Tapestries-67 | Religion
Surveying religion’s role and place in our secular world, today and into the future.
Hey fam. After I published my last piece about our crisis of authority, Joe Biden’s candidacy unraveled following his disastrous debate performance. It was a perfect example of the dynamic we talked about in that piece. Events of the last few weeks meant that many thoughtful and eloquent pieces were published on the topic. So I decided to write about something else instead, and in place of writing my own follow-up, I wanted to share three great pieces on the topic in case you want to explore it further: Mind the Gap, This is What Elite Failure Looks Like, and The Era of the Noble Lie. And for now, onto something else that touches on similar sentiments, from an altogether different perspective.
We live in a very secularized culture, one that assumes religion’s influence in the world is waning. But as one surveys the world as it is today, and where it may be headed, there are reasons to challenge this assumption. It’s an important topic to cover, because within our secular and modern culture, we downplay religion’s importance.
This piece follows on the heels of one I published a month ago about the conflict at the heart of our political moment. In the weeks since, Joe Biden has been ousted as the Democrat’s candidate, and Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. The subsequent Republican National Convention was a celebration of Trump’s personality cult, where he “was spoken of in religious terms. He was a man persecuted on behalf of all who put their faith in him. A leader on a divine mission, chosen and protected by an almighty God.” So while this piece tries to take a very broad look at religion across time and domains, the US election provides a very specific and potent example that brings the topic’s prominence to light.
This piece is designed to challenge how we think about religion, with the ultimate contention being that mental models that don’t include provision for religion’s ongoing influence, won’t be particularly good at helping us understand the future. To facilitate this exploration, this piece casts a wide net, by looking at where and how religion continues to influence the world today, and by exploring how our current cultural and technological moments may be seeding the ground with conditions for religion’s evolution and growth. This one winds more than most, so I’m glad you’ve joined me for the journey. Let’s take a walk, starting with a few observations.
#1 Religion remains a powerful force in the world
A) The decline of religion is exaggerated.
Conventional wisdom in the secular West is that religion is on an inevitable and inexorable decline. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the culture making this assertion is generally antagonistic towards religion, viewing it as a vestige of a more primitive past, and this bias potentially ignores data that suggests religion’s decline is not a foregone conclusion. Let’s briefly look at two datapoints here.
The first is in relation to the plateauing of the growth of the nones in the US. Nones refer to “people who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” when asked [in surveys] about their religious affiliation”. A range of leading polls are now arriving at the same conclusion, namely that the nones’ share of the US population has plateaued at around ~28% over the last 6-7 years, after steadily rising from the 1950s onwards. This is not to suggest that religious observance hasn’t declined significantly. It has. And it also isn’t to suggest the trend is about to reverse in the US in any meaningful way. It probably won’t. It’s only to suggest that “a steady, year-by-year increase in the percentage of Americans who have no religious identity is certainly not inevitable”, which I would argue runs counter to our secular assumptions.
The second is in relation to religion’s global trajectory. When reading the Pew Research Center’s Global Religious Futures Project, it struck me that “the percentage of the global population that is religiously unaffiliated will shrink in the decades ahead – in contrast with the trend seen in the U.S. and Western Europe”. (That this surprised me says more about my own blinkers than anything else). This is largely due to demographic changes: “large parts of the world now have low birth rates. This includes not only Western Europe and North America, but also China, where a majority of the world’s religiously unaffiliated population lives... Meanwhile, some highly religious regions are experiencing rapid population growth”. Whether below-replacement fertility rates in the developed world (with Israel being an exception), and above-replacement rates in many parts of the developing world, have anything to do with religion’s offering of purpose, community and optimism, is something to discuss in a future piece.
Demographics, so the saying goes, are destiny. Differential birth rates between the developed and developing world are something we talk about all the time, but usually in reference to their impacts on labor, global trade, changes in productivity, and climate. And if our project is to think more clearly about the future, we should consider the impact of living in a world becoming more—not less—religious over the coming decades.
B) Religion shapes politics around the globe.
Now that we’ve looked at demographic trends and their impact on global religious observance, let’s look at a few examples of how religion shapes politics and civic infrastructure around the world today, starting with Christianity.
Christian nationalism is defined as a “political ideology that advocates for the fusion of a particular form of Christianity and a country’s civic and political life.” It’s a powerful force in US politics, and has had a growing influence on the country in the last few years in particular. In Brazil, Jair Bolsanaro’s presidency was shaped by overt references to Christian nationalist values, and in Argentina (a very Catholic country), President Javier Milei frequently refers to his Catholic identity, and study of Jewish scripture. In Europe, Christian nationalism forms part of the intellectual basis of the pushback against what’s perceived as Islam’s growing threat to the historically Christian continent. Looking to the Middle East and North Africa, we find Islam either influential on, or codified within, the politics and legal frameworks in countries across the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and many others (as well as Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country). And in the subcontinent, we find India—the world’s most populous country and easily it’s largest democracy—led by a three-term Prime Minister in Narendra Modi who has made Hindu nationalism a core part of his philosophy and political agenda.
Critically, as we live through a period of heightened geopolitical tensions, some of the main actors in play are influenced by religious imperatives. Iran is the world’s chief antagonist, sponsoring conflicts and destabilizing countries across the Middle East. It’s a theocracy and brutal dictatorship, with its laws and geopolitical objectives directly shaped by religious thinking. In Russia, the “Orthodox Church has legitimated Putin’s regime by providing spiritual support for the domestic and foreign goals of the Kremlin”, including its war in Ukraine and its aspirations of greater Russian renewal. And in the US, Christian nationalism will gain even greater sway over domestic policy if Donald Trump wins a second term. I want to be very clear that while the nature of the potential conflicts between these actors is not based on religious objectives per se (although they are in Iran’s case), it’s still noteworthy that we find religious ideas and institutions influential amongst all three key actors to differing degrees (while also acknowledging China is the exception here).
In sum, religious values, thoughts and imperatives—whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist—help shape the politics of countries big and small, and developed and developing. To understand geopolitics therefore requires us to make provision for religion’s ongoing influence.
Let’s pause to take stock before the next section. To this point, we’ve discussed the trajectory of religious observance in the developed and developing worlds, and surveyed religion’s influence on the politics of a range of countries and regions. If there’s one takeaway so far, it’s that religion continues to play a powerful role in the shape of our world today, and given demographic projections, will continue to influence global politics into the future. Let’s now take a step back from the data, and see what we can learn about religion’s future by assessing our cultural context.
#2 Our cultural context provides fertile ground for religion’s resurgence
A) We are witnessing a revolt against secular modernity.
Modern existence can be described by some as aimless or untethered, and defined by disillusionment and increasing atomization. I wrote the following three years ago on this point: “while we have never been more connected, we've also never been more alone… Our worlds have become bigger and boundary-less, while the number of people we actually touch on a regular basis has shrunk.” I believe these conditions are partially responsible for what N. S Lyons describes as a revolt against Enlightenment modernity:
something is now happening: Amid our broader civilizational turmoil, the zeitgeist does seem to be shifting dramatically, shaking off the remnants of tepid, Christian-influenced secular liberalism in favor of something new, inchoate, and potentially very dark… What we seem to be seeing is a broad and accelerating reaction against and rejection of the materialist framework of Enlightenment modernity.
In explaining why he chose to convert to Judaism in Why Judaism? On Abandoning Secular Modernity, Antonio Garcia Martinez said “[m]ore and more, secular modernity looks like a shaky edifice of convoluted fantasies built over an abyss, and I for one am tired of pretending to take it seriously. Those who reject the modern sham and wish to reason seriously about politics or morality must necessarily strike a pose—half-pointing, half-saluting—toward some set of sacred principles”. He’s not alone in his conversion, with high profile atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently announcing her conversion to Christianity. While these stories in and of themselves do not constitute a durable trend, they are symbolic, and perhaps indicate the beginning of a shift against secularism’s cultural dominance.
Modern history can be understood as a series of reactions to changes in the technological, social and cultural fabric over time. The crisis of morale, loneliness and despair evident to differing degrees in our secular societies, will not pass without its own intellectual reaction. Between the crisis of authority and decaying institutions we discussed in the last piece, and the crisis of spirituality and rejection of enlightenment principles (described above), it feels as though the ground beneath us is fertile for the next cycle of intellectual upheaval.
B) Technology will continue to change the structure of our lives.
We’ve lived through enormous technologically-driven change in the last 20 years, and I’d suggest that a significant portion of the aimlessness and disillusionment described above can be traced to changes driven (or at least accelerated) by technological change. To quote Martin Gurri: “We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born.”
And as we approach this new world, and rearchitect our lives, we will probably need to find new (or old) ways to connect, build community, and create trust. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks claimed that religion appeared around the same time as the first cities, surmising that it was an innovation that solved “the problem of trust between strangers,” which could no longer be achieved on the basis of family or small groups now living in much larger settlements. Religion is a set of beliefs, but it arguably impacts its adherents’ lives more tangibly through providing a structured way of living. It’s supporters would state that it provides a framework for creating trust between groups of otherwise-disconnected people, and offers systems and incentive structures that compel productive and healthy behaviors at the individual and group level.
Just as religion was a response to a change in the external environment thousands of years ago, and just as it has evolved in response to other forms of upheaval throughout history, could it have a role to play in a landscape fundamentally altered (again) by the arrival of a new technology, this time AI? Social media has already caused a rupture in how we identify as individuals, how we connect with groups, and how movements and causes rise and fall. AI’s impact is likely to be greater than the change we’ve already lived through, and prior to its arrival, we are already desperately looking for new (or old) ways to create meaning, connect, and regain some sense of stability. Religion may not be the ultimate answer, but it’s clearly a battle-tested solution that will have appeal as our turbulent moment rolls on.
C) Messianism, awe and incomprehensibility may be on the horizon.
Let’s pull on the AI thread. I don’t know where AI is headed, but if we fast-forward, say 30 years, is it that hard to imagine that we’ll be living in a world that we’ve effectively tasked an advanced AI to run to a large degree? And if you’re willing to make that leap, is it too big a leap to imagine that people who have grown up in a world with advanced AI (i.e. our grandchildren) may view this ominiscient, omnipotent technological being as something worthy of awe, and dare I even say in some quarters, worship?
Our leading large language models (LLMs) have proven to be surprisingly adept at completing a range of tasks. But as we think about their place in the future, we must remember that when it comes to deep learning, the foundational technology of today’s AI boom, “for all its runaway success, nobody knows exactly how—or why—it works”. When it comes to explaining the origins of incomprehensible and awe inspiring power, the absence of a clear explanation is an invitation for descriptions rooted in the mystical.
We tend to view religion in the West as something from an old and primitive past, and as something likely to be cast off as technological change accelerates into the future. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that new technologies often simply accentuate existing human behaviors or impulses. AI is already being used for “conversations” with “Jesus” (see here and here). And it makes sense. The world’s monotheistic religions generally promote the maintenance of a personal relationship with god. What is more powerful than a large language model that’s trained on (a) the entire corpus or canon of a religion’s texts and commentaries, and (b) the entirety of your multi-platform personal data?
I’m not suggesting that our grandchildren will be worshipping a techno-deity in the future, or that AI will be heralded as the second coming of Christ. I’m simply challenging us to use our imagination as we think about the future. Frederik Pohl once said that “[a] good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” While we’re focused on the technical changes coming with AI, it’s both fun and important to consider its second order effects, and how it might integrate and exist within the broader fabric of our world, one that retains very large religious followings and the human impulse to believe.
Bringing it together
To build models for an uncertain future, one has to cultivate a sense of imagination. This requires us to accurately describe an existing set of conditions, understand the nature and direction of change, and overlay the novel and unknown. This is what we we attempted to do in this winding journey of a piece.
We explored our existing conditions at the start, and observed that religion is growing around the world, and that it remains a powerful force in our politics. We then tried to articulate some of the change we’re living through, namely that we seem to be witnessing a revolt against secular modernity, driven by a range of structural changes. And we finished by anticipating how technological changes may map onto this complex and dynamic picture. Alongside imagination, this exercise also requires a sense of humility. I’m sure humanity has often viewed itself as being on the precipice of fundamental change, but in time, today will simply be viewed as another truck stop in the cyclical turn of history.
I hope you don’t read this piece as one that seeks to make the case for religion. If you want that piece, I wrote a version of it several years ago and you can read it here. Instead, I hope you read this piece as one that broadens your thinking regarding the possibilities as they relate to religion in a changing future. So if you take anything from this piece, I hope it’s a new way of thinking about a future that may look different to the secular one many of us assume we’re headed towards.