Strongly felt religion has always been around; what needs explanation is its absence rather than its presence.
- Peter Berger
Religion had a stranglehold on humanity until the 20th century, when it suddenly lost its grip on nearly a billion people in the course of a single century (non-believers skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900 to 918 million in 2000, or 0.2% of world population in 1900 to 15.3% in 2000).1 What happened, so suddenly? What causes atheism?
Part of what happened is that a few atheist dictators took control of populous nations, burned all the churches, and wiped out religion as much as possible. The people in these nations did not choose atheism. As soon as the dictators were gone, religion sprung right back up again.
But in other places, Scandinavia in particular, people just stopped believing. Why?
One theory is that Scandinavians were never really that religious in the first place.2 But that’s hard to swallow. All the evidence suggests that Scandinavians were just as fervent in their beliefs as everyone else, until recently.
Another theory is that atheism can be caused by lacking the need for a cultural defense.3 The idea that when a society’s cultural identity is threatened, religiosity increases to strengthen cultural bonds (as with Catholicism and Irish nationalism). For centuries, Scandinavia has lacked the need for a cultural defense. They have not been dominated by a foreign conqueror with a significantly different culture or religion, and there have been no other popular religions to challenge Lutheranism’s dominance. However, many other isolated societies throughout history have not needed a cultural defense, and yet they did not secularize.
A third theory is that wherever one religion has a monopoly, it doesn’t need to compete for believers, it gets lazy and lets religiosity decline.4 This certainly fits Scandinavia, where Lutheranism has been state-supported for many decades. But many other religions have enjoyed a national monopoly for much longer than that and never gone secular.
A fourth theory is that it’s simply a matter of education. Denmark was the first country to provide free, compulsory elementary-school education, in 1814, and the rest of Scandinavia soon followed. Polls have shown a strong correlation between higher education and religious skepticism.5
A fifth theory is that women are to blame.6 It has long been known that women are, on every measure and in every society, more religious than men.7 So it is plausible that it is women who have done the most to keep families interested in religion. But in the 1960s, women saw a dramatic shift in their identity and possibilities and moved into the paid workforce, leading to a “de-pietization of femininity.”8 Now that women were working and pursuing their own interests rather than keeping their families religious, religion declined. But then why did religion not decline in all the countries that saw a mass movement of women into the workforce, such as the United States?
Societal causes are complex things, and not easy to measure. Perhaps all of the above have contributed to the rise of atheism in some very complex way with other factors we can’t yet measure. But now let me turn to the explanation I find most persuasive of all.
In Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (a great read, by the way; stuffed to the brim with charts, tables, statistics and careful analysis), Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue that when people experience less security, they tend to be more religious. This is what Marx said 170 years ago – that when things get tough, people turn to religion for comfort.9 But Norris and Inglehart actually provide thousands of data to support the theory.
And what about when times are not tough? When people have food to eat, clean water, adequate housing, jobs, cheap medicine, safety from natural disasters, political stability, and general contentment, they tend to be less religious.
This certainly fits with Scandinavia. Scandinavian countries consistently rank among the healthiest, most peaceful, stablest, and safest nations in the world. Thanks to the best-developed welfare systems in the world,10 Scandinavia boasts the smallest gap between rich and poor in the democratic world. Unlike the United States, nearly everyone in Scandinavia has access to health care and higher education. Moreover, the Scandinavian states all rank among the top 5 most peaceful societies in the world (the United States ranked 83rd).
Simply put, Scandinavian society is the most secure society in the history of our planet, and this may explain Scandinavians’ abandonment of religion. They just don’t need it anymore.
In Society Without God I showed that there are strong correlations between atheism and societal health. But I don’t think atheism causes societal health. Rather, I suspect that societal health causes atheism.
- According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, a trusted source on religious demographics, “The number of nonreligionists… throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900… to 918 million in AD 2000.” World population in 1900 was 1.65 billion, and in 2000 it was 6 billion. [↩]
- See Zuckerman’s Society Without God, pages 120-127. [↩]
- See Steve Bruce’s God is Dead and David Martin’s On Secularization. [↩]
- See the work of Rodney Stark and Roger Finke: Acts of Faith, “The Dynamics of Religious Economies” in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, and “Beyond Church and Sect: Dynamics and Stability in Religious Economies” in Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies. Also see Stark and Laurence Iannaccone, “A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the Secularization of Europe.” [↩]
- Harris Poll 11 of 2003 found that of those with a high school education or less, 92% believed in God, 86% believed in heaven, 84% believed in the virgin birth of Jesus, 73% believed in the devil, and 37% believed in astrology. For those with a post-graduate degree, the percentage of believers was 10-20 percent less in every category. Data from the 1972-2004 General Social Survey shows that 43.2% of those with only some high school education were religious fundamentalists, while only 16.6% of those with a post-graduate degree were religious fundamentalists. The data show a steady decline in religious fundamentalism as each higher level of education is attained. In a world of nearly 200 deeply religious states and about a dozen secularized ones, the list of countries with the highest levels of education is dominated by secular nations (the two exceptions are the USA and Ireland). [↩]
- See Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain. [↩]
- This may be surprising, given how oppressive many religions are to women. But the data are clear. For example, see Tony Walter and Grace Davie, “The Religiosity of Women in the Modern West,” British Journal of Sociology 49, 4 (1998): 640-60; Alan Miller and Rodney Stark, “Risk and Religion: An Explanation of Gender Differences in Religiosity,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34 (1995): 63-75; Miller and Stark, “Gender and Religiousness,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 1399-1423. But, also see: D. Paul Sullins, “Gender and Religiousness.” [↩]
- The Death of Christian Britain, page 192. [↩]
- Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. [↩]
- See Eric Einhorn and John Logue, Modern Welfare States: Scandinavian Politics and Policy in the Global Age. [↩]