Religion After the Pandemic: On the Global Future of Faith

This is the transcription of a talk Philip Jenkins gave at an event co-presented by the Collegium Institute and PRRUCS.

Philip Jenkins

I will start very simply and say that religion is always rising and falling. The question then becomes: where is it rising and falling? In what way? Over the past twenty years, religion—or, to make an especially important distinction, organized and institutional religion—has suffered a widespread decline in large sections of the world. As the pandemic accelerates that decline, we will see a major shift toward the secular. But only in some parts of the world. In other parts of the world, we do not see such a change. These other countries may be taking up the slack and possibly even acting as major new centers of vigorous growth. So, my answer to the question “is religion in decline” would be a definite yes and no.

Let me talk about the decline first in the context of demography. Demography is not the only way of looking at this, but it's an important one. Here's an observation: you can tell a lot about a society by its fertility rate—i.e., the number of children that a woman will have during her lifetime. If that number is small, if it's what we call “below replacement rate,” then you'll get an aging society, a contracting society. A high fertility rate means a young, expanding, and often turbulent society, so there are pros and cons for both. But here's my point: there is a strong correlation between the fertility rate of a society and its degree of religious involvement and activism, and the strength of organized and institutional religion. I don't have much time to go into why that might be, but let me just note the correlation is strong even if we disagree about the cause.

Over the last fifty or sixty years, Europe has been the storm center of that change. Fertility rates started declining rapidly, and that mapped almost exactly onto a shift toward secularization. We see a steep decline in organized and institutional religion in many ways. We see it in church attendance and religious participation and the number of people preparing to go into the clergy. Societies have increasingly adopted secular policies, often with ferocious opposition from religious organizations. Catholic Europe, for example, has passed laws allowing abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia.

I'm not here to talk about the nature of those debates except to say that as society has secularized, they have become more mainstream. Ireland, for example, just massively liberalized its laws on abortion, as did Argentina. That brings me to the next point, which is that what we used to think of as a European revolution has now become global. Those European patterns of low fertility and low faith have, in the last twenty to thirty years, spread to large sections of the globe. If you want to see some of the steepest falls in fertility and the fastest acceleration of secularization, you do not go to Denmark. You go to Latin America. You go to countries like Brazil. You go to East Asia.

Many of us may think back to the 1960s and 70s when people used to be concerned about something called the “population explosion.” Then, we knew about the incredible fertility rates in countries like India and Brazil and Mexico.  All that was true at the time, but now things have changed. Most of those countries have extremely low fertility rates. If I look at India, half the states now have fertility rates that are below replacement. Some of the lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asia, correlating with a steep decline of religion. That decline manifests itself in a number of ways, one of which is the sharp growth of people who, when you ask them, “what is your religious affiliation,” will say “none. I have none.”

Korea, for example, used to be very much a Buddhist nation. Then, it had a rapidly growing Christian population. It is likely by the time of the next religious census that Korea’s strongest group will be the “nones.” Buddhism has gone into a steep and probably irreversible decline. Korean Christianity, while not declining, is not growing anything like as much as we believed it would. Brazil and Chile used to be split between Catholics and Protestants. Now, it is Catholics and Protestants and “nones.”

This change in religion and fertility has become a global phenomenon, and not just in Christianity and Buddhism, but also in Islam. Many of us have a vision of Islam as a fervent religion with high fertility rates. Let me describe one country to you, a country where in the 1980s, a typical woman could expect to have six or seven children in her life, and where presently that number is down to 1.5. What country am I referring to? Iran. We may not think of Iran as a secular country because of its religious government. However, recent surveys suggest that the people there are as secular as anywhere else in the world. Iran has 60,000 mosques, but perhaps only 3000 of them are used with any regularity.

In the last twenty to thirty years, the secular drift has happened over much of the world. But it has not happened in all countries. The areas with high fertility and faith are in parts of the Middle East, and above all in Africa.

On the one hand, then, religion is contracting in many parts of the world. On the other hand, in other parts of the world, particularly Africa, religion is growing and thriving. As the phrase goes, what happens in Africa does not stay in Africa. As people in various parts of the world age and the population shrinks, countries need immigrants to work and pay taxes. Increasingly those immigrants are going to be African. So, the religious patterns that you see in Africa today, whether they are Muslim or Christian, will eventually become the pattern of religious practices in Europe and the United States.

As I said, religion is rising and falling. If you look at  any religious denomination, certainly any Christian denomination, most of the growth in recent years has been in Africa. The Catholic growth has been astonishing. The number of vocations is so high that it's sometimes said that “the greatest problem facing the Roman Catholic church is that the Vatican is 2000 miles too far North.” If the Vatican wants to be in the center of the Catholic world, it would need to be in Africa.

What about the United States? If I were giving this lecture twenty years ago, I would have remarked that the United States was different from Europe. It still had a high rate of faith and fertility. That has changed dramatically since the crash in 2008. Since then, America has become a much more secular society. All the surveys will support this. Over the last decade or so, the proportion of Americans who declared themselves to be Christian has fallen substantially from 77% to 60-65%. We also see an increase in the “nones”—that is, the people who, when you ask them, “what is your religious affiliation?” say “none.” This category has been recognized for some years, but the enormous growth begins around 2005, and picks up from 2008 to the present. Currently in the United States, the three largest religious traditions are evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, and “nones.” I am positive that during the 2020s the number of “nones” is going to grow substantially, and I would project that the number of people who are prepared to say “I am an evangelical” is going to decline.

Catholic Church in 1940. Courtesy of Notre Dame.

Now, a reasonable objection here might be to say that this is not necessarily a change in how they believe or how they act, but how they identify. That's a fair comment. However, America has become a much more secular country in its religious statistics, and that was already happening before the 2020 (whatever you want to call it) meltdown. 2008 is an important year because the economic shock had an impact across the board, especially among immigrant and newer ethnic groups. The growth of secular attitudes of “nones” among Latinos, traditionally a group with high rates of religious faith, dates to 2008. Why is that? The explanation is partly economic. After the crash, people could no longer afford to form families and households, and families are more likely to be involved in organized religion.  

Let’s come back to the question of defining “religion.” When I talk about the decline of religion, I mean a decline in organized and institutional religions, not necessarily a decline in actual belief. Let me explain the difference. In Europe, the churches are in deep trouble in the sense that they can’t get people through the door and they struggle to find clergy. Yet, we live in what is probably the golden age of European pilgrimage. In other words, people readily express religious views and are prepared to say, “Yes, I believe in God. Yes. I believe in the Bible. Yes. I believe in the Virgin Mary.” People will go to medieval shrines of saints and the Virgin and seek out healing. This is not an atheist society, but it is secularizing in the sense that people are moving away from institutions.

My suggestion: this is the direction that the United States is moving in. When I'm pessimistic, I draw an analogy. Look at the Canadian province of Quebec, which in 1960 was by far the most religious and Catholic and enthusiastic part of the Americas. In the space of about ten years, Quebec suffered a quiet revolution, which left it one of the most secular parts of the Americas. Is that a portrait of what the United States will become? I don't know, but sometimes in the dark of night, I wonder.

What about the pandemic? I believe the pandemic has had what we might call a “rocket sled” effect. It took trends that were already in progress and squeezed into one year what would have happened in ten. If you look, for instance, at retail, you see how stores and businesses that had been struggling in the 2010s got hit so hard in 2020 that they went out of business. 

I think we see a little bit of that in the context of religion—an acceleration, rather than an overnight change. Many churches have struggled financially because of the pandemic. We might say that churches have had economic difficulties before, and will recover as they have in the past. Perhaps they will, but I would also draw another analogy to the 1930s when America lost a great number of its rural churches not because people lost their faith, but because congregations could not financially survive the Great Depression.

I think the structure of American religion is changing and will continue to change in two key ways. One is a change in the role of clergy. Face-to-face interactions are fundamental for the clergy to perform baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Family ties will survive, but it has already become harder to maintain religious and congregational identities and the clerical role. Clergy cannot fulfill those functions, and so people learn to cope without clergy and become detached from the institution. If I can watch a service on my computer screen from my local church (or from a grand cathedral somewhere, or use my cafeteria choice and do one church this week, another church next week), I become detached from the tie to that congregation that has kept me within that church. Church is something that you watch rather than do or visit.

There is another psychological change that was already in progress before 2020 but has accelerated. Think what so much religious behavior has been in the last year. It has been a matter of watching screens, of figuring out zoom, and it's affected our language. Did you watch church today? Did you watch the service? Not, were you there? Almost overnight, our sense of place, so fundamental to humanity and human participation, changed. I see this church service on the screen, and I see the altar. Where am I? Well, I'm actually in my chair, and so it takes a huge mental effort to place myself there in the church. Is it possible to maintain the same kind of identity with a congregation, with a church where I participate in services remotely rather than actually being present? What is that difference? What does it mean to be there face-to-face? 

It is quite possible that over time people will look back at 2020 and 2021 and they will say, “Oh, yes, that was a very strange time.” Maybe, but I think that detachment is going to be very hard to reverse. So, I suggest we might be moving to a whole new set of religious attitudes that are going to detach us from traditional ideas of clergy—what the clergy do—and of religious participation. Then, you combine that with the other trends that I'm talking about, especially the “nones” who reject religious affiliation and move away from denominations and churches altogether.

I think the US especially faces a period of troubling change. I would add other changes that show the rocket sled effect. Many religious seminaries and religious colleges were already in a precarious position before the pandemic. Now with the transition to remote classes, the finances of these colleges are even more unstable. It is likely that the next decade will witness a revolution in religious higher education. If churches and religious institutions exercise enough imagination and creativity, they can build on this new situation and deal with, well, what Christianity has always been about: from the shift from the scroll to the codex to the printed book, Christianity has always adapted to new media. So why should this this media revolution be any different?

So, am I talking about religious decline in the United States? The answer is, I don't know. I think we're potentially talking about rapid change. A decline by many statistics—I can already hear and read stories about how this is the end of Christianity in the United States. The church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers. It has a habit of persisting.

If you are ever tempted to think that Christianity is dying, as opposed to moving to some new form, to something rich and unfamiliar, then I would encourage you to look on a global scale. Christianity is booming in many parts of the world, and there are places where it is developing a powerful presence where it has never had one. I’ll just give just one example. We're all familiar with Muslim immigration to Europe, where there are not enough European citizens to fill jobs and pay taxes. This is a mirror of what is happening in the Arab Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Countries where for many, many centuries there were no Christians have suddenly experienced a surge in Christian immigration from India and the Philippines. What used to be solidly Muslim societies now have a substantial Christian population, perhaps 7% or 10% of the population. While we’re not sure of the exact statistics, one thing is for sure: these are dramatically changing times. Then again, the constant in the history of Christianity—even in religion generally—has been change.

I would suggest there is a launch story going on here, which I personally would relate to demography and factors like gender, gender change, changing gender roles, changing concepts of family, and changing concepts of the individual. All of these changes add up to what is sometimes called the “second demographic transition.” The pandemic is accelerating this transition. Consequently, we have an era of crisis, which, if responded to correctly, can lead to a whole series of opportunities to change how we “do religion.”

Mass at St. Famille Church in Kigali, Rwanda, April 6, 2014. (CNS photo/Noor Khamis, Reuters)

I would just add one thing there: Americans especially, I think, need to think hard about the language they use when they conceive of the Christian world or Christian America. The geography of that word is going to be different from what they have always been used to, and one of the great centers of change and redefinition within that is going to be the United States, which for a long time has been the center of so much Christian activity. Am I sending a council of despair? Absolutely not. But I do know that when we write the history of religious change (or “religious revolution,” if you like), an awful lot of chapters are going to begin and end in 2020. It's a frightening time to be living through a revolution, but I'm afraid that's what we have.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is also Co-Director of Baylor’s Program on Historical Studies of Religion and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University.