Three great numbers that tell the story of secularization in America

About six months ago, Americans' faith in God reached an all-time low.

According to the 2022 report Gallup surveythe share of people that imagine in God has fallen from 98% within the Nineteen Fifties to 81% today; amongst Americans under 30, that figure dropped to an unprecedented 68%.

Up close, the trend looks much more dramatic. Just about half Americans imagine in “the God described in the Bible,” and a couple of quarter imagine in a “higher power or spiritual power,” in response to a Pew poll. Only a 3rd of Gen Z say they imagine in God certainly.

Membership in a congregationcan be at an all-time low. In 2021, Gallup found for the primary time in history that lower than half Americans – 47% – were members of a church, synagogue or mosque.

Yet one other key measure of institutional religion within the U.S., the share of individuals identifying as religious, can be low: currently about 1 in 5 adults say they aren’t affiliated with any religion, compared with 1 in 50 in 1960

In short, relating to three key areas of non secular life – faith, behavior and affiliation – all are at lower levels than at any time in American history.

What's occurring? In my opinion it's clear: secularization.

However, despite these seemingly clear numbers, the talk about whether secularization is admittedly happening continues. Indeed, for several many years, many scientists still doubt the course of this phenomenon, especially within the United States.

“What is sacred will disappear”

Secularization is a process by which religiosity in society weakens or disappears. Piotr Bergersociologist of faith, he defined it as a process removing the institutionalized domination of faith over culture and a situation during which increasingly more people give intending to their lives without traditional religious interpretations.

As Berger noted, one in all the important thing features of secularization is the social aspect: organized religion loses its primary public authority. For example, take care of the poor and sick isn’t any longer supervised by religious orders but is essentially the responsibility of state bureaucracies.

But secularization also affects families and individuals: fewer people imagine in supernatural claims, attend religious services and follow religious teachings. For example, increasingly more Americans are selecting to achieve this get married in a secular settingAND record low numbers they wish to have religious funerals.

Many European thinkers within the nineteenth century predicted the secularization of industrialized societies, including: Emil Durkheim AND max Weber, two founders of sociology. Weber spoke of the “disenchantment” of the world: the concept that growing scientific knowledge would replace supernatural explanations.

For many years, social scientists studying religion have taken secularization in industrialized societies roughly as a right. Some assumed that the disappearance of faith from many societies was almost certain – e.g C. Wright Mills, which he announced in 1959 that “the sacred will disappear completely, except perhaps in the private sphere.”

Not so fast

Not everyone was so sure. In the many years after Mills' dire predictions, many sociologists began to specific skepticism concerning the inevitability of secularization. When they observed developments resembling the rise of Pentecostalism in much of Latin America and the momentum of the religious right within the US, a debate has flared up on the subject degree of secularizationand whether something like that happened in any respect.

Other critics have identified that secularization sociologists have tended to deal with wealthy Western countries with Christian heritage and that their theories haven’t at all times translated well to other contexts. Even an issue like “Are you a religious person?” it could mean something elseespecially in non-monotheistic religions or religions where “faith” is just not as central as in Christianity.

The most famous critic of secularization was a sociologist Rodney Stark, who within the Eighties insisted that the secularization theory was fiction. Stark was as sure that religion was as strong as ever that he wrote the very idea of ​​secularization must be consigned to the “graveyard of fallen theories.”

Stark argued that secularization cannot occur because religion responds to certain human needs and fears which are fundamental and universal and unchanging. He viewed religions in diverse societies as businesses in an economy: if a faith appears anemic, it is just because its “businesses” don’t promote themselves well enough. As they improve their outreach, communication and branding – or if other, more revolutionary religious entrepreneurs come forward – religious life will proceed as usualand even increases.

Only in 2015 Stark wrote that religion within the US has actually gotten stronger, arguing that Americans simply stop responding to pollsters and that the outcomes are subsequently unreliable. He also noted that only a small proportion of individuals discover as atheists: lower than 5% in most countries.

Latest data

In our 2023 book “Without a doubt”, while researchers of faith and secularism Isabella Kasselstrand, Ryan Cragun and I argue that religious belief, participation and identification are unequivocally weaker than ever.

This happens not only within the USA, but in lots of parts of the world, in response to research conducted amongst residents of nations resembling ScotlandSouth Korea, Chile and Canada.

Our book presents data on the decline of faiths in areas which have traditionally been home to many alternative faiths. For example, in 2013, 10% of Libyans and 13% of Tunisians said that they had no religion. By 2019, these numbers were approx greater than double. Decline in faith in God are visible in countries from Denmark and Singapore to Malaysia and Turkey.

But why? In our evaluation, a key a part of the reply is the transition from a standard, rural, non-industrial society to an urban, industrial or post-industrial society – as predicted by the primary sociologists. As these changes occur, religion is more prone to change into separated from other features of society, resembling education and government. Additionally, the degree of non secular diversity in a given society is increasing, as are changes within the family, during which parents provide their children with greater freedom in religious decisions.

In almost every society we examined that experienced these concomitant phenomena, secularization occurred – often massively. Of course, in comparison with most other wealthy countries, the USA he is sort of religious. For example, fifty-five percent of Americans say they pray on daily basis, in comparison with a mean of twenty-two% of Europeans.

Nevertheless, we argue that recent data on religious beliefs, behaviors, and affiliations within the U.S. clearly illustrate secularization. In addition to more universal aspects, there are other events which have had a detrimental effect on religion strong response against the political power of the religious right and anger on the Catholic Church child sexual abuse scandal.

The consequences of weakening religion are unclear. But while its importance to America stays an open query, whether secularization is going down is just not.