Secular Stagnation

Until recently, it may have seemed as if religion were on the way out. As people grew richer and more educated, the thinking went, they would begin to rely less on the solace and meaning provided by faith. That is what happened in much of western Europe, where church membership rates have cratered over the last century. According to a 2018 Pew study, only 11 percent of people in western European countries say religion is a very important part of their lives. Proponents of so-called modernization theory see religion as a defense mechanism, a hedge against chaos and depredation; religions would invariably lose adherents in a safer, more ordered and comfortable world. As recently as 2020, the political scientist Ronald Inglehart claimed in these pages that religion was in global decline. “As societies develop, survival becomes more secure,” he noted, adding, “And as this level of security rises, people tend to become less religious.”

But a wider look at trends in religiosity reveals a more complex reality. The story of religion over the past century is not one of contraction but of continued growth and consolidation. That, at least, is the contention of the British economist Paul Seabright’s new book, The Divine Economy, in which he insists that “the world is coming to be dominated by a handful of religions to an extent that has never been seen before.” Chief among these expanding faiths are Islam and Christianity, now boasting around 2.0 billion and 2.6 billion adherents, respectively. Both are making impressive gains, finding new audiences and devotees in the world’s fastest-growing populations, notably in Africa.

And contrary to what modernization theory and its variants predict, prosperity and economic growth are hardly killing off religion. In China, Seabright claims, there are now probably “at least as many active Christians and Muslims as members of the Chinese Communist Party.” In India, the fastest-growing economy in the G-20, religion plays an increasingly important role in public life. In the United States, church membership fell below 50 percent in 2020 after hovering at around 70 percent for the better part of the twentieth century. But according to a 2023 Pew poll, 88 percent of Americans still believe in the God of the Bible or some other higher power or spiritual force.

Those who imagined religion fading away before the advance of science and commercial prosperity misunderstood its full dimensions. It is not enough to see religion as a matter of personal, private belief; it is also a communal practice, reflected in public ritual, shared experience, and the formation of identity. Religion isn’t just, or even primarily, about believing in a particular way. Many Catholics attend Mass and take Communion even if they have doubts that they are receiving the body and blood of Christ. At least according to some surveys, a surprisingly large number of evangelicals appear unsure about the divinity of Christ, which of course is a creedal requirement for being Christian. But as Seabright notes, the original Greek word for creed, symbolon, referred to “a mechanism for verifying someone’s identity by matching two halves of a broken object.” It was about deferring to the right authorities and signaling which group one belonged to, rather than “what piece of theology might be passing simultaneously through their mind as they were speaking.”

To view religion as primarily social—as something that comes alive when it is done in the company of others or that springs from the knowledge that one is doing the same thing that others are doing—allows a shift away from a preoccupation with the interiority of individual belief. The Divine Economy is an ambitious work that attempts to think economically about something that so often seems beyond the grasp of the social sciences. Seabright argues that the most successful and enduring religious messages can be explained by cost and benefit, supply and demand, and rational self-interest. That approach to religion may feel crude to believers who see their personal faith as ineffable and not reducible to such grubby material terms. But Seabright’s way of conceiving of religion helps explain why it remains so powerful in a supposedly secular world.

Does Belief Matter?

It takes a leap of faith for people to believe in the unseen in a world that tells them that everything must be “rational.” To be Christian, one must presumably believe in Christ. To be Muslim, one must—again, presumably—believe in the divinity of the Koran and the prophethood of Muhammad.

Historically, however, it has always been a bit more complicated. Since it was (and still is) impossible to know what people truly believe, religious leaders have been more than happy to accept outward professions of faith as sincere. After all, the more congregants, the better. Often, people had financial incentives to convert. Other incentives exist, as well. Under Islamic law, a Muslim woman can legally marry any man who is willing to publicly profess the Islamic creed. This is all it takes to become Muslim, and for love, one might be willing to say something one does not, in fact, believe to be true.

Then there are cases of people who would like to believe but, for whatever reason, cannot. In such cases, ritual and participation can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Belonging may come before belief rather than vice versa. In a state of inner torment, the Christian philosopher John Ruskin wished for heavenly reward but was no longer certain that heaven existed. He wrote to his father in 1852 that he “would act as if the Bible were true.” More recently, Honor Levy, an American podcaster, writer, and convert to Catholicism, explained, “You just do the rituals, and then it becomes real, even if you don’t [initially] believe in it. That’s what religion is.” Through sheer force of will, one can resolve that God is real.

These might sound like spiritual acrobatics, but they are variations of the long-standing (and often misunderstood) argument known as Pascal’s Wager. The seventeenth-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal posited that it was in one’s self-interest to find a way to believe in God even if God might not actually exist. The potential benefit of such belief was eternal salvation, and even a small chance at something as consequential as eternity trumps any of the relatively minor inconveniences associated with belief. What is less well known, Seabright reminds readers, is that Pascal confessed in the same tract that this sort of internally compelled belief will “make you more stupid.” But Pascal’s broader insight is one that could easily be applied to most, if not all, areas of life: it can be rational to be irrational.

Thinking Like an Economist

The mundane underpins the spiritual in the making of religious organizations. In The Divine Economy, Seabright analyzes religions as if they were corporations. Many faiths have fallen by the wayside over the millennia, unable to compete in the marketplace of piety. In looking at religion this way, Seabright joins an old tradition, going back at least as far as Adam Smith, of economists’ trying to understand devotion in material terms. “The velvet glove of enchantment,” Seabright writes, “clothes the iron fist of organization.” Borrowing from Smith, he explores how market incentives shape the character and content of religious messages. New religious movements, if they wish to gain adherents, must be dynamic, flexible, and tolerant of diversity. Writing in the eighteenth century, Smith compared energetic and often sensationalist Methodist preachers with the more reserved and cerebral parsons of the Church of England. The former needed to attract new audiences to earn their keep and so preached more vigorously. The latter enjoyed reliable salaries, political patronage, and institutional privileges and so did not feel compelled to change their behavior.

These privileges were analogous to the subsidies that governments provide to some private-sector companies, which then have less incentive to innovate and take risks. Like firms, religions must compete for consumers. Sometimes, this means that they must accentuate what makes them different; other times, it means softening off-putting theological claims in order to reach a wider audience. But sometimes brute material forces determine success or failure. As Seabright puts it, “Without economic resources behind them, the most beautifully crafted messages will struggle to gain a hearing in the cacophony of life.” It is rare and even refreshing to have a book about the rise of religion that concludes, in a sense, that it’s the economy, stupid.

But that doesn’t make such an explanation entirely convincing. At their advent, Christianity and Islam—effectively the Walmarts and Apples of today’s religious marketplace—had comparatively few such resources. Before they were powerful, they were powerless, a powerlessness captured most evocatively in the crucifixion of Christ. Seabright doesn’t venture into exactly why these two faiths appealed to people in ways that others did not. He does, however, persuasively argue that religions succeed and spread because they provide “goods” that humans need and want. The data bear this out: religious people tend, on average, to be happier, more fulfilled, and more connected with their fellow citizens than those who do not. Take Grace, a woman Seabright meets in Ghana who is struggling to make ends meet but still tithes a significant portion of her income to a pastor who seems to be very wealthy. According to Seabright, she does so because she has something to gain. She acts out of a form of emotional self-interest. Some of the benefits of piety are tangible. As a member of a church of like-minded individuals, Grace can meet men who have the self-discipline to wake up at 9 AM on a Sunday. They must also be willing to invest three hours of their time to listen to a long-winded sermon. Obviously, finding a life partner and a potentially good father to her still-hypothetical children is not something that she can put a price tag on.

And religion addresses a deeper need beyond the material. Humans are meaning-makers who seek, and are products of, an enchanted world. The secularization of societies cannot undo this. As long as people need meaning, religions will remain uniquely suited to provide it. Humans are social animals, and religions provide community in a way that secular ideologies can only struggle to replicate.

In the modern era, political ideologies have attempted to mimic the certainty, conviction, and mass spectacle of religion. But when they manage to provide those things, the sensation is usually fleeting and almost always susceptible to the vicissitudes of politics. People judge ideologies by their worldly success or failure because this world alone is all they have to offer. But religions have a built-in advantage: they are concerned with ultimate meaning in a way that secular ideologies are not. Communism and fascism, for example, failed in a way that Christianity and Islam cannot.

That said, the monumental growth of Christianity and Islam in the last century has come not principally at the expense of secularism but rather of local and folk traditions—what scholars call “immanent religions”—around the world, particularly in Africa and parts of Latin America. In increasingly globalized societies, these local religions tend to lose out. The established, universalist faiths of Christianity and Islam provide the kinds of standardized ritual and support structures that soften the impact of rapid change and the upheaval of migrating from rural areas to rapidly expanding cities.

THE PARADOX OF SECULARIZATION

In the real world, the effects of losing the scaffolding that religion provides are clear enough. The rise of so-called deaths of despair in the United States has been most concentrated in the areas that have seen the largest decreases not in religious belief but in religious participation. In other words, most Americans still believe, but they have lost their ability to express that belief in a way that binds them to a wider community. So they channel it elsewhere—increasingly into partisan politics. It is well known that white Christians support Donald Trump in disproportionate numbers. Less well known is that “unchurched” Christians have proven particularly loyal to him. As The New York Times reported in January, church membership in Iowa’s Calhoun County plummeted by almost a third from 2010 to 2020, yet the overwhelming majority of its residents continued to identify as Christian. Trump garnered over 70 percent of the vote in the county.

One might call this the paradox of secularization: that even if religion matters less for individuals, it can still matter more for society at large. Like love or friendship, religion can make its presence felt through its absence. The more secularized a society becomes, the more noticeable the holdouts, which is why outward displays of religiosity can seem so jarring in various European contexts. Across the globe, religion remains resonant in public life because it speaks to fundamental and foundational concerns that come to the fore in the messiness of political combat. For good or for ill, religion provides answers to the question of what it means to be a citizen. It can clarify the very purpose of politics. And it can offer citizens a deeper source and higher authority from which to derive their rights. If there were a world in which people cared only about calculating their economic self-interest, the power of religion would be significantly blunted. But the world does not quite work that way—and, if Seabright’s analysis is any indication, it won’t any time soon.