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The Myth of the ‘Irreligious World’
For the past decade, I’ve taught Intro to Christian Theology courses to undergraduates at the University of Edinburgh. My students come from every continent. Although some bring a deep commitment to their religious traditions, the majority in any year are young and British and, as such, don’t have any intentional religious affiliation. Intellectually and socially, these bright young people are in the process of flying the nest. Courses like mine are where they land to form their views on different religions.
In each of these globally diverse cohorts, I’ve learned to expect something similar from some students raised in Western cultures: the idea that by taking a class on theology, they’re studying a museum piece. However fascinating they find Christianity, they arrive assuming that its intellectual content is a relic from the past and plays no part in the world’s present or future.
Early on in every course, like clockwork, a handful of students will say something along the lines of “The world is no longer religious,” “The world is now secular,” or “Religion is dying across the world.” (Over the years, only a couple of students have made that point antagonistically. For most, it’s simply taken as a fact of life—like pointing out that grass is green and water is wet.)
I’ve yet to hear that view from a student who wasn’t Western European. When a student from that cultural background makes this assessment of “the world,” fellow students from other parts of the globe—Africa, Asia, the Middle East, North and South America—tend to be puzzled. At this point, invariably, I enter the chat. “By world,” I ask, “do you mean the globe, the entire human population, people from every culture . . . or just the West?” A light-bulb moment often follows. The students’ vocabularies gain a new term, “Western exceptionalism,” and their “world” becomes a lot smaller. Suddenly, secularity becomes parochial rather than universal, local rather than global.
Where in the World Is Religion Waning?
Recently, the results of a major study of global attitudes toward the Bible—The Patmos Initiative—were released. The study, published by the Foreign Bible Society based on data from Gallup, measured belief in God or a higher power, as well as rates of global access to the Bible and interest in learning more about it. The results are yet another nail in the coffin for the “irreligious world” narrative.
Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa have exceptionally high rates of Bible use, alongside widespread interest in learning more about Scripture. East Asia is highly religious, although dominated by other religions, and most of its population has no knowledge of the Bible. Religion is the stuff of daily life across the Muslim world. Only one Western European country—Portugal—shows a demonstrable loss of interest in religion in general.
The survey suggests a generational shift elsewhere in the West: Older Westerners are less likely to be interested in faith, while younger Westerners seem increasingly drawn to it. (In that way, the study mirrored the findings of the Bible Society’s Quiet Revival report in the United Kingdom.) Apart from Portugal, the countries that show an increase in irreligiosity begin in central and eastern Europe—Poland, Romania, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine—before stretching out across the Russian Federation. Perhaps surprisingly to some, the West (Portugal aside) isn’t the global region in which religion faces a gloomy immediate forecast.
What should Christians in the West think about this kind of global survey, particularly as the “irreligious world” narrative increasingly runs out of steam?
Theological Account for a Religious World
In theological terms, the results of surveys like The Quiet Revival and The Patmos Initiative should be entirely unsurprising to us. Among the most basic commitments in Reformed theology is the claim that every human being is made in God’s image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–27) and that, however much humanity’s fall into sin has corrupted that image, we remain image-bearers of a ruined sort (Gen. 9:6). We cannot escape the reality that as creatures, we exist to know ourselves and our Creator.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, the West isn’t the global region in which religion faces a gloomy immediate forecast.
In an act of general revelation, God constantly shares a knowledge of himself in the world around us (Ps. 19) and in our inner lives (Rom. 1:21). John Calvin described that implanted inner knowledge as the sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis), which is shared by God with every human being. And in a fallen world, we actively suppress that sense as automatically and unwittingly as we continue breathing (Rom. 1:18). Post-fall, this is a self-(dis)regulating feature of the disordered inner life.
Suppress it as we might, though, we can never truly rid ourselves of it. Like Sisyphus in Greek mythology—doomed to push a boulder uphill in vain, over and over—we spend our every moment repressing the irrepressible. In that light, the Dutch neo-Calvinist J. H. Bavinck described how the shape of each human life follows the contours of our suppressed sense of the divine, which leaves behind an equally vague and powerful sense of the noumenal as a byproduct. It’s precisely because we suppress our sense of the divine that we’re left nonetheless knowing there’s something beyond, something above, something that transcends this world.
To explain what this looks like in human life, Bavinck turned to the paradox described in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine contrasts God’s relentless search for him with his own strivings as someone who both looked for and hid from God. Channeling that insight, Bavinck writes, “We can say, every person seeks God, and we can also say, there is no one who seeks God.” Wherever we go, we should expect to find the same thing: human beings somehow running toward and away from God at the same time.
Inescapability of Religion
Throughout Christianity’s history, theologians relied on that kind of anthropology to explain the sheer ubiquity of religion across human cultures. In the modern age, though, that long-standing argument has faced a novel problem: secularization, which creates the freedom to not identify with a religion (or even to identify yourself as antireligious). Has our point in history shown religion is less than ever-present?
Bavinck’s mid-20th-century response was to distinguish religion from “religious consciousness,” arguing that a Westerner whose life has no connection to a particular religion can nonetheless be driven by a set of intuitions that continually draw him back to religious questions: How do all things connect? What norm should I live by? How do I deal with my failures? Is my life run by a fate I cannot change, or am I free to determine my path? What, if anything, lies beyond this life? Every life, Bavinck claimed, is shaped by an assumed set of answers to those (ultimately religious) questions.
We could say something similar about the difference between people who are members of a political party and people who have a “political consciousness.” In the United Kingdom, around 1.5 percent of people are party members. We’d be wrong to assume from this that politics has no hold on the other 98.5 percent of the population. Every few years, elections draw many people back into its orbit for a moment. And in everyday life, regardless of organized politics, each person is shaped by a political consciousness that guides him or her on all manner of issues: the price of groceries, immigration, education, and so on. Religion is no different.
The psychologist Justin Barrett has shone a different light on irreligious majority cultures, which also helps us think about them in view of the Christian assertion that humans are, by default, incorrigibly religious. In his studies of childhood development in different global settings, Barrett has shown that a largely irreligious (or antireligious) society can only be sustained through the proactive, ongoing suppression of religion. An atheistic society only has a future insofar as it succeeds in repressing the religiosity that it finds, by default, in the inner life of every child born to it. (Given that every child also continues to bear God’s image, is born into a world that is itself a general revelation of God, and constantly receives the sense of the divine in his or her inner life, societies with that aspiration face a particularly Sisyphean task.)
Lean into the Sense of the Divine
When confronted with the irrepressible nature of human religiosity, Reformed theology offers an account of why humans are simultaneously looking for and not looking for God. In reflecting on this, we’d certainly be naive to conflate the gospel with religiosity in general: to do so would show we’ve confused the suppressed sense of the divine with its sad byproduct, the sense of the noumenal. However, Reformed theology also prompts us to draw lines from the noumenal to the divine, in making sense of why religion is so hard for humans to lose forever—either for individuals or societies.
Reformed theology offers an account of why humans are simultaneously looking for and not looking for God.
Our theology gives us something to say in light of global statistics or generational shifts in one part of the world. It takes us to Mars Hill, where Paul observed to the Athenians that they were “very religious” and then proclaimed the “unknown God” to them (Acts 17:22–23). In noting their fixation with religion, his words were loaded with double meaning, affirming the people’s religiosity to confront their religiosity. Two millennia on, we have abundant opportunities to do the same. For theological reasons, our world remains a very religious place.
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