Scientific advancement isn’t just making people question God, it’s also connecting those who question. And 11 percent of Americans born after 1970 were raised in secular homes.
A chunk of the population born after the article was printed may respond to the provocative question with, “God who?” In Europe and North America, the unaffiliated tend to be several years younger than the population average. But the response isn’t limited to yes or no. Fifty years ago, Time asked in a famous headline, “Is God Dead?” The magazine wondered whether religion was relevant to modern life in the post-atomic age when communism was spreading and science was explaining more about our natural world than ever before. If the world is at a religious precipice, then we’ve been moving slowly toward it for decades. And as with religions, these internal contradictions could keep new followers away. Organized around skepticism toward organizations and united by a common belief that they do not believe, nones as a group are just as internally complex as many religions. And many more simply don’t care to state a preference. Within the ranks of the unaffiliated, divisions run deep. In many parts of the world-sub-Saharan Africa in particular-religion is growing so fast that nones’ share of the global population will actually shrink in 25 years as the world turns into what one researcher has described as “the secularizing West and the rapidly growing rest.” (The other highly secular part of the world is China, where the Cultural Revolution tamped down religion for decades, while in some former Communist countries, religion is on the increase.)Īnd even in the secularizing West, the rash of “religious freedom bills”-which essentially decriminalize discrimination-are the latest front in a faith-tinged culture war in the United States that shows no signs of abetting anytime soon. Religion is rapidly becoming less important than it’s ever been, even to people who live in countries where faith has affected everything from rulers to borders to architecture.īut nones aren’t inheriting the Earth just yet.
The United Kingdom and Australia will soon lose Christian majorities. France will have a majority secular population soon. There have long been predictions that religion would fade from relevancy as the world modernizes, but all the recent surveys are finding that it’s happening startlingly fast. ( Watch The Story of God With Morgan Freeman for more about how different religions understand God and creation.) A lack of religious affiliation has profound effects on how people think about death, how they teach their kids, and even how they vote.
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