In the June 14 issue, The Economist reports that the decline of organized religion has seen a mild reversal since COVID. In 2023-2024, according to this report, three different surveys show a decline of “Nones,” those who report no religious affiliation, by four percentage points.
Unfortunately, The Economist neglects to tell us which three surveys report this decline (sadly typical of their reporting). A survey by Pew Research is probably one of them. On January 24, 2024, Pew Research published an online report titled “Religious ‘Nones’ in America,” in which they document a drop in the number of Nones from 2022 to 2023. However, in an analysis published the same day, Pew Research felt that it was “too early to tell” whether drop was significant. In another article published this year, on June 9, Pew Research detailed global religious decline from 2010 to 2020. One of the things they looked at was which religions suffered the greatest losses via “religious switching,” i.e., people switching to another religion or switching to no religion at all. Based on global surveys conducted from 2008 to 2014, Pew found that the biggest religious losers were Christianity (-11.6%) and Buddhism (-9.8%); the biggest gainer was no religious affiliation (+16.7%).
The Cooperative Election Survey (CES), housed at Harvard University, also asks questions about religion, and serves as another good source for data on religious affiliation. The CES tracks the Pew Research surveys within a few percentage points. But there are some curious differences. CES finds 5.1% fewer Protestants than Pew does. There’s also a significant gap in those reporting as “Something else” — which is probably what many Unitarian Universalists would report themselves as.
Also of note — in my view, both CES and Pew define “religion” in such a way that Christianity serves as the paradigm, which may not capture the religion of, say, Unitarian Universalists who strongly identify with their religion yet don’t believe in God, don’t pray, and don’t feel the need to attend regular worship services. If you don’t assume that religion centers around Christian-style belief in God and attendance at church, then social atomization and disaffiliation (as reported, e.g., by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone) might be the stronger factors driving so-called secularization.
The Economist does report one possible explanation for the slight increase in religious affiliation from 2022 to 2023:
“The most plausible explanation for the changing trend is the covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns, social isolation and economic shocks affected almost all countries and age cohorts at about the time the data on religious belief hit an inflection point…. Research by Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, an economist at the University of Copenhagen, shows internet searches for prayer and other religious practices shot up in alsmot every country in 2020. Pippa Norris of Harvard and the late Ronald Inglehart argued that in times of existential insecurity, people tend to turn to religion for comfort…. Ms. Bentzen’s previous research on devotion following earthquakes — a different sort of shock — shows that religiosity tends to remain elevated for up to 12 years after a catastrophic event.”
Time will tell if we’re actually seeing a slight decline in “Nones,” or if this is just a temporary blip. As a Unitarian Universalist, I’m also less worried about secularization — after all, by many definitions we’re already secular — and far more worried about social atomization and disaffiliation. We don’t have to convince people to believe in God. We only have to convince people that being part of a values-based community is a good thing.
