Religion Declining, Secularism
Surging
05/12/2016 Phil
Zuckerman Huffpost
An
ongoing spate of recent studies - looking at various countries
around the world - all show the same thing: religion is in decline.
From Scandinavia to South America, and from Vancouver to Seoul, the
world is experiencing an unprecedented wave of secularization.
Indeed, as a recent National
Geographic report
confirms, the world’s newest religion is: No
Religion.
Consider
the latest facts:
* For the first time in Norwegian history,
there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in
God.
* For the first time in British history,
there are now more
atheists and agnostics than believers in God.
And church
attendance rates in the UK are at an
all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending
church on any given Sunday.
* A recent survey found that 0%
of Icelanders believe that God created the
Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of
Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to
be.
* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are
not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant
churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected
to close within
the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low
attendance.
* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards,
24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34%
of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort
of spirit, God, or life-force.”
* In the United
States, somewhere
between 23% and 28% of
American adults have no religious affiliation, and these so-called
“nones” are not only growing in number, but they are becoming
increasingly
secular in their behaviors and
beliefs.
* Among Millennials -
Americans in their 20s - over 35% are non-religious, constituting
the largest cohort of secular men and women in the nation’s
history.
* In Canada,
back in 1991, 12% of adults stated “none,” when asked their
religion - today that is up to 24%.
* In Australia,
15% of the population said they had no religion in 2001, and it is
up to at least 22% today.
* In New
Zealand, 30% of the population claimed no
religion in 2001, but it had risen to 42% in 2013.
* In South
America, 7% of men and women in Mexico,
8% in Brazil, 11% in Argentina, 12% in El Salvador, 16% in Chile,
18% in the Dominican Republic, and 37% in Uruguay are non-religious
— the highest such rates of Latin
American secularity ever
recorded.
* In Japan,
about 70% of adults claimed to hold personal religious beliefs
sixty years ago, but today, that figure is down to only about 20%;
In 1970 there were 96,000 Buddhist temples throughout Japan, but in
2007, there were 75,866 - and around 20,000 of those were
un-staffed, with no resident priest. In the 1950s, over 75% of
Japanese households had a kamidana (Shinto altar), but by 2006 this
was down to 44% nationwide, and only 26% in major cities.
* While 11% of South
Koreans were atheists in 2005, that
has increased to at least 15% as of late, and the percentage of
South Koreans who described themselves as religious has dropped
from 58% to 52% over the past decade.
* Over 50%
of Chinese adults
are secular (although in Communist dictatorships where religion is
officially oppressed, valid information on people’s religiosity is
always hard to come by).
* In Africa, while religiosity remains
high, there are none the less growing pockets of irreligion: over
5% of the those in Ghana claim
to have no religion, and 9% of people in Madagascar and Tanzania,
and 11% of people in Gabon and Swaziland are nownon-religious.
* Approximately 20% of Botswanans now claim to have no
religion.
* Over 20% of Jamaicans are now non-religious.
Many other nations contain significant populations of nonreligious
people, such as Slovenia, Israel, Finland, Hungary, Russia,
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, etc. — but a nation-by-nation breakdown is
not possible here. Suffice it to say that most countries have
experienced notable degrees of secularization over
the past century, and for the first time in the world’s history,
there are now many societies where being secular is more common
than being religious.
Although openly supporting atheism is sometimes
punished in some Muslim-majority
countries - in fact, in 13
Islamic nations, atheism is a crime
warranting the death penalty— there are
still numerous
signs of growing
secularism throughout
the Muslim world, although reliable
numbers are hard to come by.
Finally, the sheer number of secular men and women on planet earth
is unprecedented — according to the Pew Research
Center’s latest
estimates, there were over 1.1 billion
non-religious people in the world in 2010, and that number is
expected to increase to over 1.2 billion by the year 2020.
Will this tidal wave of secularization continue to wash over planet
earth?
Hard to say for sure.
On the one hand, we know that socialization is the number one
engine that drives religiosity: children are raised to become
religious by their religious parents. And thus, as more and more
people stop being religious, it is quite likely that they won’t
raise their children to be religious, and thus the
inter-generational spread of religion will weaken in the decades
ahead. Additionally, secularization is highly correlated
withinternet
access and usage. And thus, as the web becomes
more ubiquitous in more people’s lives, secularism will continue to
grow.
On the other hand, religious people have more kids than secular
people. And those nations today with the highest birthrates are the
most religious, while those nations today with the lowest
birthrates tend to be among the most secular - so demographically,
in terms of who has more babies, the religious have the breeding
advantage. And this is why, according to Pew’s
latest predictions, the growth of
secularity will most likely level off within a few decades, while
Islam will continue to grow, becoming the world’s largest religion
by 2050.
But for now, churches are closing across the world, faith is
fading, and those men and women who live their lives according to
secular values and humanist principles are on the rise.