You have probably sat through this dinner: someone wants to say a few words of grace before the food, half the table bows their heads, half of them hesitate, and it fizzles out. You have seen the reverse too: a room full of people around a cake, lights off, wish made, candles blown out, and nobody thinks of it as a ritual or asks why it has to be done this way.
Put those two scenes side by side and you have the question on this page: is religion leaving, or has it just moved somewhere else? Four things follow — in this argument even the most basic numbers are unstable; the sentence "will religion disappear" has three different things packed into it; one camp simply does the accounts with churches as suppliers in a market; and another says what changed is not how many people believe but the position belief occupies.
In 1993 C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler and Mark Chaves did something laborious: instead of asking people, they counted. In one rural Ohio county they tallied the people who actually turned up at Protestant churches on a Sunday, and they obtained attendance counts from eighteen Catholic dioceses. In polls, Americans' self-reported weekly attendance had long sat at around forty per cent. What they counted came to roughly half of that.
Nobody need be lying. "I am a person who goes to church" and "I went last week" collapse into one sentence rather easily in the two seconds it takes to answer a survey. A large and technically sophisticated literature has grown up since about how to count and how well; only one direction has held steady — self-reports run higher than counts. The most basic fact in this entire argument is partly a product of how it is measured.
So hold off on answering whether religion is going to disappear. In 1968 Peter Berger told The New York Times that by the twenty-first century religious believers were likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture. In 1999 he edited a volume called The Desecularization of the World, which opens by stating that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false.
The person who took the question apart was José Casanova. His Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) points out that the single word "secularization" bundles three unrelated propositions — differentiation, decline, and privatization; the figure sets out what each one means. His verdict: the first holds up broadly; the second varies by region and does not generalize; the third has too many counterexamples — in the cases he examined, religious organizations moved back into public argument, which he called deprivatization.
That is why both sides feel the evidence is on their side. They are not proving the same proposition, and the kinds of evidence differ — institutional history, survey data, case comparison. They were never meant to be judged together.
The hardest version of the case against decline comes from what is called the religious economies approach. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke's The Churching of America (1992) runs like this: if demand for religion is roughly constant, then differences in participation should not be put down to a change of heart but to supply — whether anyone is organizing, how hard they work at it, and whether a monopoly is shielding them from competition.
Their signature figure is the American rate of church adherence: under 17 per cent in 1776, about 62 per cent by around 1980. In a society supposedly growing steadily more modern, participation went up. Their explanation is that the new republic had no established church and anyone could set up shop, so suppliers had to compete, and competition pulled participation up with it. The reverse inference is that Europe's low participation is not a sign that Europeans are more modern, but that state-church arrangements sat on supply for centuries.
The hardest blow this camp has taken is a technical one. In 2002 David Voas, Daniel Olson and Alasdair Crockett showed that the index most often used to measure pluralism is mathematically bound to the participation measure — even where no real relationship exists, a correlation falls out of the arithmetic. Chaves and Gorski had reviewed this body of work in 2001 and found exactly what you would expect on that account: results in both directions, no stable sign.
More awkward still is the American showcase itself. Voas and Chaves titled a 2016 paper with the question: is the United States a counterexample to the secularization thesis? Their answer is that it is no longer. Look at trends rather than levels: American religiosity has been falling for decades, and falling the same way it falls in Western Europe — each cohort lower than the one before, driven by generational replacement rather than by people changing their minds mid-life.
So what this camp leaves behind is not a market law but a correction: do not explain everything from the demand side. Regulation and organization can move the numbers, and that is a different matter from what people hold to be true.
Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) opens with an odd question: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in Western Europe around 1500, while in 2000 unbelief is not only easy but, for many people, hard to avoid?
His answer is not that something was removed. He objects to telling the modern story as a subtraction story — as though you peel away superstition and the rational human being underneath is simply revealed. Once you peel, someone has to build: a whole way of explaining the world and settling birth and death without recourse to anything transcendent. He calls that framework the immanent frame. It comes with a pair of terms: the porous self, whose interior is open to the outside so that spirits, fortune and curses can get in; and the buffered self, which generates meaning inside its own head with the outside kept out. Once that shift happens, belief stops being the background and becomes a position.
There is a very concrete site for this argument. The anthropologist Matthew Engelke spent a year doing fieldwork at the British Humanist Association, trained as a funeral celebrant himself, attended sixteen humanist funerals and six Christian ones, and surveyed more than 150 celebrants; the book is An Honest Death. What he found hardest was not avoiding mention of God but the coffin: it sits there, forcing a room full of people to deal with what is left of a person after death, and the celebrant has no ready-made line available — no promise of an afterlife, no "he is watching over you" — so the words have to be made fresh at every funeral.
This is Taylor's point on the ground: the secular is not the blank left behind when religion is taken away, it is itself an arrangement somebody has to build, at some cost. Talal Asad puts it harder still: secularism is an arrangement in its own right, one that also lays down what counts as religion and which room religion belongs in.
The disenchantment (Entzauberung) discussed in the piece on Weber and rationalization joins up here: disenchantment is about the world being rewritten as something calculable; Taylor is about the person being refitted so that nothing leaks in.
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's Sacred and Secular (2004) offers an explanation: religiosity broadly tracks existential security — the less likely people in a place are to be knocked over by famine, disease, violence or unemployment, the lower religious participation tends to be. But the same book adds a second sentence straight away: there are more people in the world holding traditional religious views than at any point in history, because the societies with high religiosity also have high fertility.
The numbers fit. In June 2025 the Pew Research Center compared 2010 with 2020: Christians rose from 2.1 to 2.3 billion while falling as a share of world population from 31 to 29 per cent; people with no religious affiliation rose from 1.6 to 1.9 billion, about 24.2 per cent of the world in 2020. In the United States, a large survey in 2023–24 found 29 per cent of adults with no religious affiliation, and the decline in the Christian share has slowed in recent years — yet in the same data 35 per cent of adults hold a religious identity different from the one they were raised in. The stock looks as though it is settling; the flow has not stopped.
The last piece comes from fieldwork. Saba Mahmood spent two years, from 1995 to 1997, with women's religious study circles at three mosques in Cairo. Social science defaults to the assumption that having agency means resisting norms, so when it sees participants deliberately practising the conduct the norms require until it becomes habit, the only available reading is domination; she argued that the agency lies elsewhere.
Her conclusions have their supporters and their critics, but what the fieldwork shows is clear: contemporary religious revival is not a pre-modern leftover — it runs on modern forms of organization and modern media. So secularization is not one curve. It is a set of independent processes running at different speeds in different directions in different places.