Giving Up on God

The Global Decline of Religion

Ronald F. Inglehart

I
n the early years of the twenty-first century, religion seemed to
be on the rise. The collapse of both communism and the Soviet
Union had left an ideological vacuum that was being filled by
Orthodox Christianity in Russia and other post-Soviet states. The
election in the United States of President George W. Bush, an evan-
gelical Christian who made no secret of his piety, suggested that
evangelical Christianity was rising as a political force in the
country.
And the 9/11 attacks directed international attention to the power of
political Islam in the Muslim world.
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 sci- entific knowledge were not causing religion to
disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.
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.
RONALD F. INGLEHART is Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor Emeritus of Democracy,

September/October 2020 1
 Democratization, and Human Rights at the University of Michigan and the author of the
forthcoming book Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing It and What Comes Next?

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IRS
 Giving Up on God

Growing numbers of people no longer find religion a necessary

source of support and meaning in their lives. Even the United
States—long cited as proof that an economically advanced society
can be strongly religious—has now joined other wealthy countries in
moving away from religion. Several forces are driving this trend, but
the most powerful one is the waning hold of a set of beliefs closely
linked to the imperative of maintaining high birthrates. Modern
societies have become less religious in part because they no longer
need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major
world religions have instilled for centuries. Although some religious
conservatives warn that the retreat from faith will lead to a
collapse of social cohesion and public morality, the evidence
doesn’t support this claim. As unexpected as it may seem,
countries that are less religious actually tend to be less corrupt
and have lower murder rates than more religious ones. Needless
to say, religion itself doesn’t encourage corruption and crime. This
phenom- enon reflects the fact that as societies develop, survival
becomes more secure: starvation, once pervasive, becomes
uncommon; life expec- tancy increases; murder and other forms of
violence diminish. And as
this level of security rises, people tend to become less religious.

THE RISE AND FALL OF FAITH

Our earlier study, published in 2011, compared levels of religious belief
measured as early as 1981 with findings from the latest surveys then
available, from around 2007, bridging a period of roughly a
quarter century. In each survey, respondents were asked to indicate
how im- portant God was in their lives by choosing a value on a
scale ranging from one—“Not at all important”—to ten—“Very
important.”
Examining how a country’s level of religiosity changed over time
led to some striking findings. A majority of the countries surveyed
showed upticks in a belief in the importance of God. The largest
increases were in former communist countries. 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 experi- enced after the Soviet Union
disintegrated; religion was filling the ide- ological vacuum left by the
collapse of communism. Religious beliefs also increased in many
Ronald F. Inglehart

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.
 Since 2007, there has been a remarkably sharp trend away from
re- ligion. In virtually every high-income country, religion has
continued to decline. At the same time, many poor countries,
together with most of the former communist states, have also
become less religious. From 2007 to 2019, only five countries
became more religious, whereas the vast majority of the countries
studied moved in the opposite direction. India is the most
important exception to the general pattern of declining
religiosity. The period of the study coincides roughly with
the return to power of the Hindu na-
The most dramatic shift tionalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whose
away from religion brand of politics seeks to conflate
na- tional identity with religious
has taken place among identity. The bJP government has
the American public. advocated policies that discriminate
against the followers of other
religions, particu-
larly India’s large Muslim minority, polarizing communities and
whipping up religious sentiments.
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.
Influential thinkers from Karl Marx to Max Weber to Émile
Durkheim predicted that the spread of scientific knowledge would
dispel religion throughout the world, but that did not happen. For
most people, religious faith was more emotional than cognitive.
And for most of human history, sheer survival was uncertain.
Religion provided assurance that the world was in the hands of an
infallible higher power (or powers) who promised that, if one
followed the rules, things would ultimately work out for the best.
112 fo R e I gn A F F A
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In a world where people often lived near starvation, religion helped
them cope with severe uncertainty and stress. But as economic and
technologi-

September/October 2020 113

cal development took place, people became increasingly able to
escape starvation, cope with disease, and suppress violence. They
become less dependent on religion—and less willing to accept its
constraints, including keeping women in the kitchen and gay people
in the closet— as existential insecurity diminished and life
expectancy rose.
Secularization doesn’t happen everywhere at once; it occurs when
countries have attained high levels of existential security, and
even then it usually moves at a glacial pace, as one generation
replaces another. It can even reverse itself, with societies
becoming more religious if they experience prolonged periods of
diminished security. Secularization has been gradually taking
place since the nineteenth century, starting with the societies of
western Europe and North America that were most secure
economically and physically and then spreading to more and more
parts of the world.
Although secularization normally occurs at the pace of intergen-
erational population replacement, it can reach a tipping point when
the dominant opinion shifts and, swayed by the forces of conform-
ism 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.

LOSING THEIR RELIGION

Several other factors beyond rising levels of economic and
techno- logical 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 cul- tural 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. 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.
The uncritical embrace of President Donald Trump—a leader who
cannot be described as a paragon of Christian virtue—by many
prom- inent evangelicals has led other evangelicals to fear that
young people will desert their churches in droves, accelerating an
ongoing trend.
 Plenty of seats: at a Catholic church in New York City, June 2014
The Roman Catholic Church, for its part, has lost adherents because
of its own crises. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center found
that fully 92 percent of U.S. adults were aware of recent reports of
sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and about 80 percent of those
surveyed said they believed that the abuses were “ongoing problems
that are still hap- pening.” Accordingly, 27 percent of U.S. Catholics
polled said that they had scaled back their attendance at Mass in
response to these reports.
But perhaps the most important force behind secularization is a
transformation concerning the norms governing human fertility. For
many centuries, most societies assigned to women the role of
C
producing as many children as possible and discouraged divorce,
H
RI abortion, homo- sexuality, contraception, and any sexual behavior
S
T
O
not linked to repro- duction. The sacred writings of the world’s major
PH
E
religions vary greatly, but as Norris and I have demonstrated,
R
G virtually all world religions instilled these pro-fertility norms in
R
E
G
their adherents. Religions empha- sized the importance of fertility
O
R because it was necessary. In the world of high infant mortality and
Y
/
T
low life expectancy that prevailed until recently, the average woman
H
E
had to produce five to eight chil- dren in order to simply replace
N
E the population.
W
Y
O
During the twentieth century, a growing number of countries
R
K attained drastically reduced infant mortality rates and higher life
expectancies, making these traditional cultural norms no longer
necessary. This process didn’t happen overnight. The major
world
religions had presented pro-fertility norms as absolute moral rules
and stoutly resisted change. People only slowly gave up the familiar
beliefs and societal roles they had known since childhood
concerning gender and sexual behavior. But when a society reached
a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security,
younger generations grew up taking that security for granted, and
the norms around fertility receded. Ideas, practices, and laws
concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality
are now changing rapidly.
This shift is quantifiable. Data collected in the World Values Survey
over the years offer a glimpse of a deep transformation. The
survey uses a ten-point scale based on each country’s acceptance of
divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. The tipping point is around the
middle of the scale, at 5.50: lower scores indicate that a majority of
the country’s people harbor more conservative views, and higher
scores indicate that a majority have more liberal views centered on
individual choice. Around 1981, majorities in every country for
which we have data sup- ported pro-fertility norms. Even in high-
income countries, the mean scores ranged from as low as 3.44
(Spain), 3.49 (the United States),
3.50 (Japan), 4.14 (the United Kingdom), and 4.63 (Finland) to as
high as 5.35 for Sweden—then the most liberal country but with a
score still slightly below the scale’s tipping point. But a profound
change was underway. By 2019, Spain’s mean score had risen to
6.74, the United States’ to 5.86, Japan’s to 6.17, the United Kingdom’s
to 6.90, Finland’s to 7.35, and Sweden’s to 8.49. All these countries
were below the 5.50 tipping point when first surveyed, and all of
them were above it by 2019. These numbers offer a simplified
picture of a complex reality, but they convey the scale of the recent
acceleration of secularization.
This trend has been spreading to the rest of the world, with one
major exception. The populations of the 18 Muslim-majority
countries for which data are available in the World Values Survey
have stayed far below the tipping point, remaining strongly religious
and committed to preserving traditional norms concerning gender and
fertility. Even con- trolling for economic development, Muslim-
majority countries tend to be somewhat more religious and culturally
conservative than average.

THINGS WON’T FALL APART

For centuries, religion has served as a force for social cohesion,
reducing crime and encouraging compliance with the law. Every
major religion inculcates some version of the biblical
commandments “Thou shalt
not steal” and “Thou shalt not kill.” So it is understandable that
reli- gious conservatives fear that the retreat of religion will lead to
social disarray, with rising corruption and crime. But to a surprising
extent, that concern is not supported by the evidence.
Since 1993, Transparency International has monitored the relative
corruption and honesty of government officials and business people
around the world. Each year, this watchdog group publishes the
Corruption Perceptions Index, which
ranks public-sector corruption in 180 Religious countries tend
countries and territories. These data to be more corrupt
make it possible to test the actual rela-
tionship between religiosity and cor-
than secular ones.
ruption: Is corruption less
widespread
in religious countries than in less religious ones? The answer is
an unequivocal no—in fact, religious countries actually tend to be
more corrupt than secular ones. The highly secular Nordic states
have some of the world’s lowest levels of corruption, and highly
religious coun- tries, such as Bangladesh, Guatemala, Iraq, Tanzania,
and Zimbabwe, have some of the highest.
Clearly, religiosity does not cause corruption. Countries with low
levels of economic and physical security tend to have high levels of
religiosity and also high levels of corruption. Although religion may
once have played a crucial role in supporting public morality,
that role shrinks as societies develop economically. The people of
reli- gious countries are slightly more likely to condemn corruption
than the people of less religious countries, but the impact of
religion on behavior ends there. Religion may make people more
punitive, but it does not make them less corrupt.
This pattern also applies to other crimes, such as murder. As
sur- prising as it may seem, the murder rate is more than ten times as
high in the most religious countries as it is in the least religious
countries. Some relatively poor countries have low murder rates,
but overall, prosperous countries that provide their residents with
material and legal security are much safer than poor countries. It is
not that religiosity causes murders, of course, but that both crime and
religiosity tend to be high in societies with low levels of existential
security.
The evidence suggests that modern societies will not descend into
nihilistic chaos without religious faith to bind them, but that may not
always have been the case. In early agrarian societies, when most
people lived just above the survival level, religion may have been
the most effective way to maintain order and cohesion. But
moderniza- tion has changed the equation. As traditional religiosity
declines, an equally strong set of moral norms seems to be
emerging to fill the void. Evidence from the World Values Survey
indicates that in highly secure and secular countries, people are
giving increasingly high priority to self-expression and free choice,
with a growing emphasis on human rights, tolerance of outsiders,
environmental protection, gender equality, and freedom of
speech.
Traditional religions can be dangerously divisive in contempo-
rary global society. Religions inherently tend to present their norms
as absolute values, despite the fact that they actually reflect their
societies’ histories and socioeconomic characteristics. The rigidity
of any absolute belief system can give rise to fanatical intolerance,
as the historical conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and
Chris- tians and Muslims have demonstrated.
As societies develop from agrarian to industrial to knowledge-
based, growing existential security tends to reduce the
importance of religion in people’s lives, and people become less
obedient to traditional religious leaders and institutions. That trend
seems likely to continue, but the future is always uncertain.
Pandemics such as the covId-19 one reduce people’s sense of
existential security. If the pandemic lasts for many years or leads
to a new Great Depression, the cultural changes of recent
decades might begin to reverse.
But that shift remains unlikely, because it would run counter
to the powerful, long-term, technology-driven trend of growing
pros- perity and increased life expectancy that is helping push
people away from religion. If that trend continues, the influence
that traditional religious authorities wield over public morality will
keep shrinking as a culture of growing tolerance becomes ever
stronger.∂