Religion Is Declining in the United States and Worldwide

Ronald F. Inglehart produced an interesting article on trends related to religion for Foreign Affairs for which he provided the eye-catching title Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion.  He used international surveys that were performed across many countries to draw his conclusion that a worldwide decline in religiosity became apparent in recent data over the period 2007-2019.  And that decline was most precipitous in the United States.

“A dozen years ago, my colleague Pippa Norris and I analyzed data on religious trends in 49 countries, including a few subnational territories such as Northern Ireland, from which survey evidence was available from 1981 to 2007 (these countries contained 60 percent of the world’s population). We did not find a universal resurgence of religion, despite claims to that effect—most high-income countries became less religious—but we did find that in 33 of the 49 countries we studied, people became more religious during those years. This was true in most former communist countries, in most developing countries, and even in a number of high-income countries. Our findings made it clear that industrialization and the spread of scientific knowledge were not causing religion to disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.”

The way these surveys worked was to ask people how important God was in their lives, and request they assign a numerical value to their response based on zero meaning no importance and ten indicating great importance. 

“For example, from 1981 to 2007, the mean score of the Bulgarian public rose from 3.6 to 5.7. In Russia, it rose from 4.0 to 6.0. In part, this growth in religiosity was a response to the severe decline of economic, physical, and psychological security experienced after the Soviet Union disintegrated; religion was filling the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of communism. Religious beliefs also increased in many developing countries outside the former Soviet Union, including Brazil, China, Mexico, and South Africa. On the other hand, religion declined in most high-income countries.”

Something would change around the interval between 2007 and 2019, and that change would become most apparent in the United States.

“But since 2007, things have changed with surprising speed. From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.”

“The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline. For years, the United States had been the key case demonstrating that economic modernization need not produce secularization. By this measure, the United States now ranks as the 11th least religious country for which we have data.”

Most religions derive from eras in which patriarchy was predominant and childhood survival was low.  It made sense to create a religion in which women were subjugated and concentrated their efforts on producing offspring.  Things that interfered with this plan such as contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and women’s rights were either discouraged or forbidden.  This approach seems hopelessly outmoded in a modern society and has been fading gradually over recent decades in wealthier nations.  If one believes that religions were created to meet the needs of humans, then it should not be too surprising that when humans no longer feel a need for what religions provide then participation in them will decline.  Inglehart identifies this drift away from traditional, religion-sponsored rolls in gender and sexuality as a partial explanation for what has been observed. 

The fact that around the year 2007 an inflection point occurred is curious, and the magnitude of the inflection also cries out for an explanation.  Inglehart provides this hypothesis. 

“Although secularization normally occurs at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, it can reach a tipping point when the dominant opinion shifts and, swayed by the forces of conformism and social desirability, people start to favor the outlook they once opposed—producing exceptionally rapid cultural change. Younger and better-educated groups in high-income countries have recently reached this threshold.”

A “tipping point” seems an all too convenient mechanism.  He uses the sorry state of politics in the United States to try to justify this supposition. 

“Several other factors beyond rising levels of economic and technological development help explain the waning of religion. In the United States, politics accounts for some of the decline. Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has sought to win support by adopting conservative Christian positions on same-sex marriage, abortion, and other cultural issues. But this political appeal to religious voters has had the corollary effect of pushing other voters, especially those who are young and culturally liberal, away from religion.”

And finally, he makes the most critical observation. 

“It once was generally assumed that religious beliefs shaped political views, not the other way around. But recent evidence indicates that the causality can run the other way: panel studies have found that many people change their political views first and then become less religious.”

What could possibly have occurred that would explain such a dramatic change in attitudes in such a short period of time?  Well, consider the insane Iraq War in which old people committed young people to go and die in a worthless cause.  It was at that point that young people began to establish a different voting pattern from their parents and became more liberal in their political views.  Younger people would receive another shock just a few years later when the Great Recession hit.  Many were left in debt with little prospect for beginning the long march of a career.  Yet another blow has been delivered to them as they struggle through the current coronavirus pandemic.  And if they survive that they can begin to face the inevitable upheavals of global warming.  Another recent development of note is the ascendance of social media.  People are still trying to understand the role those platforms play in establishing political views, but most assume they are significant.

In Young Voters: Generation Divide or Class Divide? We discussed the notion that young people have begun to see themselves as members of an economic lower class merely by the happenstance of their age.  They are highly unlikely to ever lead the economic lives that the previous generations enjoyed.  Milestones like attaining home ownership seem unattainable as they observe an older generation enjoying the benefits of decades of asset value increases.  Evidence suggests that the younger cohorts have grown impatient with the status quo and are demanding political solutions that once were considered radical.  More power to them.

For whatever reason, political views have begun to change rapidly.  Gay marriage became generally acceptable in an incredibly short time.  Could racial injustice become the next great political revolution?  Let us hope so.

The conclusion to draw from Inglehart’s discussion is that humanity was never intended to be molded by the dictates of religion; rather, the dictates of religion were defined in such a way as to serve the needs of humanity.  Religions that forget their own history and refuse to adapt will become irrelevant.