In 2025 Pew changed one thing — it stopped using custom estimates for China and switched to the locally standard question about zongjiao (formal religious affiliation) — and the historical figure for the world's religiously unaffiliated population jumped from about 1.1 billion to about 1.6 billion. The people did not change; the question did. This is the one category on the map defined by a negation: it tells you where these people do not belong, not what they believe. And inside that enormous bin, those who hold a worked-out worldview are a minority.
"Morality is inherent to the human condition, grounded in the ability of living things to suffer and flourish, enabled by reason and compassion, and needing no source outside of humanity."— The Declaration of Modern Humanism (Amsterdam Declaration 2022)
Doubting gods and the afterlife is not a modern speciality. India's Cārvāka school (also Lokāyata, generally dated to around the sixth century BCE) denied the authority of the Vedas, karma and rebirth, accepting only what the senses can verify — it survives mainly because orthodox schools kept quoting it in order to refute it. Greece's Epicurus (341–270 BCE) did not deny that gods exist, but held that they do not intervene in human affairs, which makes fear of death and divine punishment superfluous. In China, Wang Chong's Lunheng (c. 80 CE) dismantled the doctrine of Heaven responding to human conduct, point by point, and Xunzi had already written that "Heaven's ways are constant."
But these are intellectual positions, not social identities. For a person to say publicly "I belong to no religion" and live an entire life on that basis requires laws of religious toleration, institutional separation of religion and state, and a public moral vocabulary that does not run through a church. Those three arrived only in the modern period, and the words followed: in 1851 G. J. Holyoake coined secularism, deliberately avoiding "atheism" in favour of a positive name centred on wellbeing in this life; in 1869 Huxley coined agnostic, meaning "on this question I claim no knowledge."
Organisation came next. In 1876 Felix Adler founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York, turning "deed before creed" into a body with regular meetings and a platform. The 1933 Humanist Manifesto was drafted by Raymond Bragg and signed by 34 people. In August 1952 national groups met in Amsterdam to found the International Humanist and Ethical Union (today Humanists International); the closing resolution became the Amsterdam Declaration, revised in 1973 and 2003 and again as the 2022 Declaration of Modern Humanism. The organisation today has more than 160 member bodies in over 80 countries.
Pew's June 2025 report on the global religious landscape puts the religiously unaffiliated at about 1.9 billion in 2020, or 24.2% of the world — a gain of roughly 270 million over the decade, the third-largest category and the second-fastest growing after Muslims.
Yet the same organisation's 2012 figure for 2010 was about 1.1 billion, or 16%. Nearly all of the gap comes from one methodological revision: China had been handled with custom estimates and is now measured by the same self-reported affiliation question used elsewhere. On that basis China had about 1.3 billion unaffiliated people in 2020 — around 90% of its own population, and 68% of the global unaffiliated total. More than half the size of this category depends on how the question is put to people in China.
Places where the unaffiliated were a majority in 2020 include China, North Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Czechia, Hong Kong and Macau, joined during the decade by the Netherlands (54%), Uruguay and New Zealand; Sweden is at 52%. The US Religious Landscape Study of 2023–24 gives 29%, made up of 5% atheists, 6% agnostics and 19% "nothing in particular" — the largest block is the people who make no claim at all.
Pew's 2025 survey of unaffiliated adults in 22 countries shows that "unaffiliated" is far from "unbelieving." Shares saying they believe in God or a higher power: Brazil 92%, Colombia 86%, South Africa 77%, Chile 69%, the United States 45% — against Australia 18%, Sweden 10%, Hungary 9%. In all 22 countries at least 19% believe in some afterlife, rising to 65% in Peru and 50% in the US.
Among adults aged 18–54 worldwide, for every 100 people raised with no religion, 7.5 have since joined one while 24.2 have arrived from elsewhere — a net gain of 16.7. Retention is highest in Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden, where nine in ten of those raised unaffiliated stay that way. At the other end sits fertility: this group's is the lowest of any major category, which means its expansion runs almost entirely on adults changing identity. Should switching slow, the share turns over.
Treating 1.9 billion people as one worldview is the standard miscalculation here. "Nonreligious" is really a series of progressively narrower, progressively more specific claims.
The 2022 Declaration of Modern Humanism gives roughly five load-bearing points: knowledge rests on reason and evidence and is revised as evidence changes; morality needs no external source, being grounded in the capacity of living things to suffer and flourish and worked out through reason and compassion; this life is the only one; democracy, human rights and the separation of religion and state are necessary conditions; and meaning is something people supply themselves. It describes itself not as anti-religion but as a life stance able to occupy the place religion occupies.
Three common replies do not conflict with one another. Meaning is projected rather than discovered: the universe supplies no answer, but a person can set their own ends. The concrete goods of ordinary life — being loved, understanding something, making someone suffer slightly less — already carry the weight, without needing a higher purpose to hang from. And the Epicurean point: finitude is not the enemy of meaning; it is what makes a stretch of time worth anything.
The strongest objection deserves equal space. If the universe has no purpose, where does the force of "ought" come from? When someone says "reducing suffering is good," is that a statement of fact or an expression of preference? Humanists do not agree among themselves — some appeal to contract, some to consequences, some to virtue and human flourishing, and some concede that at bottom this is a choice rather than a proof. The reply from the religious side is that an external source supplies exactly that force. The argument has no agreed conclusion.
Buddhism and Jainism place no creator at the centre, but they are not secular humanism — karma, rebirth and liberation are all transcendent claims. Conversely, a self-described atheist may well believe in astrology or some cosmic energy. Claims about God, claims about the supernatural and claims about belonging are three different rulers.
This is where secular humanism has worked best. The Norwegian Humanist Association (Human-Etisk Forbund) has around 150,000 members and runs a humanist confirmation for some 12,000 teenagers a year — roughly a fifth of the country's fifteen-year-olds — mirroring the church rite in form, with a curriculum of ethics, critical thinking and civics. Scotland has recognised humanist weddings as legally valid since 2005; about 8,100 were held in 2024, more than any other belief-based ceremony. Naming ceremonies and funerals follow the same logic: the hinges of a life call for ritual, and that need does not disappear with belief.
Secular ethics is not one system but several running in parallel — consequentialist, deontological, virtue-based, contractualist — each with its own difficulties and its own defenders. One visible contemporary offshoot is effective altruism: using evidence and quantification to pick the actions that reduce the most suffering. The 10%-of-income pledge launched in 2009 had roughly 11,000 lifetime pledgers by late 2025 and has channelled about US$321 million to evaluated charities. The criticisms are equally clear: that it favours measurable targets over hard-to-quantify questions of justice; and after the 2022 FTX collapse the movement conducted a sharp internal reckoning over governance and funding dependence.
According to Humanists International's Freedom of Thought Report, "apostasy" is punishable by death in at least ten countries (among them Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Malaysia and Nigeria) and criminalised in more than a dozen others; blasphemy is punishable in 83 countries, with the death penalty available in six. The other kind of pressure is subtler: a 13-country study published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2017 found that people intuitively assign descriptions of grave immorality to atheists rather than believers — and the same intuition shows up in atheists themselves.
The "New Atheism" wave of roughly 2004–2010 argued for open confrontation with religious claims; the mainstream of humanist organisations leans toward construction and cooperation instead. And the largest group of all, the "nothing in particular" respondents, mostly neither join anything nor stake out a position — what they share is absence, not agreement.
Misconception: 1.9 billion "no religion" means 1.9 billion atheists.
That is a count of affiliation, not of belief. In Brazil 92% of the unaffiliated believe in God or a higher power, in the US 45%; self-identified atheists are just 5% of American adults.
Misconception: without religion there is no source of ethics.
Cārvāka, Epicurus, Xunzi and Wang Chong are precedents; consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics and contractualism are each fully worked out. Meanwhile the 2017 13-country study shows the opposite intuition is near-universal — atheists included.
Misconception: nonbelief is a modern Western product.
As a publicly available identity it is indeed recent; as a position it was already formed in sixth-century-BCE India and Greece, and the world's largest unaffiliated population today is in East Asia.
Misconception: secularisation will hand the world to the nonreligious.
This group has the lowest fertility of any major category and grows almost entirely by adult switching; Pew's longer-range projections in fact expect its global share to fall back. Growing in numbers and growing in share are different things.
It sits at one end of the spectrum, not outside it (see Day 21). Monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and non-theism all lie on one axis; filing atheism under "outside the religious question" assumes only theists need an account of how to live.
East Asian "no religion" reads differently (see Day 16). Japanese mushūkyō usually means not belonging to an organisation, and coexists comfortably with New Year shrine visits and ancestral rites; the Chinese term for "religion" likewise leans toward organised bodies. A Western questionnaire applied in East Asia measures affiliation rather than belief — which is precisely where that methodological revision came from.
It is not secularisation theory paying out (see Day 25). Growth in the unaffiliated is concentrated in high-income countries and East Asia while the world's religious population also grew over the same decade; both are true at once.
The live contemporary problem is community. Leaving a religion is easy; rebuilding the network is hard — the people you see weekly, the ones who bring food when you are ill, the ones who know what to say at a funeral. Humanist ceremonies and associations are built at exactly that gap, and nowhere near the same scale.
This page presents the history, numbers and internal disagreements of the religiously unaffiliated and of secular humanism from a neutral, comparative standpoint. It does not argue that any worldview is the correct one, and passes no judgement on any tradition, organisation or individual. Survey figures are sampled estimates for particular years and populations, and vary considerably with question wording and definitions.