Irreligion

• 1. Introduction

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  Irreligion names something that most people in the modern world have encountered but few have a precise word for: the absence, rejection, or indifference toward religious belief and practice. Around 2010, scholarly research on the subject barely existed. Then something shifted. By 2020, roughly 24.2 percent of the global population fit inside this broad category, a total of more than 1.9 billion people. That number encompasses an enormous diversity: committed atheists, quiet agnostics, people who check "nothing in particular" on a survey, and millions who still light incense or attend weddings in churches they no longer believe in. The story of irreligion turns out not to be a single story at all. It is a set of overlapping puzzles about language, measurement, culture, and the unexpected ways human beings navigate their relationship with the sacred.

• 2. A Word and Its Complications

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  The word irreligion first appeared in French, as irréligion, in 1527. The English form followed in 1598, and Dutch borrowed it as irreligie during the 17th century, though scholars are uncertain whether that borrowing came from French or from English. The Latin root is straightforward: the prefix ir- is a form of in-, meaning "not," attached to religion. But beneath that tidy etymology lies a tangle of contested meanings. Britannica notes that the term is characterized differently depending on context, and surveys of religious belief sometimes use lack of affiliation as its sole marker. That approach can mislead badly. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Society insists on a sharper definition: active rejection of religion, which it distinguishes from mere absence of religion. Sociologist Colin Campbell, in his 1971 work Towards a Sociology of Irreligion, described it as "deliberate indifference towards religion," a phrase that implies intention rather than mere drift. The Merriam Webster Dictionary, by contrast, keeps things loose, defining "irreligious" as "neglectful of religion" or indicating a "lack of religious emotions, doctrines, or practices." Even the Oxford English Dictionary maintains two definitions, one of them labelled obsolete since its first publication in 1900. For religion itself, no universally agreed definition exists, even within the social sciences, which means the boundaries of irreligion shift with the definition of the thing it negates.

• 3. The Taxonomy of Unbelief

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  Agnosticism and atheism are the positions most people reach for when they think of irreligion, but the intellectual landscape is considerably wider. Agnosticism holds that the existence of God or the divine is unknown or unknowable. Atheism, in its broadest form, is the lack of belief that any deities exist; positive atheism goes further and asserts there are factually no deities. Agnostic atheism combines both: a person who neither believes in deities nor claims to know their non-existence. New Atheism, a label associated with writers and scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, represents a more vocal strand of atheistic thought from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Beyond these, the map extends in unexpected directions. Apatheism describes outright apathy toward the question of whether any deity exists. Ignosticism, also called igtheism, holds that the very question is meaningless because the word "God" lacks a coherent, unambiguous definition. Alatrism recognizes the existence of one or more gods but deliberately refuses to worship any of them, on the basis that gods ignore prayers and rituals carry no supernatural significance. Antitheism is explicit opposition to theism itself, not merely its absence. Deism accepts a creator of the universe but rejects revelation as a source of knowledge, relying instead on empirical reason. The designation "Spiritual But Not Religious" was coined by anthropologist Robert C. Fuller for people who reject organized religion yet hold strong metaphysical beliefs. Post-theism proposes that the division between theism and atheism is already obsolete, belonging to a stage of human development now past. Anthropologist Jack David Eller observes that "atheism is quite a common position, even within religion" and that "atheism is not the opposite or lack, let alone the enemy, of religion but is the most common form of religion." That counterintuitive claim points toward a central difficulty: in much of East Asia and in several other cultural contexts, identifying as "without religion" does not mean what a Western researcher might assume.

• 4. The Problem of Counting

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  In 2010, the Pew Research Center counted more than 1.1 billion religiously unaffiliated people worldwide, representing about 16.3 percent of an estimated 6.9 billion. Of those, 76 percent lived in the Asia-Pacific region, and China alone, officially an atheist state, held about 700 million. A 2022 Gallup International Association survey of 61 countries found that 62 percent of respondents called themselves religious, roughly one in four said they were not, and 10 percent identified as atheists. Those headline numbers, however, conceal significant distortions. In many countries, censuses and demographic surveys do not separate atheists, agnostics, and those who answer "nothing in particular" as distinct populations. The gap matters: a 2015 Gallup poll found that even 23 percent of self-identified American atheists believe in a higher power, just not the God described in the Bible. Meanwhile, in Scandinavian countries that register among the highest levels of nonreligiosity in Europe, 47 percent of atheists are still formally members of national churches. The Swedish population, for instance, identifies with the Church of Sweden at a rate of 58 percent. In the Muslim world, "not religious" frequently means not strictly observing Islam rather than abandoning supernatural belief. In Israel, "secular" tends to mean not following Orthodox Judaism. In China, roughly 85 percent of the population practices various forms of religious behavior with some regularity, even under state atheism. Scholars Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera estimated in a 2013 essay that there were roughly 450 to 500 million nonbelievers worldwide, drawing on the International Social Survey Programme's 2008 survey of 40 countries. That figure is far lower than unaffiliated counts because nonbelief and non-affiliation are different measures. By 2020, an estimated 78 percent of the global atheist and nonreligious population lived in Asia and the Pacific, with Europe accounting for 10 percent, North America 6 percent, Latin America and the Caribbean 4 percent, sub-Saharan Africa 1.5 percent, and the Middle East and North Africa just 0.1 percent.

• 5. Why Societies Secularize

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  Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim all predicted that the spread of scientific knowledge would push religion toward extinction. Industrialization did not cause religion to disappear, and political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have argued that the classic secularization thesis misidentifies the driver. Faith, they contend, is "more emotional than cognitive." Their alternative, the existential security thesis, holds that it is a society's vulnerability or stability, not its scientific literacy, that determines how religious it is. Poverty and chaos make religious values more central; wealth and security diminish their grip. Between 1981 and 2007, a study of 49 countries containing 60 percent of the world's population found an overall increase in religiosity: respondents in 33 of the 49 rated God more important in their lives. Most former communist and developing countries became more religious during that period, while most high-income countries moved in the opposite direction. Then a sharp reversal came. From 2007 to 2019-43 out of 49 of those same countries became less religious. This time the decline was not confined to wealthy nations. India stood as the most important exception to the general pattern. The United States offered a dramatic example of the shift: its mean rating of religious importance dropped from 8.2 to 4.6 on a scale of one to ten. Inglehart and Norris argue that declining religiosity also traces to a drop in the social need for the pro-fertility norms that world religions enforced for centuries, norms against divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and contraception, as life expectancy rose and infant mortality fell. Change in acceptance of divorce, abortion, and homosexuality has been tracked by the World Values Survey, which found growth in acceptance throughout the world outside of Muslim-majority countries. Even in the Middle East and Iran, comprehensive surveys have documented growing calls for reforms in religious political institutions.

• 6. The Future of the Global Numbers

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  Pew Research Center's global projection study pointed to an unexpected twist in the secularization story. Despite rising irreligion in many wealthy countries, the unaffiliated share of the world population is forecast to shrink from 16.4 percent to 13.2 percent by 2050. The reason is arithmetic: highly religious countries have younger populations and higher birth rates, while less religious countries, particularly in East Asia, have older populations and lower fertility. By 2060, Pew estimates the raw number of unaffiliated people will grow by more than 35 million, yet the overall population-share will decline to around 13 percent because total global population grows faster than the unaffiliated group. Ronald Inglehart, however, argues that the underlying trend toward secularization is driven by technological innovation and that reversals rarely last long. The countries that exemplify the low-fertility, low-religiosity pattern most sharply include China and Japan in East Asia and parts of Western Europe. By contrast, the 2020 estimate placed 88.5 percent of the global irreligious population inside just ten countries: China, the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, Brazil, France, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. China alone hosts more than 1.27 billion of those individuals. Even where numbers are hard to pin down, one methodological principle has been repeatedly confirmed: measuring irreligion requires a high degree of cultural sensitivity, especially outside the West, where the categories of "religious" and "secular" are not always rooted in local language or practice. A 2024 Pew report on Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam found that many people unaffiliated with any religion still hold beliefs in gods or unseen beings and engage in religious practices, a reminder that the simplest survey question can obscure what is actually a very complicated interior life.

• 7. Rights and Recognition

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  In 1993, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared that article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects not only theistic beliefs but also non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as "the right not to profess any religion or belief." The committee was explicit: freedom to hold a religion necessarily includes freedom to replace it with another or with atheistic views. Signatories to the convention are barred from using physical force or penal sanctions to compel anyone, believer or nonbeliever, to renounce their position. Most democracies imply this protection within their broader legal frameworks, but a notable explicit statement appears in Article 36 of China's 1982 constitution, which bars any state organ, public organization, or individual from compelling citizens either to believe or not to believe in any religion. China's 1978 constitution went further still, with Article 46 explicitly granting citizens the freedom "to propagate atheism." Colin Campbell's sociological study of irreligion began in the early 1970s, roughly two decades before these international legal declarations took their modern shape, a reminder that both the academic field and its legal context are younger than many people assume.