Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Secularists

Berger’s correction

In 1968, Peter Berger predicted religious believers would survive only in small, embattled enclaves. In 1999, he recanted. He said the world was as furiously religious as it ever was and that building a universal theory on the behavior of Dutch professors was perhaps not the strongest methodology.

We took the correction. What we did not do is abandon the thesis entirely. Secularization is not a law. It is a tendency under specific conditions: material security, accessible education, functional welfare states, and secular institutions performing equivalent community functions. Where those conditions obtain, religiosity declines. Every time. Scandinavia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Japan, and — with a generational lag — the United States, where the unaffiliated rose from 8 percent in 1990 to 28 percent in 2023.

The conditions, not the calendar

The evangelical revival points to Lagos and São Paulo. We point to the conditions producing that growth: massive urbanization, economic precarity, weak welfare states, and the absence of secular alternatives for community and meaning. The Pentecostal church in Campinas is a mutual aid society, a credit union, a counseling center — exactly the functions that in Denmark are performed by the state. When the state arrives, the church recedes. This is the historical record of every country that has made the transition.

The American case is our strongest evidence. White evangelical Protestantism declined from 23 percent in 2006 to 14 percent in 2023. The pattern mirrors European secularization, just decades later. The Catholic Social Teaching camp calls this purification. We call it what the data shows: decline. People left and found meaning in Buddhism adapted for Western individualism, therapeutic culture, or the diffuse spiritual-but-not-religious identity that now characterizes a quarter of Americans.

Where we concede ground: The meaning crisis in secularized countries — anxiety, loneliness, deaths of despair — is real. We took something away.

What would change our mind: A sustained religious revival in Scandinavia — rising attendance and belief, emerging organically, not via immigration.

Read the full synthesis: Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?