What does the decline of religiosity mean?

Posted on 08/11/12 17 Comments

An interesting recent article in The Huffington Post charts what it calls the “notable decline in religiosity worldwide.” A few regions are standouts, in particular the once unshakeably Catholic Ireland. In a 2005 poll 69% of Irish people identified themselvse as religious, but today this has plummeted by 22 points to 47%. Undoubtedly the primary factor here is the sin and corruption of the Catholic Church, though the many copies of The God Delusion that have flown of the shelves of Kennys didn’t help matters.

This research is charting the shift of something, but what exactly is not clear since the key term “religious” is highly disputed. There may be declining numbers of people who will identify themselves as “religious” on a survey, but what’s the significance of that fact? I suspect, for instance, that many more would still happily call themselves “spiritual”, a fact which perhaps suggests that “religious” has some sort of connotations with institution, authority and (sadly enough) pedophiles and corruption, that other terms like “spiritual” do not.

If my intuition is correct then it may be that the trend away from “religiosity” is in fact reflective of a general trend away from association with, and submission to, authoritarian institutions.

One problem, however, is that it is readily possible to conceive of an individual becoming more religious (at least by many intuitive measures of what it means to be religious) even as he abandons fidelity to recognized “religious” instuititions and begins to self-identify as an atheist. And with that I present to you the case of Hypothetical Sean (or Hypo-Sean for short).

The Case of Hypothetical Sean

Hypo-Sean used to go to the Catholic Church for mass several times a year (but not more than several times a year) and to confession around once a year. Hypo-Sean didn’t think much about faith however. His parents had always been Catholic and so he too always identified himself as Catholic. He knew the liturgy of the mass — it had been drilled into him since he was a youth — but it can’t be said that he’d ever, like Wesley, had the experience of a heart strangely warmed. The closest he ever got was drinking hot buttered rum with the boys in the back alley.

When Hypo-Sean saw the 2005 survey he checked off “religious” because, well, that’s just what you do.

Over the last seven years Hypo-Sean has grown increasingly disgusted with the stories he’s read about the church in Ireland. Then last summer he learned that his childhood friend Brian had been abused by the local priest when he was a child. That was it. Hypo-Sean shook the dust off his proverbial heels and never looked back. He was done with church. He was done with the religious life.

Since then Hypo-Sean has started attending the monthly meetings of a local free thought society. Every meeting includes a speaker, with hearty discussion and debate over a pint of Guinness. Hypo-Sean has since agreed to be the webmaster for the group’s fledgling web page. The group is devoted to understanding the universe through science. Hypo-Sean now spends all his free time reading about science and the joy of scientific discovery. He’s read with intoxication the works of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, Stephen Weinberg and Carl Sagan. Hypo-Sean now calls himself a “naturalist” and he regularly gets into spirited debates with members of the Christian club at the local university. When Hypo-Sean read The God Delusion he felt the shackles fall off his wrists. It was like he was reborn. And he went straight out to Kennys and bought a dozen copies to give out to friends and acquaintances.

“Oh here comes Hypo-Sean,” they say with an eye roll, “Here to talk about science and reason again.”

Hypo-Sean found himself filling out another survey just a little while ago. In this one he gladly checked off “non-religious” on the survey. And as he did so he felt a strange comforting sensation, almost like a heart being strangely warmed.

Walter

“If my intuition is correct then it may be that the trend away from
“religiosity” is in fact reflective of a general trend away from
association with, and submission to, authoritarian institutions.”

I’d say that is about right.

I often wonder if the internet isn’t partly to blame. Back in the good old days before Al Gore invented the Web, I was secure in my cocoon of Christian belief. I would never have dreamed of actively seeking out books that were critical of my Christian faith, since to do so was to invite the devil into my heart. Then a miracle of technology happened and I stumbled across powerful arguments against my faith that I would never have sought out had more effort than a mouse click been required to see them.
- http://www.randalrauser.com/ Randal Rauser
  
  No doubt that’s a factor. To make things worse, the internet is a tangle of powerful arguments against Christianity and terrible arguments against Christianity that are stated powerfully. And sadly, people often can’t tell the difference.
- epicurus
  
  I left Christianity in the pre Internet days. It took a lot more work, time, and talking face to face. And there were no groups of ex Christians that one could access, so you felt like the only person in the world who found problems with the bible, evil, etc
http://www.thepolemicalmedic.com/ Thrasymachus

The right data to look at here may be about changes in ‘being spiritual’. If there is a trend from ‘being spiritual’ to being avowedly not spiritual, then it seems generalized secularization is a better fit for the data than people migrating from authoritarian or other formalized expressions of religious belief to more individualized forms of spirituality.

Alas, this is not data I am aware of, or even whether it exists.
Jerry Shepherd

Hi Randal,
I agree with your assessment.
Blessings,
Jerry
Raymond Ingles

So, any human orginazation or cause that can’t be ‘religious’, then?
- http://www.randalrauser.com/ Randal Rauser
  
  There are many organizations and causes that are less likely to become a focused center of religious devotion, but that’s different from drawing an absolute line of demarcation as to which organizations and/or causes can never possibly be the object of religious zeal.
  
  Obviously a nation is a great candidate for religious zeal, the local YMCA rather less so. But that is not to say that the local YMCA could never possibly become an object of religious zeal for an individual.
  - Raymond Ingles
    
    So, a ‘religious’ topic becomes so entirely because of the devotion someone feels toward it? The actual topic itself is irrelevant, what matters is the amount of devotion it inspires?
    - http://www.randalrauser.com/ Randal Rauser
      
      I didn’t claim that “the actual topic itself is irrelevant”. I simply pointed out that measuring degree of religiosity is not linked essentially with formal adherence to one of those entities we call “religions”.
      - Raymond Ingles
        
        I’m trying to get a handle on what the boundaries are… if any. I mean, could stamp collecting be someone’s religion?
        
        So far as I can see, you’re claiming that certain topics are most likely to become ‘religious’ to people, but practically anything could be somebody’s ‘religion’.
        
        Is there any criterion beyond ‘devotion’ that helps decide if something is someone’s ‘religion’?
        
        http://www.randalrauser.com/ Randal Rauser
        
        “Is there any criterion beyond ‘devotion’ that helps decide if something is someone’s ‘religion’?”
        
        It depends who is defining religion, I suppose. What you should do, if this is a source of great concern to you, is present your own set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a religion which includes the things you want to include and excludes the things you want to exclude. And then argue your position and persuade others of it.
        
        As I said, my interest here is simply to challenge the assumption that a survey questioning people about their religiosity successfully reflects patterns of religiosity.
        
        Raymond Ingles
        
        “It depends who is defining religion, I suppose.”
        
        No need to be coy, Randal! I’m asking you point-blank what your definition is: Hey, Randal, what by your lights are the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be a religion?
        
        “What you should do, if this is a source of great concern to you, is present your own set of necessary and sufficient conditions…”
        
        I’ll hop in my time machine and get right on that: http://randalrauser.com/2011/09/ray-ingles-on-religion/
        
        randal
        
        I’d say that one’s religion is one’s ultimate concern.
Crude

I think there’s been a decline in ‘religiosity’, but there’s not been a matching increase in atheism, much less naturalism. Even the poll shows as much (and quite a lot of the shifts in atheism seem to be well within the poll’s margin of error.)

Your example is one of Hypo-Sean, raging naturalist, but those guys actually seem pretty thin on the ground. The greatest change seems to be in people who are altogether apathetic regarding the topics.

I’d also suspect the internet changed things, but not in the way people in this thread think. I suspect the number of people running around and digging up Hume’s arguments against miracles and the like is extremely low. But culturally, Christians have allowed themselves to be utterly airbrushed out of the culture in ways that are almost Stalinesque, and have hardly complained at being mocked pretty mercilessly in the same popular culture.

Until they start grappling with the culture (either by bullying the current one victim-style or making their own), the story will remain the same.
http://twitter.com/AtheistMission TheAtheistMissionary

IMHO, the decline of religiosity is nothing more than the inevitable result of the fact that our Western media, culture and day-to-day social discourse are no longer afraid to shine the light of rationality on theological truth claims. The criticisms of theology aren’t new – I doubt whether The God Delusion added a single creative thought to what Hume expounded 250 years prior.
Theology, without institutional privilege, is dying mythicism. Smart people, like Randal, are unable to defend their beliefs without resorting to mystery cards, presuppositional arguments, tu quoque argumentation and attacks on the “worldview” of those who scoff at their acceptance of the supernatural. Look no further than exchanges between Randal and Stephen Maitzen: pick any post and then read the comment threads between the two to the end.
I leave you with this disarmingly honest quote by the Anglican Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Reverend Dr. Giles Fraser:

“The word “theodicy” describes the intellectual attempt to justify the existence of God in the face of human suffering. Coined by Leibniz at the beginning of the eighteenth century, he argued that out of the various possible worlds that God could have created, he might have created the best of these, a world containing less suffering than all the other options available. With this suggestion, Leibniz sought to explain how it’s at least logically possible that a merciful God could create a world with the suffering that it has.

And then, in 1755, some years after Leibniz published his famous argument, a massive earthquake hit Lisbon on the morning of the first of November, the popular feast day of All Saints. A 15ft crack opened down the middle of the street. Locals watched the tide disappear only to return as a huge wave that drowned most of the city. 30-40 thousand people were killed.

It was in the face of this terrible disaster that Voltaire came to mount his celebrated attack upon Leibniz in Candide. Voltaire cast Leibniz as the foolish Dr Pangloss, ready to trot out the absurd idea that this is the best of all possible worlds whatever misfortune befell him. The satire was biting. He was claiming that all theologians seem to care about in the face of human misery is getting God off the hook. Theodicy, Voltaire insists, is a moral disgrace and a sick joke.

Well, I have no answer to the question of how God can allow so many innocent people to die in natural disasters, like the earthquakes of Lisbon or Haiti. And indeed, I can quite understand that many will regard these events as proof positive that religious people are living a foolish dream like the idiotic Dr Pangloss.

And yet, I still believe. For there exists a place in me – deeper than my rational self – that compels me to respond to tragedies like Haiti not with argument but with prayer. On a very basic level, what people find in religion is not so much the answers, but a means of responding to and living with life’s hardest questions. And this is why a tragedy like this doesn’t, on the whole, make believers suddenly wake up to the foolishness of their faith. On the contrary, it mostly tends to deepen our sense of a need for God.

What many believers mean by faith is not that we have a firm foundation in rational justification. Those, like Leibniz, who try to claim this are, I believe, rationalizing something that properly exists on another level. Which is why, at a moment like this, I’d prefer to leave the arguments to others. For me, this is a time quietly to light a candle for the people of Haiti and to offer them up to God in my prayers. May the souls of the departed rest in peace.”
- http://www.randalrauser.com/ Randal Rauser
  
  Interestingly, you completely ignored my deconstruction of the word “religiosity”. What is “religiosity” exactly?
  - http://twitter.com/AtheistMission TheAtheistMissionary
    
    We’ve been on the definition of “religion” merry-go-round before. I don’t take issue with the proposition that any belief system can become religious in fervor. That’s why I took my aim at theology and, specifically, theological truth claims such as the existence of life after death, the Trinity, transubstantiation, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, etc.