101. THE FUTURE OF RELIGION — B
The triptych this week is from the BBC Future series about the long view of humanity. The article, from which this week’s posts are drawn, is “Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion?” by Sumit Paul-Choudhury. What follows are excerpts for your reflection.
“Communist states like Soviet Russia and China adopted atheism as state policy and frowned on even private religious expression. In 1968, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger told the New York Times that by ‘the 21st Century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture’.
“Now that we’re actually in the 21st Century, Berger’s view remains an article of faith for many secularists — although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That’s most true in rich, stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in places like Latin America and the Arab world. Even in the US, long a conspicuous exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of ‘nones’ has been rising sharply. In the 2018 General Social Survey of US attitudes, ‘no religion’ became the single largest group, edging out evangelical Christians.
“Despite this, religion is not disappearing on a global scale — at least in terms of numbers. In 2015, the Pew Research Center modelled the future of the world’s great religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. Far from a precipitous decline in religiosity, it predicted a modest increase in believers, from 84% of the world’s population today to 87% in 2050. Muslims would grow in number to match Christians, while the number unaffiliated with any religion would decline slightly.”
“’Nones’ may be disinterested in organized religion, but that doesn’t mean they are militantly atheist. In 1994, the sociologist Grace Davie classified people according to whether they belonged to a religious group and/or believed in a religious position. The traditionally religious both belonged and believed; hardcore atheists did neither.”
“What’s more, around three-quarters of atheists and nine out of 10 agnostics are open to the existence of supernatural phenomena, including everything from astrology to supernatural beings and life after death.”
“What do these self-directed religions look like? One approach is syncretism, the ‘pick and mix’ approach of combining traditions and practices that often results from the mixing of cultures.”
“An alternative is to streamline. New religious movements often seek to preserve the central tenets of an older religion while stripping it of trappings that may have become stifling or old-fashioned.” Some researchers think the religions that might emerge from the current turmoil will have much deeper roots.
“So the ‘nones’ mostly represent not atheists, nor even secularists, but a mixture of ‘apatheists’ — people who simply don’t care about religion — and practitioners of what you might call ‘disorganised religion’. While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them?”
“Munificent economies, good government, solid education and effective rule of law can ensure that we rub along happily without any kind of religious framework. And indeed, some of the societies with the highest proportions of non-believers are among the most secure and harmonious on Earth.
“What remains debatable, however, is whether they can afford to be irreligious because they have strong secular institutions — or whether being secular has helped them achieve social stability. Religionists say even secular institutions have religious roots: civil legal systems, for example, codify ideas about justice based on social norms established by religions.”
Q: What are your thoughts about the future of religion?
