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

But while Americans started from a higher level of belief, they have not escaped the march of secularization from one generation to the next. A recent report summarizes the trend in its title: “Exodus: Why Americans Are Leaving Religion—and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back.”⁷⁴ The exodus is most visible in the rise of the Nones, from 5 percent in 1972 to 25 percent today, making them the largest religious group in the United States, surpassing Catholics (21 percent), white Evangelicals (16 percent), and white mainline Protestants (13.5 percent). The cohort gradient is steep: just 13 percent of Silents and older Boomers are Nones, compared with 39 percent of Millennials.⁷⁵ The younger generations, moreover, are more likely to remain irreligious as they age and stare down their mortality.⁷⁶ The trends are just as dramatic among the subset of Nones who are not just none-of-the-abovers but confessed nonbelievers. The percentage of Americans who say they are atheist or agnostic, or that religion is unimportant to them (probably no more than a percentage point or two in the 1950s), rose to 10.3 percent in 2007 and 15.8 percent in 2014. The cohorts break down like this: 7 percent of Silents, 11 percent of Boomers, 25 percent of Millennials.⁷⁷ Clever survey techniques designed to get around people’s squeamishness in confessing to atheism suggest that the true percentages are even higher.⁷⁸

Why, then, do commentators think that religion is rebounding in the United States? It’s because of yet another finding about the American Exodus: Nones don’t vote. In 2012 religiously unaffiliated Americans made up 20 percent of the populace but 12 percent of the voters. Organized religions, by definition, are organized, and they have been putting that organization to work in getting out the vote and directing it their way. In 2012 white Evangelical Protestants also made up 20 percent of the adult population, but they made up 26 percent of the voters, more than double the proportion of the irreligious.⁷⁹ Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote. Similar patterns apply to populist movements in Europe. Pundits are apt to mistake this electoral clout for a comeback of religion, an illusion that gives us a second explanation (together with fecundity) for why secularization has been so stealthy.

Why is the world losing its religion? There are several reasons.⁸⁰ The Communist governments of the 20th century outlawed or discouraged religion, and when they liberalized, their citizenries were slow to reacquire the taste. Some of the alienation is part of a decline in trust in all institutions from its high-water mark in the 1960s.⁸¹ Some of it is carried by the global current toward emancipative values (chapter 15) such as women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and tolerance of homosexuality.⁸² Also, as people’s lives become more secure thanks to affluence, medical care, and social insurance, they no longer pray to God to save them from ruin: countries with stronger safety nets are less religious, holding other factors constant.⁸³ But the most obvious reason may be reason itself: when people become more intellectually curious and scientifically literate, they stop believing in miracles. The most common reason that Americans give for leaving religion is “a lack of belief in the teachings of religion.”⁸⁴ We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.⁸⁵

Whatever the reasons, the history and geography of secularization belie the fear that in the absence of religion, societies are doomed to anomie, nihilism, and a “total eclipse of all values.”⁸⁶ Secularization has proceeded in parallel with all the historical progress documented in part II. Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.⁸⁷ American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.⁸⁸ The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.⁸⁹ Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.