According to multiple surveys in the last few years, the decline in religious affiliation has stalled while certain religious beliefs, like belief in an afterlife, have actually increased. Of course, social trends are hard to pin down, emerging incrementally with each year of data, like a picture being drawn in slow motion. Still, with the Pew and other surveys, a picture is emerging that suggests, to riff off Mark Twain, “the reports of religion’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”
This, of course, counters longstanding narratives that religion is on its deathbed. People who hold this view often seem to miss the veritable graveyard of failed prophecies of religion’s imminent demise. From Marx to Diderot, it has been fashionable to hold that as science, technology, and learning progress, the illusory comforts that religion provides will no longer be necessary.
And yet, eight out of 10 Americans believe in a God or universal spirit. Even among the religiously unaffiliated, seven out of 10 at least believe in a higher power. And while proponents of the death-of-religion hypothesis used to take some solace in the steady decline in religious identification and activity over the past century, now there may not even be that.
The persistence of religion forces us to consider the possibility that religion has its dogged staying power precisely because it is more than an adaptive (or, depending on your viewpoint, maladaptive) evolutionary meme—it speaks to something fundamental to our human condition in ways that secular alternatives simply have not.
But first, how do we know the decline in religion has stalled? Survey research is an inexact science, but even so the evidence is becoming hard to dismiss. All the landmark religion surveys (the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study) are converging on this same finding: The increase in people claiming no religious affiliation has stopped. There are other indicators as well, such as traditional Latin Mass services across the country brimming with young families with children.
Worldwide, religion is seeing an upward trajectory, with the nonreligious share of the worldwide population shrinking due in large part to the fact that religious countries are having more children. Culturally as well as numerically, religion is indisputably important many years after its prophesied demise.
So why, despite everything, does religion have so much staying power? No small number of people have speculated about the constancy of religion across societies and history, with Sigmund Freud suggesting that religion was like a childhood neurosis to be grown out of, and Richard Dawkins positing religion is an evolutionary adaptation that might have been important in our earlier history but is no longer needed in a modern society. The religion-as-neurosis seems to suggest that religious people are more likely to suffer from mental illness, but across the 20th century the data has shown, quite clearly, the opposite—that religious people are not only less anxious and depressed, but are generally happier and healthier overall. This is true even for groups where one might not think that is the case, like sexual minorities. Further, religious individuals are more likely to connect positively with others, volunteering more in their communities and having warmer and longer-lasting family relationships.
While in principle there is nothing preventing nonreligious individuals from forming their own health-affirming organizations, volunteering more, or having more stable marriages (and many do engage in these), religion appears to provide something particularly potent in these areas. In describing her religious disaffiliation last spring, one New York Times editor lamented that the book clubs, workout groups, and meditation apps—all used as an alternative to religion—still haven’t filled the void.
But ultimately, religious people typically aren’t religious in a transactional way, simply being religious because of its mental health benefits, or improved marriages, or increased civic engagement. And focusing only on such avoids the question of why religion benefits us in ways secular organizations do not seem to have matched or replicated. We suggest religious benefits come from something deeper and more profound than a utilitarian scorecard.
Arguably the most prominent female former atheist in the world, Ayaan Hirsi, explained in 2023 her own recent conversion to Christianity simply: “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” Even the nonreligious often recognize that religion provides a vital sense of meaning and purpose for believers. And this is not just conventional wisdom: Research has shown that believers in God are more likely to report that life has meaning.
While the secular state certainly promotes similar society-building concepts as many religions, religion has a unique influence over the human soul. It is one thing for a philosopher to opine that societies should be generous and kind, but it is quite another thing for a person to believe that the creator of the universe has commanded them to do so. For instance, in the U.S., underage drinking is outlawed. Unsurprisingly, our own unpublished analysis from more than 160,000 underage U.S. college students finds those whose religion prohibits drinking are much less likely to drink: underaged college students of no religion, 43 percent reported drinking alcohol in the last two weeks, compared to 13 percent of Muslims and 7 percent of Latter-day Saint underage college students. So why would religion matter if society has already outlawed such behavior? A likely partial answer is because such an instruction, for believers, has come from on high, rather than from humans.
Of course, one can always argue that religion, whether it gives meaning or not, is simply delusional. To each their own beliefs. But many people are gradually recognizing that there might be something more to the tenacious yearning that religion fills. That yearning seems to nod toward something real and higher and is not just a side effect of an evolutionary need for a communitarian ethos. As C.S. Lewis describes it in Mere Christianity:
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
In addition to the fundamental sense of meaning, religion has something in particular to say to those in pain or suffering. While Marx’s dictum that religion is the “opiate of the masses” is well-known, much less known is what came right before the quip: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of the soulless conditions.”
And why would it not be? Because it is embedded within transcendent and eternal perspectives, religion provides answers to questions of suffering and death in ways that secular philosophies simply, by their nature, cannot. As sociologist Stephen Stack put it, “Humans are beset with desires and disappointments which cannot be convincingly compensated by worldly means. Only by invoking the power of the gods, of the supernatural, can plausible promises of solutions be extended.” While often used as a cudgel against belief (“How can bad things happen to good people?”), this can be turned on its head. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the highly impoverished areas of the world for which suffering is the highest such as Sub-Saharan Africa (70 percent of all deaths during childbirth happen in Sub-Sarahan Africa), where more bad things are happening to good people, are also some of the places where religious beliefs are the strongest. No secular system offers a compelling answer to the loss of a child, the inevitability of death, or the existential weight of human suffering in the same way religious traditions do. And as long as humans face losses that secular offerings cannot adequately address, religion is unlikely to disappear.
In the end, the persistence of religion may be a powerful argument not just for its cultural utility, but for the possibility that it points toward something real and enduring beyond the material world. Perhaps our persistent spiritual hunger is a sign of a transcendent reality behind the yearning.
