Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

According to an old idea in social science called the Secularization Thesis, irreligion is a natural consequence of affluence and education.⁶⁶ Recent studies confirm that wealthier and better-educated countries tend to be less religious.⁶⁷ The decline is clearest in the developed countries of Western Europe, the Commonwealth, and East Asia. In Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and several other countries, religious people are in the minority, and atheists make up a quarter to more than half of the population.⁶⁸ Religion has also declined in formerly Communist countries (especially China), though not in Latin America, the Islamic world, or sub-Saharan Africa.

The data show no signs of a global religious revival. Among the thirty-nine countries surveyed by the Index in both 2005 and 2012, only eleven became more religious, none by more than six percentage points, while twenty-six became less religious, many by double digits. And contrary to impressions from the news, the religiously excitable countries of Poland, Russia, Bosnia, Turkey, India, Nigeria, and Kenya became less religious over these seven years, as did the United States (more on this soon). Overall, the percentage of people who called themselves religious declined by nine points, making room for growth in the proportion of “convinced atheists” in a majority of the countries.

Another global survey, by the Pew Research Center, tried to project religious affiliation into the future (the survey did not ask about belief).⁶⁹ The survey found that in 2010, a sixth of the world’s population, when asked to name their religion, chose “None.” There are more Nones in the world than Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, or devotees of folk religions, and this is the “denomination” that the largest number of people are expected to switch into. By 2050, 61.5 million more people will have lost their religion than found one.

With all these numbers showing that people are becoming less religious, where did the idea of a religious revival come from? It comes from what Quebecers call la revanche du berceau, the revenge of the cradle. Religious people have more babies. The demographers at Pew did the math and projected that the proportion of the world’s population that is Muslim might rise from 23.2 percent in 2010 to 29.7 percent in 2050, while the percentage of Christians will remain unchanged, and the percentage of all other denominations, together with the religiously unaffiliated, will decrease. Even this projection is a hostage to current fertility estimates and may become obsolete if Africa (religious and fecund) undergoes the demographic transition, or if the Muslim fertility decline discussed in chapter 10 continues.⁷⁰

A key question about the secularization trend is whether it is being driven by changing times (a period effect), a graying population (an age effect), or the turnover of generations (a cohort effect).⁷¹ Only a few countries, all English-speaking, have the multidecade data we need to answer the question. Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians have become less religious as the years have gone by, probably because of changing times rather than the population getting older (if anything, we would expect people to become more religious as they prepare to meet their maker). There was no such change in the British or American zeitgeist, but in all five countries, each generation was less religious than the one before. The cohort effect is substantial. More than 80 percent of the British GI Generation (born 1905–1924) said they belonged to a religion, but at the same ages, fewer than 30 percent of the Millennials did. More than 70 percent of the American GI Generation said they “know God exists,” but only 40 percent of their Millennial great-grandchildren say that.

The discovery of a generational turnover throughout the Anglosphere removes a big thorn in the side of the secularization thesis: the United States, which is wealthy but religious. As early as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on how Americans were more devout than their European cousins, and the difference persists today: in 2012, 60 percent of Americans called themselves religious, compared with 46 percent of Canadians, 37 percent of the French, and 29 percent of Swedes.⁷² Other Western democracies have two to six times the proportion of atheists found in the United States.⁷³