The global religious exodus: Why people are switching—and ditching—faith

The Pew Research Center shows that Christianity is the global loser when it comes to people leaving one religion and adopting another (or none at all)

This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!

---

Last month, when the Pew Research Center released its latest comprehensive “Religious Landscape Survey,” I wrote that one of my favorite charts was the one that described religious “switching.”

What is religious switching? It’s when you were raised in one religious tradition but have since gone on to a different one. It’s been happening a lot in recent years and it threatens to upend one of the most basic beliefs about belief: That if you raise your children in your faith, it’ll stay with them in the future.

Think about that for a moment: One of the reasons religion has historically had so much power is because parents could safely assume that if they indoctrinated their kids from a young age, those beliefs and traditions would live on indefinitely. It’s the very idea at the core of the Quiverfull movement, famously exemplified by the Duggars: If you have lots of children, the religion will eventually spread to their own families, and within a few generations, your religion will mathematically outgrow all the other ones.

This is how journalist Kathryn Joyce described the Quiverfull mindset nearly two decades ago:

… if just 8 million American Christian couples began supplying more “arrows for the war” by having six children or more, they propose, the Christian-right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century (“assuming Christ does not return before then”). They like to ponder the spiritual victory that such numbers could bring: both houses of Congress and the majority of state governor’s mansions filled by Christians; universities that embrace creationism; sinful cities reclaimed for the faithful; and the swift blows dealt to companies that offend Christian sensibilities.

It turns out, however, that having more “arrows” isn’t enough. The vertical continuation of religion is no longer a safe assumption.

People make friends outside their religious bubble when they go to grade school and college. They date and marry people who don’t share their faith (though values likely overlap). They live in diverse communities where there’s no “default” faith, making the spread of different ideas a little easier. There’s also less stigma today in saying you’re not religious (or not Christian). That means the pressure to remain in the fold has largely evaporated.

Man putting a Christian cross away for good (image via Adobe Spark)

We can quantify that by looking at religious switching. When the Pew Research Center asked people what religion they grew up in and what religion they practiced today, the shifts were astonishing.

For every new person who becomes a Christian, six leave the faith.

Among Catholics specifically, for every 1 new convert, they lose 8.4 people.

Meanwhile, for every godless heathen who “finds” religion, nearly six others abandon theirs.

Why is that happening? The survey didn’t go into all that, but I would argue “Nones” are the beneficiaries of organized religion’s addiction to shooting itself in the foot. Blame the sex scandals, the blatant hypocrisy, the desperate attempts to worship Donald Trump while abandoning Jesus, the easy access to material for people questioning their faith, etc.

The point is: Way more people are growing up and walking away from organized religion than entering it.

There was one limitation to those numbers: All those responses came from Americans. We didn’t know what religious switching looked like in other parts of the world.

Today, the Pew Research Center has released religious switching numbers for other countries, giving us a much better understanding of whether the trends we’re seeing in America are also being felt everywhere else.

In short? Yes, people are switching and ditching religions all over the place. The survey of over 80,000 people in 36 countries finds that Christianity and Buddhism are the biggest losers in the religious carousel.

In fact, while 28% of Americans are now a different religion than the one they grew up in, there are several countries where the rates of switching are much higher, including South Korea (50%), Canada (38%), the United Kingdom (36%), and Japan (34%).

The countries where religious switching is relatively low tend to be ones where there’s far less religious diversity as well as social/political pressure for people to remain in a particular religious group. In Bangladesh, for example, several atheist bloggers who criticized religion were murdered by Islamic extremists. No wonder the religious switching rate there is under 1%.

And when those people switch religions, Pew says, it’s almost always in the direction of non-religion: “… Most of the switching is disaffiliation—people leaving the religion of their childhood and no longer identifying with any religion.”

That has a huge impact when the dominant religion in your country is Christianity.

According to the chart I posted earlier, for every 1 American who joins Christianity, 6 Americans leave it. What do those numbers look like elsewhere in the world?

In Italy, for every new Christian, 28.4 people are leaving the faith (!)… and the numbers are also lopsided like that in Germany (19.7), France (15.8), Mexico (6.3), and so many other nations.

Just remember: When people leave Christianity (or Buddhism), most of them are not going to a different faith. They’re ditching organized religion entirely.

And making matters worse for religious leaders, when you look at the people who are leaving religion in those countries where you see a lot of religious switching, it’s skewed toward younger people (ages 18-34). They’re more likely to be ditching religion than older people (50+), which means any demographic power those majority faiths have right now is shifting rapidly. (Australia is the rare example of a country where a larger proportion of older people are leaving religion.)

The survey also found that religious switchers tended to be people with more formal education and men switch more often than women. But more than anything, I would still argue that the biggest drivers away from religion are the actions of religious people themselves. When influential people wear their religion on their sleeves while pushing cruel public policies, looking the other way when it comes to sexual abuse, and promoting ideas that have no basis in reality, it’s no wonder so many people around the world come to the conclusion that there’s no value in those beliefs.

They’re not even considering whether the faith is right or wrong, but rather considering the real-world implications of those beliefs and realizing that no amount of rationalizing justifies what people are doing in the name of God.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

---