Religion Looks Stronger Because It Is Shrinking

There is a widespread feeling that religion is on the rise. Louder, angrier, more political, more present in the news than it was a generation ago. The feeling is accurate as a description of what people are seeing. It is wrong as a description of what is happening, and the two come apart for a reason worth understanding, because the same mechanism operates in many places besides religion.

First, the Direction

Religion is in decline. This is not a controversial claim among people who measure it. In nearly every rich country, and in a good many that are not rich, the share of people who identify with a religion, attend services, or say the questions matter to them has been falling for decades. The United States, long the exception, stopped being one some years ago; the fastest-growing category in its surveys is the people who answer none. I will not quote figures, because they move, but the direction has not changed in my lifetime and shows no sign of changing.

The causes are the familiar ones. Science keeps answering questions that used to belong to the priest. Freedom of movement and of information makes the inherited faith one option among many rather than the only thing on offer. And the internet in particular did something no previous technology managed: it put the doubter in a room with other doubters, at no cost and with no one watching. A belief that used to survive on the isolation of anyone who questioned it lost that protection almost overnight.

Then, the Composition

Now the important part. Decline is not uniform across the believing population. It happens from the edges inward.

The people who leave a religion first are the ones who were nearest the door: the moderates, the culturally attached, the people who attended for their parents' sake, the ones who already half-agreed with the secular world and were held in place by habit. When the cost of leaving drops, they are the first to go, because they had the least to give up.

What remains after they leave is not a smaller copy of the original population. It is the original population with its moderate wing removed. The average member is now more devout, more literal, more certain, and more hostile to the world outside, not because anyone changed their mind but because the people who would have pulled the average toward the centre are no longer counted.

So the public face of religion gets harder. The spokesmen are now the ones who stayed, and the ones who stayed are the ones who cared most. The sermons that reach the news are the fiercest ones, because those are the sermons the remaining congregation wants to hear.

And the Fear

There is a second effect layered on the first, and it pushes in the same direction.

A group that watches itself shrink does not respond calmly. Each departure is felt by those who remain, and the world outside, which is absorbing their children and their neighbours, starts to look like an enemy rather than a neutral background. A community that was once the default and is becoming a minority experiences that transition as an attack, and it fights the way anything fights when it believes its survival is at stake: with more force, more organisation, more willingness to break norms, and a much louder voice than its numbers would suggest.

So a shrinking religion is both more radical in composition and more frightened in mood, and both make it louder. Loudness is what we perceive. We do not perceive the millions who quietly stopped going, because quiet non-attendance makes no news. We perceive the ones who remained and are now shouting.

The Statistical Shape of It

This is worth stating in general terms because it recurs.

Any population that loses members from its moderate end will appear to radicalise even if no individual becomes more extreme. Any group that perceives itself as losing will become more aggressive in defence. Put the two together and you get a phenomenon whose visibility rises while its size falls, and an observer who measures visibility will conclude the exact opposite of the truth.

The same shape describes the last defenders of a great many lost causes. The point is not that the noise is fake; the noise is real, and the people making it are real and sometimes dangerous. The point is that noise is not a measure of numbers, and treating it as one leads to policy made in a panic about a threat that is, in fact, receding.

What Follows

Two things, and they pull against each other.

The first is not to be fooled. When someone tells you religion is resurgent, ask what they are measuring. If the answer is headlines, court cases, and the volume of the loudest preachers, they are measuring the fever of a shrinking body, not its growth. The trend is our friend and has been for a long time.

The second is not to be complacent, because a frightened, radicalised minority can do enormous damage on its way out. The historical pattern of a dying establishment is not a graceful exit. It is a last attempt to seize by law what it can no longer hold by consent, and we are living through several such attempts at once. This is the wave that has to be ridden out. It was created by the very forces that are ending religion, and it will subside when the position becomes what it should already be: embarrassing to hold in public. I have argued that atheism's pressure is what civilises religions; this is the phase where the pressure hurts most and where holding it steady matters most.

Until then, keep the two measurements separate in your head. How loud, and how many. They are moving in opposite directions, and only one of them is the future.