03 Section B Option 3, Key question 4 - Secularisation in global perspective (part 3)

Indicators and population change

Global religious change must be separated into changes in people's religion and changes in the size and composition of populations.

Secularisation means religion becoming less significant in social life; researchers disagree about its extent and causes. Three dimensions need separate evidence. Belief concerns acceptance of religious ideas, such as belief in a deity or an afterlife. Practice concerns what people do, such as worship, prayer or rituals. Public power and influence concern religion's capacity to shape institutions, decisions and accepted rules. Religious affiliation is identification with a group. It can accompany all three dimensions, but does not measure any of them perfectly.

A religion can gain members through children being born and raised within it, even if existing adults become less observant. Migration can change a country's religious composition without any resident changing belief; movement between countries redistributes people rather than adding to the world's religious population. Religious switching changes the religious category with which someone identifies. None of these processes is automatically a religious revival: stronger commitment requires evidence about commitment.

Consider an original numerical illustration, not observations of a real society. A religious population grows from 80 million to 88 million while the total population grows from 100 million to 120 million. Its headcount rises by 10%, but its population share falls from 80% to approximately 73.3%. The count and share answer different questions. Neither tells us whether prayer becomes more frequent or religious leaders gain authority.

Pew Research Center's report published in June 2025 estimates that the religiously unaffiliated share of the world's population rose from 23.3% in 2010 to 24.2% in 2020: an increase of 0.9 percentage points. These are estimates for people of all ages, assembled from more than 2,700 data sources, rather than one worldwide interview sample. Pew used revised 2010 estimates to improve comparison with 2020. These results concern identity, so they support a limited claim of growing disaffiliation; they do not show that every unaffiliated person lacks religious beliefs. Pew: global religious change.

Cross-cultural comparison also requires attention to meanings. Pew notes that its formal religious-identity measure in China does not capture everyone who holds religious beliefs or undertakes religious practices without identifying with a religion. Low affiliation therefore cannot simply be translated into low practice. A measure centred on formal membership may have different validity in settings where religion is organised differently. Pew: global methodology.

This changes how to test a theory. A theory predicting declining religious authority cannot be refuted simply by pointing to more births in religious families. A theory predicting declining belief needs comparable belief questions across time. Evidence has to match the proposed process.

Security and modernisation

Pro-secularisation explanations connect changes in social conditions to a reduced importance of religion, but the proposed conditions need not develop equally everywhere.

Modernisation includes changes such as industrial development, scientific expertise and increasingly specialised institutions. Steve Bruce defends the view that features of modernisation help explain declining religious power, popularity and prestige. For example, if medical decisions depend on professional scientific standards, religious leaders no longer have to authorise treatment. This is an illustration of how institutional change could reduce religious authority, not evidence that every patient stops believing. Bruce's argument should therefore be tested against specific dimensions and historical settings rather than rewritten as a prediction that every modern individual must be an atheist. Bruce, Secularization (2011).

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart offer a more explicitly comparative explanation in Sacred and Secular (2004; second edition 2011). Existential security is a sense that survival and basic needs are sufficiently secure. Their argument is that insecurity makes religion's reassurance and promises of meaning especially important; greater security tends to weaken this need. Reliable food, healthcare and protection against severe hardship can make survival feel less precarious. Religious practice and values may then become less central, particularly as generations raised under more secure conditions replace older ones. This is a tendency, not an immediate response by everyone who receives a higher income. Norris and Inglehart: theoretical introduction.

The original study compared survey evidence from four waves of the World Values Survey, 1981–2001, across 80 societies. The authors found patterns consistent with stronger religiosity among vulnerable populations and more secular orientations among prosperous populations. The comparative design gives a wider basis than treating one European society as the world's future. It also means the findings describe the periods and societies studied, rather than supplying present-day results for every country. Norris and Inglehart: original study account.

Working through the explanation

Imagine two original hypothetical societies with similar average incomes. In one, illness can leave a household without food or treatment; the other provides dependable support. The security account predicts that equal average income need not produce equal religiosity: protection against risk matters. It directs us to investigate the distribution and experience of security, rather than merely ranking countries by wealth. This connects religion to social inequalities without assuming that all poorer people are religious or that wealthy believers are impossible.

The evidence does not by itself prove the causal chain. A country-level association between wealth and low religiosity cannot establish each individual's motive. Education, religious histories and political institutions may also matter. In their 2011 methodological reconsideration, Norris and Inglehart acknowledged the original gap between national correlations and a direct individual-level test; they added evidence including a lived-poverty measure and later survey data. That strengthens the attempt to test the mechanism without making the original association an experiment. Norris and Inglehart: evidence reconsidered.

Differentiation and public religion

Modern institutions can become more independent of religion while religious identities continue to shape public action.

Institutional differentiation means different spheres, such as law, science and religion, acquiring their own roles and standards. Privatisation means religion becoming largely a private matter. In his comparative argument, José Casanova distinguishes differentiation, declining belief/practice and privatisation. They are separate propositions to investigate. His challenge to an inevitable retreat of religion from public life does not require denying every decline in religion. Nor does he treat every society as following the same European path. His work is comparative historical interpretation, not a single representative survey of the globe. Casanova, Rethinking Secularization (2006).

An independent court system illustrates differentiation. A religious association lobbying that system illustrates public religion. The two can coexist: participating in a debate differs from possessing the legal authority to decide its outcome. To establish public power, investigate control over institutions or successful effects on decisions; media visibility alone is weaker evidence.

Political mobilisation occurs when people and organisations organise support for public goals. Religion can provide a shared identity, trusted networks, meeting spaces and moral language through which people mobilise. A movement might connect religious belonging with national membership, making religion politically significant even among supporters with different levels of personal observance. This explains why economic development need not erase religion's public role. It is a mechanism to investigate, not a claim that a religion's adherents all share one political programme.