God is not dead. Yet.

Most of the world is turning away from religion. Australia leads the pack.

Every culture has its own creation myth. How did we get here? Surely, someone must have made all those trees, stars, the sun, us!

The concept of the Great Manufacturer is bound up in the jumbles of ideas, histories and laws that, centuries and millennia ago, formed the world’s great religions. We no longer need religion as the guide and explanation of all things. Civil law has replaced religious law, evolution explains that God didn’t actually make Adam and Eve, palaeontology has unearthed the fossil record of prehistory, astrophysics has described the origins of the universe, and archaeology has elucidated history and shown scriptural accounts to be unreliable.

Still, though, religion persists. According to surveys coordinated by the US-based Pew Research Center, in only nine of the world’s 193 countries is ‘no religion’ dominant.

That, though, is changing. Within most nations, the trend is away from religious belief. In just a decade, from 2010 to 2020, religious adherence fell in 124 countries by an average of 3.25%. Australia led the world, with a decline of 17% over that decade.

In contrast, religion increased in 73 countries but, on average, by only 0.55%. The trend is clear.

A widely-cited study, published in Nature Communications, identified three stages in religious decline: first, someone stops attending religious gatherings; then the place of religion in their lives erodes; and finally they shed religious affiliation.

That’s at an individual level. Several research projects have found the full process of secularisation at a national level takes around 200 years. The Nature Communications paper proposed that secularisation is under way almost everywhere but different countries are at different stages of the process.

The last of the three stages – final abandonment of religious affiliation – can happen quickly. The remarkable declines of 17% over a decade in Australia and Chile, 16% in Uruguay and 13% in the United States show those countries are progressing quickly along the process of abandoning religion.

“As secular institutions offer more efficient solutions to life’s problems – e.g., biomedicine replacing religious healing, welfare states replacing spiritual reassurance – religion loses functional relevance”, the researchers found. “This transformation is assumed to occur not primarily by individuals abandoning religion during their adult life, but by an intergenerational breakdown of religious socialization.”

Secularisation largely occurs when less-religious younger generations replace their elders. The age gap helps to explain why some countries are progressing much faster than others. In countries with higher secularisation levels among their younger populations, the shift away from religion happens much more quickly.

Comparing whole nations with one another masks immense differences within those countries. In the United States, for instance, there is a vast difference in religious observance between states, varying from 24% in Vermont to 70% in Mississippi. States which tend to support the Democratic Party (in the north-east, midwest and west) are less religious; those in the south and centre are more religious and vote Republican.

In Britain, that political split does not occur. Scotland, which votes overwhelmingly for the left-of-centre Labour and Scottish National parties, religious observance is much higher than in England and Wales. Glasgow is the outlier. In England and Wales, rural and regional populations – which tend typically to be more conservative – are also less secular.

In most western democracies, around two-thirds no longer regard religion as being important to them. Once again, the United States is an outlier. And India’s strongly Hindu population dominates there, with only 11% saying religion is not important.

Though the downward trajectory in Australia is steeper than elsewhere, the pattern here is likely to be repeated in many other countries. If this rate of decline continues, religion will be unimportant to virtually everyone by the 2060s.

Answers depend on the questions being asked, which partly accounts for apparent differences between various surveys. The Australian census asks “what is a person’s religion” rather than asking whether they have a religion. On the well-established trend, it is probable that the next census, which is in the field at the time of writing, will show “no religion” will outpace Christianity for the first time, becoming the dominant religions belief in Australia.

That would change if the question changed. A pre-census survey by the Essential Media polling firm found 43% of people answering “no” to “Do you have a religion”. But when a two-choice option was given – boxes for yes and no – the number rose to 54%. That amounts to an extra two million Australians without religion.

Even with the current census question, the decline in the number of Australians who identify as Christian is remarkable. In just five years, the number fell by almost 190,000.

Immigration has boosted the numbers of some other religions but by nowhere near enough to balance the exodus.

As we’ve seen, younger people of most nations tend to be significantly less religious than those older than them. But the secular trend is evident in all age groups.

What does it all mean?

There’s less here than meets the eye. Warnings that loss of religion would dislocate the community’s moral compass have turned out to be wrong. If anything, the decline of religion has been marked by an increase in tolerance, by removing a critical element of social discord.

In those places where the gods still rule – America and Iran, to take just two – lethal conflict and civil repression loom. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has recruited an eager Orthodox Church to his repressive, murderous cause. Narendra Modi uses Hinduism as a political weapon. Islamic fundamentalists are far from being defeated, and those with a slightly lower score on the religious madness index – Erdoğan in Turkey is a good example – continue to use belief to reinforce their rule.

Religion, said Karl Marx, is the opium of the people. Western democracies have gone cold turkey and – though it may take another 200 years – the rest of the world is set to follow.