This book is quite informative, but the authors seem to think that any decline in any individual level metric of religion means that people are somehow becoming less religious - overall. This is an oversimplification and reductionist view of people’s complexity as it ignores the secular nature of religious people. The authors do not think religion will disappear, but they think it will diminish a lot.

Their conclusions seem to be overstated. At least they do mention that their results are limited since self-reported surveys only show limited snapshots, are inherently problematic, and are not the whole story (more below). They also admit that their study over represents European countries and are missing data from more than 1/3 of all countries around the world - they used World Values Survey (1981-2020) and European Values Survey (1981-2020). Not much is made on China & Asia, which alone has 76% of the non-religious in the world, while Europe (12%), North America (5%), Latin America/Caribbean (4%), sub-Saharan Africa (2%), Middle East/North Africa (< 1%) - Pew Research Center “Global Religious Landscape” report

The authors simplify secularization theory as “modernization creates problems for religion” (22). However, they believe that secularization’s end result would not be increases in irreligion - it would be indifference towards both religion and secularism and would include ignorance of both. In other words, such concepts would become foreign to people in highly secularized societies. Other researchers have fleshed out numerous versions of “secularization” processes and show that most do not lead to irreligion, secularism, or even atheism - Sociology of Secularisation: A Critique of a Concept.

The authors state that the vast majority of people around the world - remain religious, identify with a religion and religion keeps on growing due to fertility rates (increasing in developing countries and decreasing in “modernized” countries). It has been almost a century and a half since secularization theories were proposed and religious belief is incredibly high around the world at more than 75% today (63). Using the same databases as this book, other have argued that religious beliefs would remain high even if say religious attendance were to decrease globally (Dhima & Golder. 2021. Secularization Theory and Religion. Politics and Religion. 14(1):37 - 53). It gets more complicated. Even the hardcore secular have a hard time completely separating from religion too. In the US they exist in a paradox by being not religious and adhering to religion-like secular traditions - The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious.

Scholars have shown that surveys in general have suffered globally from very low and declining response rates for decades and consistently fail to predict political elections worldwide - therefore casting reasonable doubt that they actually capture the real sentiments of any population (Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith & Beullens, K et al. 2018. Response Rates in the European Social Survey: Increasing, Decreasing, or a Matter of Fieldwork Efforts?. Survey Methods: Insights from the Field & Zhou, Z. et al. 2021. Why Polls Fail to Predict Elections. Journal of Big Data. 8, 137) There are also translation issues in survey questions since many cultures do not have words that are equivalent to “religion” or “secularity”, as even this book makes note of this.

The authors claim that most of the “secularizing” is occurring mainly in modernized countries, not less developing countries. According to them, most of the secularizing is due to indifference to religion - not careful analysis, rationality, and rejection of religion. Though they say that religion is dropping often due to younger cohorts, they do not discuss how drops in religion in modernized countries are merely a part of wider trend of drops in interest among younger people in other institutions such as the labor market, the economy, government and politics, and marriage. Its not like people are less interested in just religion, their interest is declining in these other institutions at the same time. Especially marriage and family. Fertility rates have dropped below replacement levels in the modernized countries in the book, and this impacts interest and participation in religion (individualism increases, community decreases).

One of the flaws in this type of book is how “religion” and “secular” are treated as real or historical when in reality they are recently invented abstractions. Scholars of the history of religion agree that “religion” is not a historical concept since it is not found in any ancient cultures or religious texts like the Old and New testaments, the Quran, Hindu Vedas etc. It is a modern Western concept that was invented recently in the 16th/17th centuries and the actual concept of religion is pretty much a template of Protestant Christianity - emphasizes belief, sacred texts, attendance at religious buildings, and rituals (Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept). On the other hand, “secular” is an older term and is an intricate part of ancient Roman and earliest Christian culture. For example, the world, the state, the law, and theology were not distinct and seperate in the Middle Ages. There is even a long tradition of overlap with secularism - The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216 & "Secularism: The Basics" by Jacques Berlinerblau.

People in the past were never really that “religious” (contrary to widespread belief that the past was religious). The Churching of America, 1776-2005, for example, documents how religiously involved American citizens has barely grown from a very low 17% of the population in 1776 to 62% in 2000. One need only to look at the Bible, Quran, Vedas, etc and the writings of Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc through the centuries to see that they perpetually preoccupy themselves with seemingly ubiquitous prevalence of non-belief, indifference, sin and disobedience. In light of this, it is surprising that religiosity even increased globally to its high levels today as technology, science, modernity, and capitalism developed in parallel. The reality is that religious folk are also secular folk simultaneously by default. They use their time mostly on things of the world - here and now - inevitably.

Chapter by Chapter summary

Introduction: Setting the Stage

Defining “religion” is problematic; “We define religion as the amalgamation of ideas, rituals, practices, symbols, identities, and institutions that humans collectively construct based upon their shared belief in the supernatural.” (9); religion is measured as belief, belonging, and behavior; defining “secularization” is problematic; secularization can be seen as differentiation and decline in belief, belonging, and behavior; “Second, we acknowledge that many indicators of secularization - such as those presented above in terms of belief, belonging, and behavior - are limited snapshots. They don’t tell the whole picture of religious life. Or of secular life. And sometimes, such snapshot survey results are based upon problematically worded questions. For instance, survey results about belief in God among a given population are far from perfect; different surveys word questions differently, so that one might ask, “Do you believe in God?” while another might ask, “Do you believe in God or a Universal Spirit?” - the latter being a compounded question that allows people to say “yes” to two very different yet undifferentiated options. Fortunately, some of the data we now have allow us to look at the changes of religiosity within the same countries on questions that have been asked the same way every time, over the years. This helps. Another issue is that, in many countries, there is a stigma attached to no believing in God, so that many people will be hesitant to admit as much, rendering significant undercounts of atheism and agnosticism. Furthermore, statistics about declining church attendance rates may be misleading; while people in a given society no longer attend church as much as previous generations, they might be engaging in new, novel, non-traditional forms of religious behavior, thereby rendering such a measure of secularization as nothing more than an indication of religious change, not decline, an issue we address in subsequent chapters. While acknowledging the short comings above, we must stress that they are shortcomings of social science in general, not of secularization theory, specifically. That is, survey research is always fraught with problems of incompleteness and ambiguity; it has always been the case that surveys can only tell us so much.” (16); “Fourth, secularization should always be conceived of as occurring on a spectrum, and always be characterized as a matter of degree. We do not believe that there are any societies that are totally and completely religious in all aspects of belief, behavior, or belonging, nor do we believe that there are any societies that are totally and completely secular in all three aspects. (17)

1. Secularization Theory

“Secularization theory can be summarized in a single phrase: “modernity creates problems for religion.” Of course, there is a lot more to the theory. Secularization theory asserts that, as people experience modern life, adopt modern sensibilities, and develop modern understandings of life and the universe, they will be less likely to adhere to religious supernatural explanations, respect religious authority, identify as religious, and engage in religious behaviors.” (22); “There are at least two elements of modernization that contribute to secularization. The first is differentiation, or the process of separating religion from other aspects of life. That religion used to be integrated in most everything that people did may seem foreign now in the twenty-first century, but it was the case in millennia past.” (22); “Another aspect of modernization that contributes to secularization is rationalization. By rationalization we don’t mean that individuals are more rational, which would be nice but really isn’t in our nature. Rationalization refers to the ordering of society based on technological efficiency, bureaucratic impersonality, and scientific and empirical evidence.”(26); variations on secularization theory: classical versions of secularization, religious pluralism, existential security, religious transmission by granting more childhood autonomy; challenges to secularization theory: religious economies and supply-side arguments, religion is changing not declining; secularization theories are too broad to be useful since each country is different in how it experiences religion - too many variables to make any significant meaning from it

2. The Evidence, Part I: A Global Overview

“Using cross-national survey data, this chapter will illustrate the spread of secularization internationally. We use data from the World Values Survey (WVS) (1981-2020) and the European Values Survey (EVS) (1981-2020) to present both current levels and changes in the three Bs of religiosity: belief, behavior, and belonging, in over 100 countries over the past 4 decades. These surveys have been selected because they consist of representative samples of the adult population in each country; having been described as “the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed,” the WVS is particularly useful for investigating global trends. Although we recognize that there is an over representation of European countries in our sample, data are available and presented from a wide range of nations around the world well beyond Europe.” (53); “To examine religious behavior, we use a very common measure: frequency of religious attendance. Similar to other scholars, we focus on regular attendees - those who attend religious services at least monthly. Figure 2.1 shows monthly attendance at religious services for the most recent year that each country participated in the survey. Less than half of the population attend monthly in 63 percent of the countries. In other words, church attendance is not the contemporary norm in a majority of the countries represented in the survey data. With few exceptions, the lowest levels of religious service attendance can be seen in Europe, and in particular in western and northern Europe. However, eastern and southern Europe - regions that are typically viewed as more religious than their northern and western European counterparts - show clear signs of weakening religious behavior.” (54); “Figure 2.2 displays changes in monthly attendance over time. More than half of the surveyed countries - 52 percent - have seen religious attendance diminish.” (56); “In most countries around the world, a majority of people identify with a religion. Figure 2.3 shows religious affiliation for the most recent year available for each country. In only a minority of nations - China, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Uruguay, France, Hungary, and Australia - does less than half of the population identify with a religion. Many modern and modernizing countries also fall into the second category: countries with between half and three quarters of their populations belonging to a religion. In the lest developed countries, religious identification is often closer to 100 percent. What do these results tell us about secularization, secularity, and religious identities? We know from previous research that nominal affiliation to a religion carries a wide range of meanings in diverse contexts.” (59-60); “Of the three Bs, religious beliefs remain the highest across the world. As seen in Figure 2.5, more than 75% of the population believe in God in all surveyed countries in North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and in most countries in eastern Europe. In Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Estonia, China, Macau, Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea, less than half of the population believes in God. However, sizable secular populations exist in a range of modern and modernizing countries: Between a quarter and half of the population are nonbelievers in Denmark, Hong Kong, France, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, Australia, Germany, Slovenia, Iceland, Belgium, Andorra, Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria.” (63)

3. The Evidence, Part II: A Closer Look

A closer look at Norway, Chile, South Korea, and the United States

4. Is Being Secular Unnatural?

No

5. What Secularity Looks Like

“What does secularity look like in the most secularized societies? Some readers may picture a society with powerful secularist organization, outspoken irreligious sentiments, in the media and in politics, and a majority of individuals adopting explicitly secular identities, such as atheist, agnostic, antitheist, and/or secular humanist. However, empirical evidence of such societies is actually hard to find, which has ironically been used to illustrate a presumed flaw in secularization theory: that the end result of secularization is supposed to be widespread opposition to religion - to active irreligion - which doesn’t seem to occur. However, what secularization theory actually predicts - and what we have shown elsewhere - is that advanced secularity assumes that both religion and irreligion are hard to find. Irreligious organizations, religious criticism, and atheist activism are signs of secularization - in particular at the early stages. When religion still has some authority in society, there is a need for irreligious or secularist activism. But that is not the endpoint of religious decline. In fact, secularization ultimately leads to religious indifference where religion and irreligion become non-issues. After all, it is generally when religion is a strong and pervasive force in society that one finds active and engaged anti-religiosity, but when religion itself is weak and diminished, so too is opposition to it.” (116); . Discussing these dynamics, David Nash says that “in some respects, both atheism and religion have recognized that one task in their imagined present and future is to entice individuals from the indifferent space, into spending more time embracing and following the religious or the secular narratives on offer.” Ultimately, showing indifference toward religion also means rejecting religious counter-identities like atheism, antitheism, and secularism. On this note, it may be the case that, in some respects, the religious and the explicitly irreligious have more in common than either of them have with the indifferent - namely as different opinions and positions within a shared discourse.” (119); “As much of the rest of this chapter and this book illustrate, many elements of religion are not necessary for society to function, but it does appear as though a sense of belonging, identity, and community are important elements of social life for humans. How, then, do nonreligious individuals find a sense of community without religion? The most obvious way is by building intentional communities around the aspect of their identity that they have in common: their nonreligion or nonbelief. In the US, thousands of local atheist, Humanist, and freethought groups (collectively, “secular groups”) have been founded to provide community for the nonreligious. Thousands of similar groups exist around the world from India to Kenya…However, secular groups are unlikely to be the option of choice for the vast majority of nonreligious individuals for two reasons. First, most people who leave religions do so not because they engaged in a careful and detailed examination of their religion’s beliefs, history, or policies and found them to be out of line with their own values, but because religion just ceased to matter to them. As noted above, most people who leave religion or who were never affiliated with a religion are indifferent to religion, not irreligious or anti-religious…The one study of which we are aware that was able to estimate the percentage of a population that was affiliated with a with secular groups was conducted in Switzerland and found that just 0.1 percent of the population was affiliated with a secular group in 2017. We are unaware of any countries or societies where a sizable percentage of the population (e.g. greater than five percent) is affiliated with secular groups. Second, secular groups are often organized around what the members oppose, not necessarily on what they value.”(123-124); discusses “Life-Cycle Rituals” that the secular engage in such as for replacing weddings and funerals; discusses raising children, cultural religion, aging, dealing with personal crisis among the secular

6. Exceptions?

Cultural arguments of religion still being engrained in a society, government restrictions and artificial religification, forced and artificial secularization

Conclusion

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Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (Secular Studies Book 7)