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

Two Sundays

In 2015, the Westerkerk in Amsterdam — the church where Rembrandt was buried — hosted its last regular Sunday service. The building still stands. Tourists photograph it. Occasionally someone rents it for a concert.

That same year, the Redeemed Christian Church of God opened a new auditorium outside Lagos that seated a hundred thousand people. The parking lot alone covered sixty-five acres. Both events were local news.

The thesis that broke

The secularization thesis — the idea that modernization inevitably erodes religious belief — was the closest thing sociology had to a law of history for most of the twentieth century. Max Weber called it disenchantment. Peter Berger called it the sacred canopy collapsing. By the 1970s, the forecast looked settled: as nations industrialized and built welfare states, religion would recede into private sentiment and eventually into memory.

Then the curve broke. Not in Europe, where secularization continued on schedule, but everywhere else. Pentecostalism swept Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa with a speed that caught demographers off guard. Brazil went from roughly 5 percent Protestant in 1970 to above 30 percent by 2020, driven almost entirely by charismatic churches whose prayer networks operated more like social movements than denominations. China’s underground Protestant population grew from an estimated one million in 1980 to somewhere between 60 and 100 million by 2020.

The secularists read this as a developmental lag — the Global South will follow Europe once it reaches Europe’s material security. The evangelical revival reads the same data from São Paulo and Lagos and sees something the model cannot absorb: the most rapidly modernizing cities on earth are also the most rapidly Christianizing. The megachurch is not a relic. It is an innovation — spiritual and religious simultaneously.

The question beneath the data

The sociologists have spent two decades trying to referee with data, and the data refuses to cooperate. Pew’s 2015 projections show the world getting more religious through 2050, driven by fertility differentials. The Catholic Social Teaching camp watches from inside a tradition that has seen worse — the Reformation, the French Revolution, the anticlerical campaigns. What looks like decline from the outside looks from the inside like purification.

The crux beneath the geographic disagreement is anthropological. Do human beings need the sacred the way they need food — hardwired, ineradicable? Or is religious impulse a developmental stage populations outgrow under specific conditions? The answer determines whether the Global South is behind or the West is anomalous. The fertility rates might settle it before the theologians do.

Perspectives:
- Secularists
- Evangelical revival
- Sociologists
- Catholic Social Teaching