March 23rd, 2011
10:56 AM ET

Organized religion 'will be driven toward extinction' in 9 countries,
experts predict

By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

Organized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine
Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new
paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

It won't die out completely, but "religion will be driven toward
extinction" in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

It will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and
Switzerland, they anticipate.

They can't make a prediction about the United States because the U.S.
census doesn't ask about religion, lead author Daniel Abrams told CNN.

But nine other countries provide enough data for detailed mathematical
modeling, he said.

"If you look at the data, 'unaffiliated' is the fastest-growing group"
in those countries, he said.

"We start with two big assumptions based on sociology," he explained.

The first is that it's more attractive to be part of the majority than
the minority, so as religious affiliation declines, it becomes more
popular not to be a churchgoer than to be one, he said - what Abrams
calls the majority effect.

"People are more likely to switch to groups with more members," he said.

Social networks can have a powerful influence, he said.

"Just a few connections to people who are (religiously) unaffiliated is
enough to drive the effect," he said.

The other assumption underlying the prediction is that there are social,
economic and political advantages to being unaffiliated with a religion
in the countries where it's in decline - what Abrams calls the utility
effect.

"The utility of being unaffiliated seems to be higher than affiliated in
Western democracies," he said.

Abrams and his co-authors are not passing any judgment on religion, he's
quick to say - they're just modeling a prediction based on trends.

"We're not trying to make any commentary about religion or whether
people should be religious or not," he said.

"I became interested in this because I saw survey data results for the
U.S. and was surprised by how large the unaffiliated group was," he
said, referring to a number of studies done by universities and think
tanks on trends in religion.

Studies suggest that "unaffiliated" is the fastest-growing religious
group in the United States, with about 15% of the population falling
into a category experts call the "nones."

They're not necessarily atheists or non-believers, experts say, just
people who do not associate themselves with a particular religion or
house of worship at the time of the survey.

Abrams had done an earlier study looking into the extinction of
languages spoken by small numbers of people.

When he saw the religion data, his co-author "Richard Wiener suggested
we try to apply a similar technique to religious affiliation," Abrams said.

The paper, by Abrams, Wiener and Haley A. Yaple, is called "A
mathematical model of social group competition with application to the
growth of religious non-affiliation." They presented it this week at the
Dallas meeting of the American Physical Society.

Only the Czech Republic already has a majority of people who are
unaffiliated with religion, but the Netherlands, for example, will go
from about 40% unaffiliated today to more than 70% by 2050, they expect.

Even deeply Catholic Ireland will see religion die out, the model predicts.

"They've gone from 0.04% unaffiliated in 1961 to 4.2% in 2006, our most
recent data point," Abrams says.

He admits that the increase in Muslim immigration to Europe may throw
off the model, but he thinks the trend is robust enough to withstand
some challenges.

"Netherlands data goes back to 1860," he pointed out. "Every single data
that we were able to find shows that people are moving from the
affiliated to unaffiliated. I can't imagine that will change, but that's
personal opinion, not what the data shows."

But Barry Kosmin, a demographer of religion at Trinity College in
Connecticut, is doubtful.

"Religion relies on human beings. They aren't rational or predictable
according to the laws of physics. Religious fervor waxes and wanes in
unpredictable ways," he said.

"The Jewish tradition that says prophecy is for fools and children is
probably wise," he added.

And Abrams, Wiener and Yaple are not the first to predict the end of
religion.

Peter Berger, a former president of the Society for the Scientific Study
of Religion, once said that, "People will become so bored with what
religious groups have to offer that they will look elsewhere."

He said Protestantism "has reached the strange state of
self-liquidation," that Catholicism was in severe crisis, and
anticipated that "religions are likely to survive in small enclaves and
pockets" in the United States.

He made those predictions in February 1968.