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Last year, a new survey from Britain revealed that in the last decade, the percentage of British adults who have no religious faith has risen from 43 percent to 52 percent; additionally, while 10 percent of British adults said that they don’t believe in God 25 years ago, today that is up to 25 percent.
Look at weddings in Spain: back in the early 1990s, about 80 percent of marriages were performed as religious ceremonies, consecrated by the church. But today, only 20 percent of marriages in Spain are religious, with 80 percent of all Spanish weddings now being performed as civil ceremonies outside of religious auspices.
Over in South Korea, the percentage of people who say they have no religion has risen from 47 percent in 2005 up to nearly 60 percent today.
Consider Tunisia: in 2013, 16 percent of the population was non-religious, but that is now up to 31 percent—with an astonishing 46 percent of Tunisians between the ages of 18-29 being non-religious.
Here in the United States: since 2007, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped from 78 percent down to 65 percent, while the percentage of those who don’t identify with any religion has increased from 16 percent up to 26 percent.
What’s going on?
Simple: secularization.
Secularization is the historical process whereby religion weakens, lessens, diminishes, or fades in society; secularization entails a social process in which fewer people, over time, believe in supernatural claims, fewer people engage in religious behaviors, and fewer people belong to or identify with a religion.
Other definitions of secularization put forth by sociologists over the years have included:
- The process “in which traditional religious symbols and forms have lost force and appeal” (Milton Yinger)
- “The process whereby religious thinking, practice, and institutions lose social significance” (Bryan Wilson)
- “The process by which sectors in society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols,” as well as a situation in which “an increasing number of individuals who look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations” (Peter Berger)
- “The declining scope of religious authority” (Mark Chaves)
- “The decay of religious institutions… the shift from religious to secular control of a variety of social activities… the decline in the proportion of their time, energy, and resources that people devote to supernatural concerns” (Steve Bruce)
Many more definitions have been developed. But what most definitions of secularization have in common is that they seek to describe some sort of transformation over time in the way religion exists in society—a change that entails some version of weakening, diminishment, decline, or loss. Whether we are talking about religion being increasingly differentiated or cut off from other sectors or institutions of society—such as government or education—or whether we are describing religion as holding less symbolic sway in a given culture, or whether we are observing fewer people seeing the world in religious terms or engaging in religious activities, the bottom line is one of decreasing religiousness.
Today, secularization appears to be running rampant. Indeed, the world contains fewer religious people—and more secular people—than ever before in recorded human history.
What causes secularization?
Well, like any theory seeking to explain mass changes in society over time, that’s up for much debate. But some of the strongest contenders include existential security (when people’s lives are safe and secure, when they have access to food, shelter, medicine, jobs, etc., and society is marked by peace and prosperity, the need for religion goes down); increased education (the more people become literate and learn about history, culture, and science, the less likely they are to believe religious dogma); increased access to the internet (by broadening people’s perspectives, exposing them to critiques of their faith, distracting them with entertainment, consumerism, and porn, and allowing then to socially link up with other secular people, the internet corrodes religiosity); women working in the paid labor force (as women gain agency and independence through paid employment, their need for religious support wanes); reactions against religious malfeasance (when religious institutions align themselves with oppressive regimes or malignant political parties, or when they engage in criminal behavior such as systemic pedophilia, people may react by rejecting religion); secularist activism (when secularists promulgate their ideas via public debates, stand-up comedy, books, billboards, Instagram, blogs, etc., some people take heed); increased religious diversity and pluralism (when there is an increase of multiple and diverse religions in the same society, all claiming sole and ultimate truth, this can create a crisis of credibility).
But whatever the causes, and whatever the results, secularization is a global reality, with few exceptions. The modern fading of religion will not only have ramifications throughout the political and cultural landscape, but the psychological and personal as well.
