On September 2nd, Pew Research released yet another blockbuster post about secularization. It reveals that the process of secularization tends to begin with lowered participation in religious rituals, followed by fading of religious identity and eventually even de-prioritizing even affiliation in name only. This study has got to be worrying Christian leaders in particular, since that first part isn’t something they can control anymore.
Today, let’s check out the extreme importance of participation in religion—and how it works to keep people’s minds trapped.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 9/9/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: Lowered Participation -> Importance -> Belonging = Secularization
With so many countries around the world becoming more secular every year, researchers really want to know how secularization develops from a formerly-religious cultural identity. They want a model that explains and predicts this process. Recently, a new study dropped that offers such a model. On September 2nd, Pew Research gave us a great summary of it.
Of interest, this study doesn’t measure percentages of participation, etc. Instead, it measures the difference in how older (40+) and younger generations handle their beliefs. In that sense, researchers found that religion declines in three phases:
First, less worship attendance.
Second, fading faith importance.
Third, no sense of belonging.
Researchers call this cycle Participation-Importance-Belonging (PIB). Once all three markers go, then that person or country can be understood as secularized.
This study doesn’t change the numbers Pew Research has already gotten in previous surveys, but it does deepen the picture and contextualize it. As of their last Religious Landscape Study, about 63% of Americans affiliate with Christianity. The religion skews older and older with every year, though, with only 45% of people aged 18-29 identifying as Christians while 78% of those 65+ years old do.
How the cycle works
The process begins with younger believers who don’t see the point of participation anymore. In almost every country worldwide, younger people participate less in religion than older ones. The standouts are such glorious bastions of freedom and peace as Liberia, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka, where older people are less likely to be religious.
In many countries, religious participation is trending downward while importance and belonging remain high. In others, all three markers are low. Generally speaking, the more robust a country’s protection of human rights and its healthcare infrastructure, the further along that cycle it will be. As more young adults lose their sense of belonging to religion, the country moves further along the secularization process.
If you’re wondering, the United States shows significant age differences in all three of those measures. In terms of secularization, we’re near the middle of the pack in this study’s ranking of 111 countries. Over in countries where religion is barely a thing at all anymore, we see the highest age gaps in “Belonging,” like in Denmark. There, researchers found next to no age gaps in participation or importance.
Confounding factors do exist, of course. If the country includes religious practice and identity as part of its expression of nationalism, then they might not follow the PIB model at all. In countries like Armenia, their Armenian Apostolic Church is a nationalist icon and national symbol. So PIB stalls out at the first step. (See also: The Color of Pomegranates.)
Additionally, a government’s religious suppression or promotion of a religion alter the natural progression of its decline or rise, whatever it might be naturally. But even that artificial prop can’t stop the inevitable progression of PIB.
In Denmark, we really see the endgame of secularization. Their government supports and promotes the Church of Denmark. Despite that, their official state church’s membership numbers have tanked from 91% of the country in 1984 to 71-72% in 2024. Even so, only 20% of the population thought religion was important to their lives. And a surprising 20% of Danes identify as atheists, at least as of 2013. (Also, 650 Norse pagans made their presence known on the 2008 census!)
Finding words for the process of secularization
Many years ago, the ex-Christian community discovered the 2007 essay “Why the Gods are Not Winning.” Its authors, Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, pointed out that prosperous countries tend to become less religious—and that religious leaders can’t do much about it.
The authors called out “a myth [that] is gaining ground” —namely, that various religious leaders and believers alike all insisted their faiths were increasing in membership rather than decreasing. Despite those insistences, the essayists found many countries facing declines in biblical literalism and increases in “fableism” (people who [correctly] think the Bible is mythicized history). They predicted, based on Gallup polls:
In the 1970s nearly four in ten took the testaments literally, just a little over one in ten thought it was a mixture of history, fables, and legends, a three to one ratio in favor of the Biblical view. Since then a persistent trend has seen literalism decline to between a quarter and a third of the population, and skeptics have doubled to nearly one in five. If the trend continues the fableists will equal and then surpass the literalists in a couple of decades.
They predicted correctly. In 2022, Gallup discovered that literalists had dropped to 20% of respondents, while fableists had risen to 29%. Moreover, the switch occurred a few years earlier than expected. Gallup also found declines in importance:
“Why the Gods are Not Winning” gave us some important and potent ideas about secularization. But economics alone doesn’t erode religion. There’s more to the picture here than believers’ financial safety and prosperity. PIB’s secularization model fills in the picture for us.
This is why these modeling studies are so important: They give us a way to understand and predict what’s coming next. They give us words for what we’re seeing. In this case, participation emerges as the key indicator to a country’s religious behavior.
Secularization depends on a lack of participation
Secularization begins when religious participation becomes purely voluntary. Without some other reason making participation more mandatory, believers will naturally stop attending quite so much.
Once they stop attending so much, any children they have will generally also stop attending so much. Without parents modeling the importance of religion, children are less likely to participate in religion or consider it important.
It’s noteworthy that Christian leaders have known this for just forever. Recently, I ran across Larson’s Book of Spiritual Warfare (1999). It stresses the huge importance of indoctrinating one’s children to believe in demons (p. 48) —because even Bob Larson knows they won’t have any reason to believe in them otherwise. Indeed, parental religiosity is the strongest possible predictor of children’s own religiosity in adulthood. If parents aren’t modeling frequent church attendance and religious devotions, their children are very unlikely to pick up these habit on their own. Nor will that newer generation’s kids place much importance on their religion as a whole.
Then, once those children are grown and have their own children, they are even less likely to start modeling religious behaviors. And so their children, in turn, place even less importance on religion.
Without a way to flip that gameboard, religious leaders can’t affect this process overmuch. A huge Great Awakening-style revival might do the trick, or their religion suddenly figuring (more) prominently in right-wing nationalist fervor. But without a good reason to attend religious services, people won’t generally do so. And once that goes, everything else follows eventually—if not for the first generation to decline in participation, then for their kids. Churches across America are what one believer calls “childless churches.”
If Christian parents don’t spontaneously become very religiously observant, their kids sure won’t ever be. So basically, their religion is stuck. As the older generation forgets, the younger one never even learns it at all.
What we see happening in this study isn’t restricted to religion, of course.
Participation really is key to any high-control group
Many years ago, a multi-level marketing scheme (MLM), Amway, found out how easy it is to control people by encouraging very high levels of participation.
Not only did Amway leaders force their recruits to attend endless stupid rah-rah meetings and expensive conventions, but they also required them to read Amway-approved books and listen to rah-rah recordings every day. Amway leaders call these books and recordings—often called “tapes” because for a long time they were cassette tapes— “tools.” High-ranking leaders sell these “tools” to their recruits as indispensable, utterly essential parts of running a successful Amway distributorship. They insist nobody can achieve high rank without daily use of the scheme’s “tools.”
Of course, “tools” ain’t free. Recruits spend huge amounts of money on them—and considerable amounts of time.
Critics call this entire system “the Amway tools scam” because none of these “tools” actually help Amway distributors sell more products or recruit more people. All they do is keep distributors’ minds completely trapped within the Amway world.
When an Ambot, or die-hard distributor, tried to recruit me back in the 90s, I noticed the utter uselessness of the “tools” immediately. They sounded more like sermons than salesmanship/recruiting lessons. It was unnerving, to say the least, to hear religious rah-rah in an ostensibly-secular business context.
So when an Ambot stops listening to tapes and reading rah-rah books, that is a big huge deal. It’s a secular version of PIB: Participation wanes, and then so do importance and belonging.
Once that happens, we can expect an inevitable slide from there to missing big conventions to skipping local meetings to dropping off the Amway map entirely. The PIB progression seems to hit MLM victims faster than countries!
Participation in the pandemic
That’s why so many religious leaders panicked when the pandemic lockdowns occurred. No matter their ideology, they knew that out of sight is out of mind. Once believers stop attending religious services, they are very likely to realize those services don’t add anything to their everyday lives. So when lockdowns end, they’re not going to start attending again! So participation, in the PIB model, drops off—leading to the rest declining.
This truth might explain why so many evangelical leaders in America fought tooth and nail against any temporary closures of their churches. When Rodney Howard-Browne got himself arrested in 2020 for defying pandemic church closure orders, he clearly didn’t do it just because he was soooooo incredibly protective of Christians’ right to spread COVID far and wide with these gatherings. No, it’s more likely that he knew that no matter how fervent someone is, a break in church attendance leads most often to a break in everything else related to belief.
This fear isn’t limited to Christianity alone. Anecdotal reports suggest that many Muslims in France might have had similar realizations about participation during the pandemic. As we saw in America with Christian leaders, Muslim leaders in France also fought against closure orders, probably with similar concerns about participation declines. And just like in America, despite their efforts, post-pandemic younger believers practice their faith differently from their pre-pandemic elders. And that’s if they practice any faith at all. Pew Research’s age gaps in America certainly align with that trend as well.
The dilemma Christian leaders face
It’s quite an interesting dilemma that Christian leaders face. The entire situation fascinates me!
They can’t coerce participation because even diehard fundamentalists don’t participate every time all the time, these days. Under the PIB model, that’s a serious issue. But nowadays, church leaders are lucky if a third of their believers’ butts warm the pews on any given Sunday.
It’s like the disastrous misfire the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) faced last year with their abrupt pivot to opposing in vitro fertilization (IVF). SBC members themselves are clearly ignoring that opposition to get the babies they want. They’re also angrily pushing back on the idea that their IVF-created children are somehow sinful or inferior to other kids.
And once believers ignore one thing their leaders demand, it becomes easier to ignore other demands. Especially in high-control groups like evangelicalism, authoritarian leaders must be very careful about pushing their flocks too far, lest onetime defiance become habitual.
So any coercion around participation will alienate even diehards. Worse, it may not guarantee higher participation levels across the board. Young adults tend to recognize cult indoctrination more quickly and easily than previous generations did. Even most of the young Zoomer men getting into the hardline right-wing flavors of Christianity will drift (or stomp) away once they come down from the sugar high those flavors offer converts.
It comes down to this: Without coercion, Christianity just isn’t compelling to most people. Perhaps it never was. It achieved dominance and high levels of participation through coercion, and without it believers and leaders alike have no idea how to proceed.
Christian leaders have been pleading with the flocks to increase their participation levels—on a voluntary basis. But those pleas won’t magically begin working after years of not working. And there isn’t a way for most Western church leaders to make participation mandatory—not without significant attacks on human rights in general. That seems unlikely to succeed, even with Christians themselves.
PIB is once again a drumbeat of decline:
Once participation drops, so do importance and belonging.
Secularization isn’t just less religious influence
When we talk about secularization, we’re not just talking about religious influence. We’re talking about religious irrelevance.
In the past, religions faded because new religions supplanted them. Mithraism faded under the ascension of Christianity, for example, and Ancient Near Eastern gods to Islam. It’s happened dozens of times at least in recorded history. It almost had to, as well, since organized religion was so important to the creation and cohesion of large cities and states.
What’s happening now, though, is new. Religion itself is fading, but no other rising religion waits to supplant it. (No, political ideologies don’t count—for either side of the aisle.)
I’ve said for years that my fondest hope is that something benign and rights-preserving steps into the void religion is leaving behind itself. I still hope that. I’m an optimistic little cat. It’d be nice if humanism or something similar took the place of religion.
But that’d require humans to shed not just religion but also the cognitive processes that religion hijacks to foster belief in that-which-isn’t-real. I’m talking about stuff like decoupled cognition and promiscuous teleology, as well as confirmation bias and the lack of critical thinking skills that can mislead people into accepting logical fallacies as valid evidence for claims.
It’s a lot harder to untangle those than to reject religious affiliation. That’s what I hope more people focus on, not the outgrowths and visible signs of those processes. Focusing there might help to keep us from falling into something just as bad for modern us as religion, if not worse. We need social cohesion, but hopefully we can figure out a way to base it on something real and truly accountable at last.
NEXT UP: Weirdly, not a lot of Christians have responded to this study yet. If they do, we’ll cover reactions next. Otherwise, we’ll make fun of them and move onto the next topic: An archaeology paper makes a surprising but very plausible guess about one of the best-known rules in the Bible. And then I took that guess and ran with it. See you soon! <3
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