country, the possibly-surprising second-place finisher is the United States. The number of nonreligious Americans doubled in only a decade, and now constitutes about a third of the population.
In this article, I examine the political implications of this change. The rise of the “nonreligious right”, who espouse pseudoscientific justifications for old prejudices, is an unfortunately real phenomenon, but they’re just one small part of a much larger societal shift. The overall thrust of the evidence still signals that a less religious world will, all things considered, be better for everyone.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
The most eyebrow-raising fact is that the nones have what Pew calls a demographic disadvantage. Compared to the global population as a whole, they’re older on average and have fewer kids. This is especially noticeable in Europe, Japan, and other wealthy, developed societies where religion is fading at the same time as the population is aging and flattening out.
However, the nones are growing in spite of that, because of switching—that is, people walking away from their religious upbringing and becoming nonbelievers. This is in contrast to the way religions typically grow, by mere reproduction and indoctrination of children who are too young to question or doubt what they’re taught. Persuading adults to change their minds is much harder—and yet that’s what’s happening. In that sense, nonreligion is winning the culture war.
You made me consider the ebb and flow of religion in the USA. In the 1960s and 1970s, Christianity was everywhere in the culture, but outside of clannish pockets, it wasn’t really paid attention to. And a lot of Christmas–the high holy day–traditions were secular: I remember being in school and singing about silver bells in the city and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman (those were also stop-motion animated tv specials and are still shown, 60 years later). Speaking of tv, The Miracle of 34th Street paid lip service to Christianity by featuring a little girl who was skeptical about Santa–I don’t think Christianity is even mentioned in that movie. Closer to home and year-round, my mother sent all her children to Sunday school, but we had no doubts it was only to have a half-day to herself while we were kept busy elsewhere. In classes, we were all just going through the motions and didn’t want to be there–not the students, not the teachers. I can’t remember anyone professing to believe any of it. None of us grew up to bring our kids to church.
The 1980s were a time of the rise of desperate attempts to indoctrinate children and young adults by Protestant evangelicals/fundamentalists (shortened to fundagelicals when their aims merged), and that continued until the early 2000s. But the facade was cracking. Revelations starting with Swaggart and his prostitutes and the Bakkers living high off the hog on the donations sent by their tv-watching flock. The fundagelicals countered with families like the Duggars and their however-many kids, but all these families had huge flaws–mostly horrific child molestation and abuse.
I just considered the people I know IRL, and the only ones who attend church are the minority in the fundagelical megachurch camp. Average, everyday people don’t seem to believe, nor are they raising their children in the church.
Maybe it’s different in different parts of the country, but that is what I see around me.
@Katydid #1:
I suspect that things aren’t too much different from the 1970s, and a lot of this is “Christians” who admit to themselves that they were never meaningfully Christian, and that’s okay. But that does imply that Christianity, and religions in general, will still persist once they get pared down to a core of true believers, so they won’t go away entirely. It’d take something more to get rid of them forever.