For religion, it started going south in 2007. That was the year when the United States began joining the rest of the world’s high-income countries in rejecting the whole god-worshipping enterprise. (And it was about damn time!)
“From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little,” wrote author Ronald Inglehart* in his article “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion” in the September/October 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. “Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data.”
Up until 2007, Inglehart said, the United States had been an outlier country, a stark exception to the tendency that when a country’s economy modernized, its citizenry concomitantly secularized. But the new trend is unmistakable. According to the World Values Survey, in ten years, from 2007 to 2017, the United States went from one of the world’s most religious countries to the eleventh least religious country, a startling drop-off in a blink of an eye.
This wave of irreligion is catching the entire world right now. From 2007 to 2019, fully forty-three of the forty-nine countries Inglehart studied have become less religious. The reasons may differ somewhat from place to place, but social scientists posit that secularization happens to a population when existential security improves and people’s lives are no longer precarious. When starvation, disease, and violence are no longer a common threat, people feel less need for some celestial protector who doles out favors to the favored.
Inglehart drills down further. He claims that the biggest factor pushing populations away from religion is that the strict gender roles and sexual mores defended by the major faiths no longer comport with modern values. Having large families was once a practical imperative for social security and to provide needed labor, and religions built their architecture of moral behavior and social order atop that framework.
In today’s modern economies, that calculation is inverted. Now it makes more financial sense to have fewer children (and use verboten birth control to ensure that outcome). Families where women are seen as equal economic partners, deploying their human capital in the marketplace, are also demonstrably better off. Religion is not just irrelevant to that life trajectory but is positively hostile to it, resulting in people voting with their feet.
But the United States has been a wealthy nation with a reasonable social safety net for quite some time with few people at existential risk of starvation. Here, as well, smaller families have been trending since the post–World War II baby boom with contraceptive use broadly accepted for decades, even by the overwhelming majority of Catholics. Yet until very recently, Americans have remained stubbornly addicted to faith.
Why then the change? What was so special about 2007 and onward?
Well, I would posit: books.
At about that time, contemporary atheist authors hit their stride. Sam Harris’s groundbreaking The End of Faith came out in mid-2004, but it was a targeted critique of Islam following the attacks of 9/11. Christians didn’t think his tightly argued thesis about the danger of religious belief applied to them. It wasn’t until 2006 that Harris wiped the smug grin off Christianity’s face with his Letter to a Christian Nation.
That year, too, Richard Dawkins’s brilliant challenge to god beliefs, The God Delusion, was published and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for fifty-one weeks. It has gone on to sell more than 3.8 million copies. That year was also when Daniel Dennett’s insightful Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon came out. And 2007 not only brought Christopher Hitchens’s scorching polemic against religion, God Is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, but readers of English were treated to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s jaw-droppingly honest memoir Infidel. Hirsi Ali’s accounts of female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and the subservient yoke women labored under in Islam was the most personal account yet of religion’s devastating, real-life effects.
These books, and the nascent and growing internet audience for the authors’ lectures and debates, provided a foundation of intellectual reasoning for millions of people harboring religious doubts. And almost everyone has religious doubts: even, famously, Mother Teresa, who said in private correspondence to her Catholic confidant that Jesus responded to her prayers with “silence.”
Before the books and videos of these “Four Horsemen” (and Hirsi Ali, dubbed the Fifth) arrived on the scene, people would largely keep their doubts to themselves—or present them to their minister, priest, rabbi, or imam, who would assure the congregant that doubt is always present and a test of faith. No one with a large public following was offering the other side, the side that said, “Your nagging doubts are your rational self, holding the claims of religion up to the light of reason.” Under such scrutiny, those claims wither. These books said, you don’t have to believe nonsense just because everyone around you has succumbed. Others have broken free by simply thinking it through. These books provided clearly stated arguments demonstrating how all religions are just cultural mythologies.
While only a subset of Americans read one of these books or watched a video on atheism, the idea that atheism was a credible alternative to faith—that religion was not untouchable and could be called to defend its extraordinary claims—had penetrated the public consciousness. A convincing case for walking away from religion was made at a time when the ground was prepared for it, and the idea was unleashed into the American zeitgeist.
There are other factors that social scientists point to, such as the pedophilia scandal of the Catholic Church, the rise of evangelical politics aligning with the Republican Party, and the establishment of LGBTQ-rights activism, which made untenable conservative religious teachings on homosexuality. And while it makes sense to credit those factors with having helped move especially younger and more liberal Americans away from religion, it is also true that those factors existed well before 2007.
Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. launched the Moral Majority in 1979, and it has been clear since then that Christian fundamentalism was at the fulcrum of Republican politics. The American Catholic Church’s sexual abuse problems have been widely known since the 1980s and were thoroughly reported in 2002 when the Boston Globe exposed the depths of the depravity and cover-up in the Boston Archdiocese in more than 600 articles. As to gay rights, Vermont became the first state to legalize same-sex civil unions in 2000, a culmination of decades of gay pride and civil rights activism.
In other words, those factors don’t explain the persistently high levels of religiosity in the United States until 2007, while other high-income countries were abandoning religion all along. And they don’t explain the sudden, precipitous fall-off in religious belief in America after that. “Near the end of the initial period studied [meaning, coming up on 2007],” Inglehart wrote, “Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishing sharp decline.”
As it’s said, “success has many fathers,” and so it is with getting our fellow Americans to see the light of reason. We can credit our existential security; our educational, scientific, and technological advancement; the shift in family size and the role of women in society; and the repellant effect of religion as handmaid to reactionary politics. But to my mind, not enough attention has been paid to the impact made by the writers of new atheism: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hirsi Ali, and Hitchens.
Their writings opened people’s minds to the possibility that religious doubts were not something to overcome or ignore but something to investigate and explore. That simple change of perspective changed America, setting the country on a course to rapidly secularize. I don’t believe the timing of their writings and this phenomenon is merely coincident. I believe it is causal, and it is time to give credit where it’s due.
Reference
* Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing It and What Comes Next, by Ronald Inglehart, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, is to be released in January 2021 by Oxford University Press.