Religion is Declining Worldwide in a Predictable Sequence, Says Study

The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by Helen Teixeira, was published Oct. 2, 2025 on religionnews.com. It has been edited for length and Banner style.

When it comes to going to church, a generational pattern is playing out in many households around the world: Grandparents never miss Sunday service; parents attend only on holidays; children, who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” rarely attend at all as adults.

A new study, published in August in the journal Nature Communications and conducted by researchers at the University of Lausanne, Oxford University, and the Pew Research Center, sought to explain the ebbing of religiosity across generations.

Drawing on data from Pew, the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, the authors looked at secularization and religious change across more than 100 countries and major religious traditions.

“We hope this article is useful as a kind of grand narrative about what’s going on in the world, a model of how to see global religious change,” Conrad Hackett, one of the authors, told RNS.

The researchers describe a sequence in how religious life tends to decline across generations. First, participation in worship services drops. Next, people report that religion becomes less important in their lives. Finally, formal religious affiliation declines. They refer to this as the Participation–Importance–Belonging sequence.

“We’re capturing a story about institutional forms of religion. It’s an interesting measure because it’s not about a specific belief, but their assessment of how much religion is shaping their decisions in their everyday life,” Hackett told Religion News Service.

According to the study, countries around the world can be placed at different points along this secular transition. In much of Africa, religion remains a central part of daily life, with high levels of participation. Countries across the Americas, Asia, and Oceania often fall in the middle range, where public participation and personal importance are already slipping, though formal belonging has not yet declined to the same extent. The United States is also in this middle range, with gaps showing up across all three measures.

Europe stands out as being the furthest along this path: The European countries included in the study are in either the middle or later stages of the Participation–Importance–Belonging sequence—with both historical trends and current data supporting this trajectory.

The secular transition shows up across countries with Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim majorities. Although fewer Buddhist- and Hindu-majority countries are included in the data, early signs of the Participation–Importance–Belonging sequence can still be observed in those contexts as well.

“We had questions that were tailored to the way people participate in religion in different traditions and parts of the world,” Hackett told RNS. For example, in East Asia, people usually don’t go to a place of worship on a weekly basis. “However, when we look at other kinds of belonging or participation, we still see generational gaps,” he said.

In Muslim-majority countries, the pattern appears to stall after the first two stages: Participation and importance may be dropping slightly, but people largely continue to identify with their religion.

The Participation–Importance–Belonging sequence is most clearly visible in traditionally Christian countries, about which researchers had the most data among countries spanning the full range of the secular transition.

The authors, however, caution that the study covers only a few decades and that, in many regions, secularization is still in its early stages. They also note exceptions to the trend, including post-communist countries in Eastern Europe and Israel, where patterns of religious change diverge from the typical trajectory.

Landon Schnabel, a professor at Cornell University who studies social change, inequality, and religion, praised the study’s Participation–Importance–Belonging model as “an important framework for understanding recent trends based on available survey data” but said it might not represent “longer-range cycles of religious change.”

Schnabel argued religious life doesn’t follow a straight line toward secularization. “We see it as a pendulum swinging between institutions and individuals, conformity, and rebellion, building up and tearing down, and structure and spirit,” he said.

He also points out that people might be returning to forms of religion that aren’t contained in formal institutions. “For most of our species’ existence, spiritual practices were more localized, fluid, and integrated into daily cultural life,” he explained. “Spiritual practices were embedded within the religion of particular peoples and places.”

What looks like a decline, he suggested, might be a return to spiritual engagement that is “more personalized, syncretic, and centered on individual authority rather than institutional power.”

Kyama Mugambi, a world Christianity professor at Yale Divinity School, warned against analyzing demographic data through a Western lens. He said regions such as Africa and Latin America show different patterns of religious change. “Secularization, as construed in the study, is largely a Western construct,” Mugambi said. “Though it affects societies around the world, secularization will inevitably take different forms, shaped by the social, cultural, and intellectual histories of the places it encounters.”

We should be cautious, Zurlo said, in assuming the end of religion everywhere in the world. “The world is a furiously religious place and, in my estimation, it will continue to be for a long time,” she said. “Religion changes constantly as societies modernize, technology advances, women gain more decision-making power, and as people reinvent what it means to be religious in their specific time and place.”

While scholars debate whether modernization leads to secularization and religious decline, or simply to new forms of religiosity, there is broad agreement that change is underway. The question is not if religion is shifting, but how to understand it.

For religious communities, the study might serve as a reminder that they are not alone in seeing fewer people in the pews or less interest among younger generations. Whether those trends signal lasting decline or emerging forms of faith, the findings suggest religious life everywhere is being reshaped in ways that demand attention.

c. 2025 Religion News Service