“Write a note on global trends of secularization.” (2022)
Secularisation, in Bryan R. Wilson‘s sense, is the loss of social significance of religious thinking, practice and institutions. Worldwide it is not one trend but several, moving in different directions across regions, generations and levels of social life.
1. Decline in Western Europe
- Attendance, belief and affiliation are falling. In England and Wales, “no religion” rose from 25.2% to 37.2% between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, and Christians (46.2%) fell below half.
- Steve Bruce (God is Dead, 2002) explains this through social differentiation, the decline of local community and religious pluralism.
2. Plateau in the United States
- The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study 2023–24 finds 62% of adults Christian and 29% unaffiliated, both shares roughly stable since 2019.
- Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Sacred and Secular, 2004) attribute American religiosity to high inequality and weak welfare, which keep existential insecurity high.
3. Vitality in the Global South
- Pew’s global study for 2010–2020 (2025) found Muslims the fastest-growing group, with their share rising to 25.6%, while the Christian share fell to about 29%, mainly through disaffiliation in Europe, North America and Australia. The unaffiliated rose only modestly, from 23.3% to 24.2% of humanity.
- Pentecostalism spreads fast in Africa and Latin America. Since religious populations have higher fertility, the world as a whole is not becoming markedly less religious.
4. Generational decline
- Across 106 countries, Pew (2018) found younger adults less likely than their elders to call religion “very important” in 46, and more likely in only two.
- Inglehart (Religion’s Sudden Decline, 2021) reports 43 of 49 countries becoming less religious between 2007 and 2020, as religious norms upholding high fertility lose their force.
5. Transformation, not disappearance
- Believing without belonging (Grace Davie): belief outlives membership. Post-Soviet Russia shows the reverse: Orthodox identification rose from 37% (1991) to 71% (2015), yet only about 6% attend weekly.
- Deprivatisation (José Casanova): religion re-enters politics, from Iran to the American Christian right and Hindu nationalism. Peter L. Berger (1999) concluded that secular Europe, not the religious world, is the exception.
India
Pew’s 2021 survey of about 30,000 Indians found 97% believing in God, and only 0.7% of those raised Hindu now identifying otherwise. Secularisation here appears as institutional differentiation rather than loss of faith.
Conclusion
Global secularisation is uneven and multi-directional: differentiation is near-universal, individual decline is concentrated in secure, affluent societies, and public religion is resurgent elsewhere. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt‘s idea of multiple modernities fits this pattern better than a single, linear thesis.