Measuring the history of religious belief is not easy. Few surveys have asked people the same questions in different times and places, and the respondents would interpret them differently even if they did. Many people are queasy about labeling themselves atheist, a word they equate with “amoral” and which can expose them to hostility, discrimination, and (in many Muslim countries) imprisonment, mutilation, or death.63 Also, most people are hazy theologians, and may stop short of declaring themselves atheists while admitting that they have no religion or religious beliefs, find religion unimportant, are spiritual but not religious, or believe in some “higher power” which is not God. Different surveys can end up with different estimates of irreligion depending on how the alternatives are worded.
We can’t say for sure how many nonbelievers there were in earlier decades and centuries, but there can’t have been many; one estimate put the proportion in 1900 at 0.2 percent.64 According to WIN-Gallup International’s Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, a survey of fifty thousand people in fifty-seven countries, 13 percent of the world’s population identified themselves as a “convinced atheist” in 2012, up from around 10 percent in 2005.65 It would not be fanciful to say that over the course of the 20th century the global rate of atheism increased by a factor of 500, and that it has doubled again so far in the 21st. An additional 23 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as “not a religious person,” leaving 59 percent of the world as “religious,” down from close to 100 percent a century before.
According to an old idea in social science called the Secularization Thesis, irreligion is a natural consequence of affluence and education.66 Recent studies confirm that wealthier and better-educated countries tend to be less religious.67 The decline is clearest in the developed countries of Western Europe, the Commonwealth, and East Asia. In Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and several other countries, religious people are in the minority, and atheists make up a quarter to more than half of the population.68 Religion has also declined in formerly Communist countries (especially China), though not in Latin America, the Islamic world, or sub-Saharan Africa.
The data show no signs of a global religious revival. Among the thirty-nine countries surveyed by the Index in both 2005 and 2012, only eleven became more religious, none by more than six percentage points, while twenty-six became less religious, many by double digits. And contrary to impressions from the news, the religiously excitable countries of Poland, Russia, Bosnia, Turkey, India, Nigeria, and Kenya became less religious over these seven years, as did the United States (more on this soon). Overall, the percentage of people who called themselves religious declined by nine points, making room for growth in the proportion of “convinced atheists” in a majority of the countries.
Another global survey, by the Pew Research Center, tried to project religious affiliation into the future (the survey did not ask about belief).69 The survey found that in 2010, a sixth of the world’s population, when asked to name their religion, chose “None.” There are more Nones in the world than Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, or devotees of folk religions, and this is the “denomination” that the largest number of people are expected to switch into. By 2050, 61.5 million more people will have lost their religion than found one.
With all these numbers showing that people are becoming less religious, where did the idea of a religious revival come from? It comes from what Quebecers call la revanche du berceau, the revenge of the cradle. Religious people have more babies. The demographers at Pew did the math and projected that the proportion of the world’s population that is Muslim might rise from 23.2 percent in 2010 to 29.7 percent in 2050, while the percentage of Christians will remain unchanged, and the percentage of all other denominations, together with the religiously unaffiliated, will decrease. Even this projection is a hostage to current fertility estimates and may become obsolete if Africa (religious and fecund) undergoes the demographic transition, or if the Muslim fertility decline discussed in chapter 10 continues.70
A key question about the secularization trend is whether it is being driven by changing times (a period effect), a graying population (an age effect), or the turnover of generations (a cohort effect).71 Only a few countries, all English-speaking, have the multidecade data we need to answer the question. Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians have become less religious as the years have gone by, probably because of changing times rather than the population getting older (if anything, we would expect people to become more religious as they prepare to meet their maker). There was no such change in the British or American zeitgeist, but in all five countries, each generation was less religious than the one before. The cohort effect is substantial. More than 80 percent of the British GI Generation (born 1905–1924) said they belonged to a religion, but at the same ages, fewer than 30 percent of the Millennials did. More than 70 percent of the American GI Generation said they “know God exists,” but only 40 percent of their Millennial great-grandchildren say that.
The discovery of a generational turnover throughout the Anglosphere removes a big thorn in the side of the secularization thesis: the United States, which is wealthy but religious. As early as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on how Americans were more devout than their European cousins, and the difference persists today: in 2012, 60 percent of Americans called themselves religious, compared with 46 percent of Canadians, 37 percent of the French, and 29 percent of Swedes.72 Other Western democracies have two to six times the proportion of atheists found in the United States.73
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.
* * *
However baleful theistic morality may be in the West, its influence is even more troubling in contemporary Islam. No discussion of global progress can ignore the Islamic world, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out the progress enjoyed by the rest. Muslim-majority countries score poorly on measures of health, education, freedom, happiness, and democracy, holding wealth constant.90 All of the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim-majority countries or involved Islamist groups, and those groups were responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.91 As we saw in chapter 15, emancipative values such as gender equality, personal autonomy, and political voice are less popular in the Islamic heartland than in any other region of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. Human rights are abysmal in many Muslim countries, which implement cruel punishments (such as flogging, blinding, and amputation), not just for actual crimes but for homosexuality, witchcraft, apostasy, and expressing liberal opinions on social media.
How much of this lack of progress is the fallout of theistic morality? Certainly it cannot be attributed to Islam itself. Islamic civilization had a precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.92 Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators to Islamic law. Some of the problems are found in other resource-cursed strongman states. Still others were exacerbated by clumsy Western interventions in the Middle East, including the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, support of the anti-Soviet mujahedin in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.
But part of the resistance to the tide of progress can be attributed to religious belief. The problem begins with the fact that many of the precepts of Islamic doctrine, taken literally, are floridly antihumanistic. The Quran contains scores of passages that express hatred of infidels, the reality of martyrdom, and the sacredness of armed jihad. Also endorsed are lashing for alcohol consumption, stoning for adultery and homosexuality, crucifixion for enemies of Islam, sexual slavery for pagans, and forced marriage for nine-year-old girls.93
Of course many of the passages in the Bible are floridly antihumanistic too. One needn’t debate which is worse; what matters is how literally the adherents take them. Like the other Abrahamic religions, Islam has its version of rabbinical pilpul and Jesuitical disputation that allegorizes, compartmentalizes, and spin-doctors the nasty bits of scripture. Islam also has its version of Cultural Jews, Cafeteria Catholics, and CINOs (Christians in Name Only). The problem is that this benign hypocrisy is far less developed in the contemporary Islamic world.
Examining big data on religious affiliation from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Amy Alexander and Christian Welzel observe that “self-identifying Muslims stick out as the denomination with by far the largest percentage of strongly religious people: 82%. Even more astounding, fully 92% of all self-identifying Muslims place themselves at the two highest scores of the ten-point religiosity scale [compared with less than half of Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals]. Self-identifying as a Muslim, regardless of the particular branch of Islam, seems to be almost synonymous with being strongly religious.”94 Similar results turn up in some other surveys.95 A large one by the Pew Research Center found that “in 32 of the 39 countries surveyed, half or more Muslims say there is only one correct way to understand the teachings of Islam,” that in the countries in which the question was asked, between 50 and 93 percent believe that the Quran “should be read literally, word by word,” and that “overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land.”96
Correlation is not causation, but if you combine the fact that much of Islamic doctrine is antihumanistic with the fact that many Muslims believe that Islamic doctrine is inerrant—and throw in the fact that the Muslims who carry out illiberal policies and violent acts say they are doing it because they are following those doctrines—then it becomes a stretch to say that the inhumane practices have nothing to do with religious devotion and that the real cause is oil, colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, or Zionism. For those who need data to be convinced, in global surveys of values in which every variable that social scientists like to measure is thrown into the pot (including income, education, and dependence on oil revenues), Islam itself predicts an extra dose of patriarchal and other illiberal values across countries and individuals.97 Within non-Muslim societies, so does mosque attendance (in Muslim societies, the values are so pervasive that mosque attendance doesn’t matter).98
All these troubling patterns were once true of Christendom, but starting with the Enlightenment, the West initiated a process (still ongoing) of separating the church from the state, carving out a space for secular civil society, and grounding its institutions in a universal humanistic ethics. In most Muslim-majority countries, that process is barely under way. Historians and social scientists (many of them Muslim) have shown how the stranglehold of the Islamic religion over governmental institutions and civil society in Muslim countries has impeded their economic, political, and social progress.99
Making things worse is a reactionary ideology that became influential through the writings of the Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the inspiration for Al Qaeda and other Islamist movements.100 The ideology looks back to the glory days of the Prophet, the first caliphs, and classical Arab civilization, and laments subsequent centuries of humiliation at the hands of Crusaders, horse tribes, European colonizers, and, most recently, insidious secular modernizers. That history is seen as the bitter fruit of forsaking strict Islamic practice; redemption can come only from a restoration of true Muslim states governed by sharia law and purged of non-Muslim influences.
Though the role of theistic morality in the problems besetting the Islamic world is inescapable, many Western intellectuals—who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundredfold—have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.101 Some of the apologetics, to be sure, come from an admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims. Some are intended to discredit a destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a clash of civilizations. Some fit into a long history of Western intellectuals execrating their own society and romanticizing its enemies (a syndrome we’ll return to shortly). But many of the apologetics come from a soft spot for religion among theists, faitheists, and Second Culture intellectuals, and a reluctance to go all in for Enlightenment humanism.
Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims. Islam is not a race, and as the ex-Muslim activist Sarah Haider has put it, “Religions are just ideas and don’t have rights.”102 Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party platform.
Can the Islamic world have an Enlightenment? Can there be a Reform Islam, a Liberal Islam, a Humanistic Islam, an Islamic Ecumenical Council, a separation of mosque and state? Many of the faithophilic intellectuals who excuse the illiberalism of Islam also insist that it’s unreasonable to expect Muslims to progress beyond it. While the West might enjoy the peace, prosperity, education, and happiness of post-Enlightenment societies, Muslims will never accept this shallow hedonism, and it’s only understandable that they should cling to a system of medieval beliefs and customs forever.
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