In the west, increase in secularity has only affected the groups of people who would've been nominally religious (i.e. religious in name only). People who attend religious services on a weekly basis (a much better measure of religiosity) has stayed consistent. This is still a notable shift in religious demographic, just not the kind your portraying.
Further, outside the west, much of the world has kept or has increased their religiosity as they modernized. The belief that modernism produces secularism was abandoned by sociologists of religion some time ago after it was evidentially false (E.g. India is the most religious country in the world and still a modern state).
The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.
Have you been to India? It's a wonderful, fascinating place but it is emphatically not a modern, developed nation the way France or Japan is.
False: It was 50% in the US 70 years ago. It's about 30% now. This is a decline of 20% in absolute terms, or a 40% decline in relative terms.
Weekly church attendance is under 15% in basically all of Western Europe -- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religiou... (note that this show US attendance at 36%, but it's also comprised of data 6-15 years old).
It's probably lower than this-- research indicates that people overstate their church attendance in surveys; https://www.religion-online.org/article/did-you-really-go-to...
> The fact you can't see value in religious systems adhered to by billions of people over thousands of years speaks less to those systems than your lack of understanding them.
Plenty of things were done by huge fractions of the world population for thousands of years that deserve questioning. Authoritarianism; oppression of minorities and women; routine warfare with neighboring groups; belief in witch doctors; pooping near water wells, etc. This line of argument isn't a very good one.
10% of Germans claim to go to church every week? I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people. Plugging that into the PMF of the binomial distribution gives me a likelihood so minuscule I should consider buying a lottery ticket. I call bullshit. That research is bunk.
Even the churches themselves claim their weekly attendance is only about 3,300k (catholic church, 2017[1]) + 770k (evangelical churches, 2019[2]) - that doesn't yet mean the same attendees every week.
I still don't trust these numbers, but that's already less than half the above research, making their self-reported attendance numbers essentially worthless.
[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gottesdienste-laaaangweilig-1... [2] https://www.ekhn.de/aktuell/detailmagazin/news/studie-ueber-...
My intent is neither. It's merely tangential.
Depending on which part of the pizza you take, it's not going to have any pepperoni. In other words, if you intentionally take a non-representative sample, unsurprisingly your sample is not going to be representative. I don't really see the point you're trying to make.
10% of Germans cannot be weekly churchgoers when there's at most ~4 million weekly attendees overall. It's obviously impossible. A number lower than 5%, preferably ~1-2%, I can easily square away with that number and my own, not intentionally cherry-picked, sample.
My point is: you seem to have grown up in a very church-removed part of the country (if I had to guess either big city or east Germany). That is where your biased sample comes from. It’s most certainly not representative, and if you claim it to be just because you don’t sub select, then you are at best ignorant and at worst intentionally dishonest ;)
Currently I live in Berlin - I don't think the situation in the northeast needs explaining.
Is your point that I must be wrong and that ~4 million weekly attendees in fact means 10% of Germans do attend church weekly? Cause if that's the kind of mathematics we're doing this conversation is pointless.
> I've got friends, relatives, and acquaintances all over the country and of all age groups, and I don't know a single person who would even remotely qualify. That's at least a hundred people.
that basis is what I objected to. I never made a claim to the actual numbers. There I'd tentatively agree with you, in that I'd suspect, that it is less than 10% of the population that goes to church on a weekly basis. But that's a "if you force me to pick" statement not something that I'd put high stakes in. Especially since the link that you reacted to is for data from 2008 to 2017. And... back in 2008 I'd not be surprised _at all_ if >10% would have gone to church weekly.. And yes we can quibble about whether missing church a couple of weeks per year should still allow yourself to count as "goes to church weekly" and whatever. I really don't care about the particular number. I care (or really was triggered momentarily and hit the reply button ;)) about your assertion that the 10% number _must_ be wrong, _because_ you yourself don't know "a single person that _remotely_ qualifies". (which given your place of origin I also doubt, but whatever)
Many of those groups (1) have high birth rates (large families starting at a young age), (2) have high retention rates (>80%, sometimes even >90%) generation after generation. There is no good reason to suppose that (1) or (2) are going to stop any time soon, and even they do for some of them, they are unlikely to do so for all.
I don't think we should expect these groups to follow the same secularising trajectory as mainstream religion. These groups have evolved a cultural immunity to the temptation of defecting to secular modernity which the religious mainstream failed to evolve.
France is modern. So is the USA, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, and others.
But India?
I was born in India, grew up in the US, and remember many visits back to the motherland where a relative would extol the virtues of “coming back”. I also remember getting sick all the time, abhorrent public restrooms, sitting in traffic for hours, etc.
Anyone from an actual modern country would agree with you on this, but many Indians living in India would not.
The potential problem is: you've spent a big chunk of your adult life living in a developed nation, and despite your massively enhanced purchasing power, you are returning to a developing one, with all the concomitant physical discomforts and social ills.
But social ills are only a problem if you acknowledge them, and physical discomforts are largely solved with a money bubble, so... there we are.
It’s more expensive to live in a non-developed country than a developed one. Now a close to developed country might be an interesting choice since the prices are still low but the quality is fairly similar.
Having spent more time of my life in more developed countries, I find that a lot of little behaviors that are normal back in India really grate on me which aren't as big of a thing in, say, the US.
Basic things like behavior on public transport, over in the US you can generally seem to rely on people standing to the sides of the door in a rough line until people have stepped off, while in India you have to push your way through the crowd trying to push its way in. It's hard to get used to those sorts of things, and many of them aren't meaningfully addressed by simply being wealthy (since similar behaviors carry over to, say, shopping).
Plus, it's even worse for women, who really can't "just" not acknowledge social ills in India as they can have a significant influence on their safety. As a man, I could do essentially whatever I want, party late, wear revealing clothes, get drunk etc. If my sister were to do the same things in India she'd be putting herself at immense risk.
They do seem to be improving on the infra. front. But compared to China, they are walking with a turtle’s speed.
Everybody likes to imagine their woo is special, but it's not. As humanity slowly drags itself out of the nasty, brutish, and short natural way of things, we lose the need for primitive beliefs.
Which one is more fit to the environment?
If people don't find anything else worthy of worship, then they simply worship themselves.
Proof for that? I don't deny is has been a big part of much of human existence over the millennia, but there's zero evidence it's a necessary part of our very being.
Honestly... I've simply not seen this. There are many religious people in prominent positions, you just don't know about it. In my fairly traditional catholic parish, we have families where mom and dad are catholic, their five kids are catholic, and their 40 + grandchildren are as well (some are now adults and having kids of their own). And all successful, doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. The idea that religious == stupid or baggage or whatever is simply at odds with history. You're conflating the Duggars with otherwise normal people that just have different views.
Oh, I see, ignore the data and instead believe in your hidden truth. Got it. Thanks for the help, all this time I've been going around making reasonable conclusions based on evidence, like an idiot.
"In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace" https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decli...
"Religion and Congregations in a Time of Social and Political Upheaval" https://www.prri.org/research/religion-and-congregations-in-...
"U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time" https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...
On the other hand, left liberal indoctrination works fine in US right now, as we can see. Same with imperial indoctrination in today's Russia.
If you look at all religions ("a belief in something absent evidence"), religiosity hasn't moved an inch.
I think the identity will remain but the substance will change.
There are some really cool discussions on YouTube about the definition of God and the nature of consciousness that are quite compelling and unifying.
It follows that Christianity evolved into its current form from the NT as its starting point.
Further evolutions and shifts should be expected (though some of them may look like explorations of very ancient paths not taken, like a drift away from inerrantist literalism and back towards things like Origen's opinion that the NT writers may well have made factual errors).