A recent paper sheds some light on how religious declines appear to be happening globally. It’s a process affecting numerous countries.
“We were surprised to see this pattern show up so clearly, all around the world,” Jörg Stolz, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Lausanne, said. Stolz, along with Jean-Philippe Antonietti of the University of Lausanne, Nan Dirk de Graaf of the University of Oxford and Conrad Hackett of the Pew Research Center, wrote the paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal “Nature Communications.”
The Participation-Importance-Belonging sequence
Religious declines in various nations happen in what researchers called the “Participation-Importance-Belonging” sequence.
The three stages to the sequence are: People participate in worship services or rituals less often; then the importance of religion declines in their personal lives; and then, overall, belonging to religion becomes less common.
“The idea is that people drop the costly parts of religiosity first,” Stolz said. “Attending religious rituals takes a lot of time and energy. And once you’re there, people might ask you to contribute financially or to get more involved. All of that can be seen as costs.”
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On the other hand, Stolz said, “finding religion important and being religious in private is somewhat less burdensome — and claiming a religious belonging even less — so that goes last.”
This process doesn’t happen overnight — in fact, the researchers say it takes about 200 years. The difference between countries is, Stolz said, when the decline of religiosity begins. For instance, in France, it started centuries ago, while in Senegal, it became apparent only a few decades ago, Stolz said.
America, meanwhile, is around the middle stage, researchers said.
Younger people in particular are becoming less religious: studies show Generation Z is among the least likely to identify with a religious affiliation.
“Once people reach adulthood, they usually don’t change their level of religiosity, on average,” Stolz said. “But if the society around them is modernizing, their children tend to be somewhat less religious.”
Places of worship are starting to look at ways to reverse this trend, though it could prove challenging.
“These are tendencies so large and so long in the making that it’s hard to imagine church strategies or policies really changing them,” Stolz said.
Data is limited, researchers caution, and there are outliers to this model, such as Israel, the only nation with a majority Jewish population.
“Due to limits of data and the current status of the secular transition in countries with non-Christian religious pluralities, we cannot be certain that these countries will follow the stages predicted by our model,” Stolz said. “The number of traditionally Buddhist and Hindu countries in our dataset is small.”
