Secularization Revisited: There’s Hope for Faith

Even as Christians everywhere rejoice in the impending holiday, the faith itself faces sober times. This is especially true across nations of the West. Consider a subject that sounds parochial but amounts to a civilizational bellwether: the statistics on religious belief and unbelief in the 2021 censuses. Together, these construct a window through which to view nothing less than one of the greatest social experiments in recorded history.

That enterprise has been ongoing under different guises for centuries. To some, it is known as Matthew Arnold’s “low, receding roar” of religious faith. To others, it is the process of what is called “secularization,” or the ceding to nonreligious authorities of territories once considered to be God’s, and God’s alone. At its most sweeping, this experiment amounts to doing what most human beings before us have not done, which is to live as purely material entities, without reference to a transcendent realm.

This fact of Western religious decline is far from new. Even so, to judge by the 2021 Australian census, for example, secularization is now galloping at a pace that even the most prescient observers might not have foreseen. In 2021, just under 44 percent of Australians in the census called themselves Christian. Only 20 years earlier, in 2001, 68 percent did so. Twenty years before that, in 1981, 74 percent of those surveyed described themselves this way. And 50 years ago, in 1971, fully 86 percent still called themselves Christians. From 86 percent in 1971 to just under 44 percent today: In effect, the percentage of the Australian population calling itself Christian has been cut in half in 50 years.

Every other Western society exhibits similar growing indifference. In the United States — founded in large part by Protestant religious refugees — some 63 percent of the population now calls itself Christian. Forecasters expect that number to fall below 50 percent in a few more decades. Here, as elsewhere, the category “no religion” is the fastest-growing subset of all. Similar patterns appear across Western Europe. According to the 2021 census in what was once called Catholic Spain, just under 13 percent of those surveyed reported attending services “almost once a week.” As for the United Kingdom, the number of people calling themselves Christian hovered around 51 percent as of 2019; at the same time, only 27 percent of Britons reported that they actually believe in “a god.” In 2021, the U.K. reached a landmark: For the first time, fewer than half the people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christian.

Related data abound. So do other landmarks suggesting that Christianity, once the West’s cornerstone, is now a public monument open to defacing and attack. The virulence of the new atheism in the first decade of the 21st century was one signpost. Another is the rise in religious-liberty cases. One more is the fact that acquaintance with Christian rituals and stories is fast receding among the increasingly atomized and disconnected Western young, even as they continue to live in societies whose first principles are unintelligible apart from the Testaments both Old and New.

How have societies that once feared God now come to jeer God? A decade ago, my book How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization proposed an answer that ran counter to the usual sociological suspects. The ten-year mark seems an opportune time to revisit its thesis, adding evidence from the intervening years.

What causes secularization? This is, on the surface, a simple inquiry. It is only three words long. It seems as if all the towering apparatus of modern sociology, with its metrics and spreadsheets and innumerable data, ought to be able to answer it handily. And yet, at the same time, “What causes secularization?” is a subversive question. It turns the conceptual tables on the long-running Western conversation about Christianity upside down. Ever since the Enlightenment, renowned thinkers have held that religious belief is the outlier, the weird thing, the artifact that needs to be explained. “What causes secularization?” repudiates that framing.

And with historical justice. Evidence from all over shows that humanity apart from the contemporary West is theo-tropic. People across cultures and languages lean toward God, or gods, and away from the idea that reality can be reduced to crude materialism. What makes people of the late 20th and early 21st centuries so different?

How the West Really Lost God approached this question, first, by finding the prevailing theories of secularization insufficient or wrong. Begin with what is probably the most common theory of why people stop going to church: the notion that material prosperity drives out God. Many people believe one or another version of this thesis, summarized by Marx in the “opiate of the masses” nostrum: Faith is a consolation prize for the poor and backward. If this conventional account of secularization were sound, then one would reasonably expect that the poorer and less educated people are, the more religious they would be.

But this stereotype is not correct. Historical cases abound that point toward the opposite social reality. Consider just a few.

One is the record on religiosity in London between the 1870s and 1914. In Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, British historian Hugh McLeod, among others, documents that among Anglicans in London during that period, “the number of . . . worshippers rises at first gradually and then steeply with each step up the social ladder.” The poorest districts tended to have the lowest rates of church attendance, and those with large upper-middle-class and upper-class populations had the highest. British historian Callum G. Brown makes the same point about religiosity in the U.K. during those years: Contrary to stereotype, “the working class were irreligious,” and “the middle classes were the churchgoing bastions of civil morality.”

The same pattern appears in the United States today. In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2000), sociologists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell offer related evidence. Even during the 1960s, as overall decline began to accelerate, those at the upper end of the socio-economic ladder led those on the lower in church attendance. As the authors observe, “this trend is clearly contrary to any idea that religion is nowadays providing solace to the disinherited and dispossessed, or that higher education subverts religion.”

The same perhaps unexpected trend is well documented among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Religious participation among Mormons increases as income and education go up. Four decades ago, in another Western nation, it was also noted by the Reverend Bruce Wilson, an Anglican bishop. In his 1983 book Can God Survive in Australia? he observed, “The more educated [Australians] have a higher rate of church attendance than the less educated.”

The point is not to invent a neo-Calvinist stereotype attributing earthly success to divine favor. It’s rather to observe that intuition is an unreliable guide to understanding secularization. As the facts show, prosperity and education alone do not necessarily drive out God.

So what does? How the West Really Lost God examined other going theories and found these, too, limited in their explanatory power. Yes, as some have observed, the horrendous effects of the two world wars of the 20th century caused many across the world to question religious faith. Yes, to point back earlier in time, industrialization and then mass mobility had the effect of loosening the ties to institutions in which faith is practiced and transmitted — primarily local churches and families. And yes, even more plainly than ten years ago, the clerical sex scandals of the 2000s and beyond gave disgusted observers who were already diffident a rationalization for leaving Christianity behind for good.

All true. Yet none of these hypotheses explains a dramatic fact agreed to by almost all analysts of Western religious decline: Something happened in the early to mid 1960s that accelerated secularization as had no other force in time. Except for a few contrarians who deny the decline, every other researcher staring at this puzzle sees the same fulcrum: Belief and practice across the West went over a cliff between 1963 and 1966. Why?

How the West Really Lost God inferred that the scholarly literature on secularization has missed something crucial. That is the symbiotic, irreducible relationship between the vibrancy of the churches, on the one hand, and the vibrancy of the family on the other. What is commonly supposed is that people who are religious are more likely to have families, and large families, because religion tells them to do so. How the West Really Lost God turned that supposition upside down. It argued that the mere fact of living in families and participating in the signature events of families — birth, death, self-sacrifice — have been major forces driving people to church. Conversely, the social atomization and family implosion that followed the sexual revolution have not been net-neutral for the churches — far from it. They have instead become the main engines of secularization in our time.

Plainly, something about living in families increases the likelihood that people will go to church and believe in God — indeed, more than one such “something.” Family life encourages religious life because mothers and fathers will seek out a like-minded community in which to situate their children. Conversely, not living in a family removes the strongest possible incentive people have for searching out a transcendental framework to explain the elemental forces of family life. This theory sheds light of an altogether different sort on the “nones.” How can today’s postrevolutionary young be expected to take up Christianity when many, on account of shrinking and absent families, will reach middle age without ever having held a baby, cared for an elderly relative, sacrificed sleepless nights for others, or attended a funeral?

To put the point another way, one that believers themselves should find consoling: Western Christianity is in decline for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth value of religious belief. It is not prosperity or sophistication or science that makes God harder for today’s people to see. It is the increasing absence of family members who, by their actions in the family community, sharpen human apprehension of the divine.

Some forces propelling secularization have come into better focus during the past ten years. One such has gone inexplicably unnoticed. That is the relationship between the decline in churchgoing, especially among Millennials and Zoomers, and the simultaneous rise of cancel culture on practically every campus in the Western world.

This connection between the rise in unbelief among twentysomethings and the rise of punitive anti-Christian social codes is obviously more than a coincidence. It’s a commonplace that many students, not only in America but all over, lose their religion in college. An atheist or other nonbeliever might propose one way of making sense of this: College is where students learn higher reasoning, and higher reasoning drives out the superstition of faith. This is another hypothesis that makes intuitive sense to some, even as the facts say otherwise. As we have seen already, better-educated people, as a group, are actually more likely to be found in church than those without higher degrees.

The more likely dynamic is that, thanks to the new intolerance, the social and other costs of being a known believer in the public square mount by the year — and students take note. Intimidation in higher education, multiplied over many years and campuses, has become another unseen catalyst of secularization. Cancel culture gives intimidated young people, including those raised in a faith, one more reason not to go to church. From New York to Paris to Sydney to Buenos Aires, it manifestly is doing just that.

The past decade also suggests that secularization continues to be driven by the fact that people are marrying later and having children later, if they have children at all. These trends appear to be even more entrenched than they were ten years ago, as the median age of marriage in the United States continues to rise. By 2022, it is over 28 years of age for women; for men, for the first time, it is over 30 years.

This delay of entry into adulthood, too, interferes with the possibility of apprehending the sacred. From time immemorial, mothers and fathers have regarded the creation of new life as the zenith of their own lives as human beings. The human patrimony reflects this primordial fact in all eras and incarnations, the Western canon perhaps exceptionally; from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Succession, and everywhere in between, this civilization’s art and literature are unthinkable apart from incessant recourse to family and children.

The West’s increasing rejection of traditional family life undermines attachment to Christianity in more ways than one. Simultaneously, the broken-home situation from which more and more people hail cannot help but spur resentment for what has been lost. Many of today’s “nones” thumb their noses at the churches, even as the same churches teach the beauty of intact families, which more and more have never known, and whose missing benefits they cannot imagine.

Another force propelling secularization remains as unavoidable as it was ten years ago, and more so. Christian teaching is on a permanent collision course with the sexual revolution. In effect, the West is now running the experiment of evangelized ancient Rome — in reverse. Then, Christianity spread with extraordinary speed as the faith’s tough, novel code resonated in a pagan time and brought in zealous adherents. Now, re-paganization is doing the same as the faith’s tough, novel code is rejected tout court by partisans born after the revolution.

The nonmarital lives made possible by postrevolutionary technologies are drawing consumer-minded people out of the church, and into the re-paganizing culture where the technologies are totems. In 2021, when polled about why they were leaving Catholicism, 64 percent of Italian respondents said that they disagreed with the church’s position on “social issues.” Which issues are most likely objects of dispute? Feeding the hungry? Caring for the poor, or the rest of the social-justice agenda to which Christians are ordered? Of course not. Here as elsewhere, “social issues” equals one cause only: sexual expression unimpeded by a disapproving religious authority.

On the negative side, this reality means that the church faces an uphill climb of a kind that did not exist before the 1960s. The promise of sex without consequences may be the strongest collective temptation humanity has ever faced. There is no end of the clever forms of self-delusion that men and women can invent to convince themselves that the postrevolutionary order is the only order sanctioned by progress. And they are aided in that effort by many clerics, who yearn like most people to be liked in all the better places, and who will make two plus two equal five if that’s what it takes.

Understandable though the pressures for capitulation may be, its consequences cannot stay hidden forever. When nonhuman animals are radically separated from their families, they become dysfunctional. Famous experiments on familial deprivation among rhesus monkeys and other creatures have proved as much. Animals that cannot bond to one another and learn from one another become confused and enraged and destructive. Inter alia, this is why awareness of animal welfare has increased all around the world: because science has demonstrated that nonhuman animals have fascinating and intricate societies of their own — beginning with their own familial situations, which are the sine qua non of animal thriving.

It is past time to apply science’s insight to Homo sapiens. For six decades now, the West has been running a disruptive experiment on its own. It has internalized and broadcast messages inimical to human well-being, such as that families are inevitably problematic and hence negotiable; that having offspring does not matter; that reproduction may even be a bad thing; that there is no difference between the natural family order and “choosing” one’s own “family,” the flip side of which is the ending with impunity of the lives of fetuses, grandparents, and others whose chief vulnerability is being smaller or weaker in a world where the strong increasingly rule.

Such messages are not only potentially disastrous for living human beings. They are catastrophic in practice. Today’s ongoing experiment in fractured nonfamilial living has given rise to the crisis of loneliness that is omnipresent in the materially rich nations of the West. It is surely behind the record-breaking use of psychotropic drugs, licit and illicit, especially among the young. It is demonstrably responsible for increases in other substance abuse, crime, truancy, and related malign consequences.

For all the dark tidings, silver glimmers distinctly throughout this new way of understanding secularization and its fallout — especially for believers themselves. What How the West Really Lost God showed, and continues to show, is that it is not science that is driving people away from the church. It is not resistance to the Beatitudes. As the defeat of communism ought to have affirmed for good, there is no such thing as history with a capital H. The decline of faith, particularly Christian faith, is not foreordained.

The story of inevitable decline omits one crucial counterfactual from less than a century ago. It’s little known, and immensely consequential, that Western religiosity was on a marked upswing during the 15 or so years following World War II. The carnage of that age was followed by a religious boom not only in the United States but across the West, very much including Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and other territories where “nones” command center stage today.

This boom embraced the vanquished nations as well as the victorious, the neutral as well as everyone else, the economically devastated as well as the prosperous. In the public realm, the rhetoric of leaders was pro-Christian in a way that today strikes us as unbelievable. Christianity’s vibrancy in those years is affirmed by its commercial clout; witness the extraordinary popularity of religious themes in mid-century Hollywood blockbusters. That boom, accompanied in short order by the more fabled and obviously connected Baby Boom, is no mere artifact. It is proof all on its own that secularization is not inevitable.

Religion waxes and wanes in the world — strong one moment, weaker the next, and dependent on what marriage and family are doing at the same time. In a way that is not widely understood yet but someday will be, the political and social turmoil of Western nations today signals something supreme. The ascendancy of secularization has done humanity no favors. Its scanting of human grandeur cheapens everyone.

Christianity teaches that women are co-participants in the sacred act of creation. Today’s neo-paganism says that men and women should put career first, and marriage and the joys of children second, if at all. Christianity says that men and women are brothers and sisters on earth, cooperators in a divine plan, with unique eternal destinies in the cosmos. The secularist creed says that they are random collections of molecules, tolerated or disposed of however the strongest in Western societies see fit. Christianity says that the family is sacred, period — beyond the state and earthly power of any kind, designed by nothing short of a divinity. Neo-paganism shrugs and moves on — exactly as if the minimizing and fraying of primordial human bonds, earthly and otherwise, were not the chief source of social disintegration.

In this struggle between two visions, new proof is daily added to the ledger. Political polarization, unending drug epidemics, shattered identities among the young, and related ravages of an increasingly feral time: These are signs. They are silent syllogisms demonstrating that living without God and family is, and remains, a net loss across the West. It is tearing apart institutions and individuals alike. Life without father or Father is making many people miserable, even as the flattened vernacular of secularization robs them of the language for understanding that suffering.

Today’s troubled voices do not rage in vain. They bear a message, however unwitting, for the West. It amounts to a howl of separation from a world that many have never known, one more ordered than this one to principles of mercy, community, and redemption.

This knowledge should not only comfort believers but also brace them for the struggles present and to come. Ever since Friedrich Nietzsche put forth the notion of the death of God, that metaphor has ruled the collective Western consciousness. Many believers themselves have absorbed the historicist message that they are a dwindling minority on the wrong side. Moreover, the apprehension about dwindling might be right. The census numbers on attendance and belief might continue to fall as much between now and 2072, say, as they did between 1972 and today. Pending an awakening that leads to familial restoration, they probably will.

Even so, data and history alike affirm a profoundly contrarian point. Nothing about contemporary Christian decline proves that Nietzsche’s prediction will hold. The central fact witnessed by more and more Western people, especially since the 1960s, is not the death of God. It is instead that humanity has grown increasingly hard of hearing. Quarantined from their own by repeated acts of human subtraction and isolation, many have been catapulted far from the accustomed audible range of the sacred.

As the costs of the West’s grand, perilous, ongoing experiment continue to mount, so too might wider understanding of its origins. Meanwhile, the job for the rest of the West is to understand what really ails the lost who are now everywhere — and to open doors, wherever possible, that they no longer even know exist.

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— This essay is adapted from the inaugural Greg Craven Lecture in Ethics and Politics, which she delivered in Melbourne, Australia, under the auspices of the PM Glynn Institute, Australian Catholic University.