I have seen a decline in number of religious people and their dogmatic adherence over my lifetime. Based on this, is it logical to assume that the world one day in the future will have religious people in the minority ?
When would that happen ? 2030 or 2050 ?
Since a lot of pillars of society are built on religion, how would the disappearance of religion affect society and the human condition ?
If it happens, it certainly won’t be that quickly. This Guardian article from 2018 states that “84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group.”
Even in China, which is generally seen as being a country which isn’t particularly religious, this Wikipedia article on religious affiliation by country indicates that only half (52%) of the population is “unaffiliated.”
In the U.S., where much has been made about the decline of religion over the past 50-60 years, only 16% are unaffiliated. Granted, younger Americans are less likely to say that they are religious than older generations, but even among “younger Millennials” (which it looks like are 18-29 year olds), only 36% of them are “unaffiliated.” Given that, it’ll very likely be considerably more than 30 years before the U.S. becomes a “minority religious” country.
Not to nitpick but the USA, for instance, wouldn’t look much different than now - we’re already there, in fact.
Sure, 60 percent of Americans may claim to be Christian. But the majority are “nominal” or “cultural Christians”; they may check the box on the Census form but in reality believe none of the actual doctrine. So we are already a religion-minority nation, practically speaking. It’s just that it doesn’t show up formally yet, especially given that many young people are forced by their parents to pretend to be Christian but in fact are closeted atheists.
I don’t know that I’d agree with the majority of U.S. Christians believing “none” of their faith’s actual doctrine, but I would agree that many (quite possibly most) either aren’t aware of all of the doctrine of their particular denomination, and/or pick and choose what to follow, and what not to.
There is undoubtedly a subset of them who will pick “Christian” on a survey like the Pew one I linked to, and say that they believe in God and Jesus (and, most of them probably do mean it), but rarely if ever go to church, pray, or have any real engagement with their faith.
I suppose it comes down to how the OP is envisioning their definition of “not religious.”
It depends what you mean by “not religious”? What will people believe in, if not religion? Would they (hopefully) believe in reason and science? Would they believe in some other sort of irrationality? Would they have no convictions at all?
Let me narrowly define that by “not religious” in the OP, I mean people stop believing in after life specifically.
People believe and act like - that this life is all they got, and do not do anything for payback after death.
Under that definition, I suspect that even most people who are only nominally “Christian” @Velocity described) would still be “religious.”
People don’t change. If they don’t use the organised church as a means of connecting with other people in a mobile society, they use twitter, SDMB and Tinder. If they don’t dogmatically believe in special creation, they dogmatically believe in crystal pyramids, evolution and their political party.
If we limit ourselves to people who have an actual set of concepts in which they believe and which they purport to understand — leaving out the people who are simply going along with what others expect them to give lip service to * — I strongly suspect we’ve always been a minority.
I personally have extremely strong doubts that anyone was going around genuinely believing things they did not understand except as a consequence of going along with what others expect them to give lip service to. I mean, yeah, some people were not just going through the motions of saying they believed but were inclined to believe that maybe all these other people knew better than they themselves do, so in that sense they consider it to be true. Taking other folks’ word for it, not realizing that most of those “other folks” are also just going along with it. But it’s practically axiomatic for me that if you bracket off the ones who are just conceding to the authority of the Crowd (or the Crown or whatever), people don’t believe things they don’t understand. They just don’t.
Religion satisfies one or more of people’s basic fundamental needs:
… etc.
Of the many religions kicking around, every one tries to provide some of these things that people demand. Some religions do better than others. The religion that satisfies the most of these needs will gather the most adherents.
This is where Christianity comes in. Christianity seems to do a bang-up job answering … or pretending to answer … all of the above, and more. I don’t think other religions really do all that, or not as well.
Religion. If we didn’t have it, we’d have to invent it.
Oh, wait a minute. That’s exactly what happened.
It’s interesting to see this question through the eyes of this mostly US centric board, where the posters so far can’t conceive of such a situation.
But cast you eyes across the pond to Europe, and you can already see what societies look like with only a minority belief in God.
This gives you some stats on the UK, which is not an outlier in this regard. Only 28% of people profess to a belief in God, only 5% regularly attend church. We don’t care if our politicians are atheist.
Yes, I be surprised if the UK and quite a few other european countries weren’t already in exactly that situation.
I personally don’t know anyone who is “religious” to the extent that they go to church.
I was chatting to a colleague the other day, newly moved here from Australia. He casually mentioned that he’d found a local church to attend, and I was quite taken aback!
I have one friend who goes to church most weeks, but she’s Catholic so I give her a pass.
Thank you, for posting this. There are several Northern European countries, not so different from the USA, where the religious are a minority. No need to imagine a future with such cultures, they already exist.
in France, there is about 31 % atheists, 15% agnostics, 10 % without opinion, and only 37% that defines themselves as religious according on enquiry on personal beliefs.
So already there.
And the corollary is that when people stop believing in a religion, they look for other ways to satisfy these needs. Hence such things as crystal healing and other woo, Atheism+, and dogmatic adherence to political party.
As for why Europe is generally less religious; IMHO one of the important needs religion fills is coping with insecurity, and with extensive social safety nets and mostly-peaceful societies, people living in Europe have much less to cope with. Plus the same things mean there is less need of a close community to rely on in difficult times.
I rather put it down to a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the established church. When the church in your country has traditionally engaged in politics and suppression of the masses, and as society then loosened up, people lost their taste for organised religion.
That’s funny-Most of the people I have met throughout my lifetime that believed in the various types of woo also turned out to be religionists, whereas I can’t recall seeing any atheists that turned to woo to satisfy some supposed need. Got anything to back up that corollary?
Such as?
I’ll grant you were but not are.