The future is (still) less religious

If you want to understand the future, look at the big-picture trends.

Most news headlines are as ephemeral as clouds. Economies rise and fall in cycles, like bubbles on the tide. Elections come and go, putting one party into power, then a different one when voters get fed up.

However, behind the day-to-day clamor and chaos, trends quietly gather momentum until they become unstoppable avalanches that change the course of civilization.

One of those big, slow trends is the worldwide rise of the nonreligious. A new Pew Research study, about changes in the global religious landscape from 2010 to 2020, gives a glimpse into what's going on.

We're No. 3

According to the study, Christianity is the single largest religion on the planet, but Christians are slowly declining as a share of the world population. Islam is the second largest and is growing the fastest.

However, in third place, right behind those big two:

The religiously unaffiliated population—often called religious "nones"—is the world's third-largest religious category, after Christians and Muslims.

...Between 2010 and 2020, religiously unaffiliated people grew more than any group except Muslims. The unaffiliated made up a majority of the population in 10 countries and territories in 2020, up from seven a decade earlier.

...Around the world, the number of people who say they have no religious affiliation grew by 17%, from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 1.9 billion in 2020. This outpaced the 11% increase among the religiously affiliated. Therefore, the religiously unaffiliated expanded as a share of the world's total population, increasing from 23% in 2010 to 24% a decade later.

Because it needs to be footnoted every time, "the nonreligious" is a catchall term. Pew lumps explicitly self-identified atheists and agnostics together with people who simply don't declare their allegiance to any organized faith. Some of the people in this group still believe in God or the soul, and may occasionally engage in religious practices like prayer. Some have rejected religion, while some simply never got involved with it in the first place. Some are fervent in their lack of belief, while others are merely disengaged and apathetic.

Philosophically, you may find this incoherent. Practically, it makes sense. Despite their varying beliefs (or lack thereof) when it comes to God, the nonreligious as a whole tend to resemble each other more than they resemble the religiously orthodox. They're more liberal, friendly to science, generally well-educated. They're open to novelty, less threatened by change, and more inclined to think of morality as rational rather than dogmatic.

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.

Which are the least religious countries?

China is, by far, the country with the largest unaffiliated population. There are some difficulties with measuring this, both because Chinese culture doesn't necessarily think of religion in the same terms that Western societies do, and because the Chinese government's official stance of atheism can mask genuine belief. However, even taking these complexities into account, it's clear that China has more nonbelievers than any other country in the world.

But the country with the second most nonbelievers?

It's the United States.

According to Pew, between 2010 and 2020, the number of nonreligious Americans doubled. Today, over 100 million Americans—close to one-third of the total U.S. population—are nonreligious. They outnumber every single religious denomination.

These numbers mesh with other findings, like a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. It's confirmation that this isn't an outlier, but a real shift happening on a massive scale.

While the magnitude of the increase wasn't quite as great, the nonreligious population also grew in Australia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. Some of these countries were already further along the secularization curve, but America is catching up.

As one potential future vision of how this might play out in America, consider Spain. There, Catholicism, once dominant, is in steep decline:

Although the decline in the proportion of Catholics is substantial in all age groups, it is particularly profound among the youngest, according to data from the European Social Survey analysed by Funcas.

Thus, in 2002, 60% of the population aged 18 to 29 identified as Catholic, while in 2024 only 32% did so.

...in 2023, only 18% of marriages were celebrated according to the Catholic rite; in 1976, virtually all marriages were religious, and even in 2000, they still accounted for 76% of the total.

As more and more of the younger generations leave religion behind, this collapse becomes a self-perpetuating, accelerating cycle. Young people who get married don't have their weddings in the Catholic church; when they have children, they don't enroll them in Catholic schools. As a consequence, each generation is less religious than the last.

What does this mean for the future?

A less religious future isn't a glide path toward utopia. There's one troubling trend that needs to be pointed out: the so-called "nonreligious right", people who self-define as conservative but not religious.

Rather than the longtime crusades of the Christian right—banning abortion and contraception, repressing LGBTQ people, Ten Commandments everywhere, school prayer, funneling public money to churches—these regressive seculars have different priorities. They cheer on anti-immigrant bigotry, put forth pseudoscientific justifications of racism and sexism, and fight any social-justice cause that they label with the all-purpose sneer of "woke". Yes, this sounds very much like the Trump coalition.

However, we shouldn't be too hasty to jump to conclusions. While the nonreligious right is real, the old-school religious right still exists and is still very much the support base of Trumpism. If they're losing numbers and political influence, that can only be a good thing.

Their decline, in tandem with rise of the nonreligious left, will sap the strength of toxic, regressive ideologies and clear the way for progressive causes. The world's growing irreligiosity won't be an unalloyed blessing, but it will lead to a future that's slightly better than the past.