What's happening to God? Growing numbers of people around the world say he's gone away, or it doesn't

matter, or it doesn't exist at all. And I'd like to understand why. My name is David Voas. I'm a professor of social

science at University College London. I do research on religious change in the modern world. You'll be aware that religion is

in decline across Europe, North America, and in many developed countries elsewhere. We measure this by looking at believing, worshipping, or seeing it as

important. Religion is losing ground, and those facts corroborate what's called the secularization thesis; the idea, as my

friend Steve Bruce puts it, that modernization creates problems for religion, eroding its authority and undermining

participation. What links modernization with religious decline? There have been quite a few suggestions. Once we come into contact

with different beliefs and cultures, it's hard to take it for granted that we know the truth and everyone else is wrong.

Prosperity gives us the freedom to choose our own worldview. Religion faces competition across all of its

traditional functions. We now have secular specialists to heal us, teach us, marry us, counsel us, judge us, and so on.

Today, I want to focus on God. Some of what I say will come from my own research, but it's also based on decades

of work by leading historians, sociologists, and survey researchers, and I'll be citing their books as I go along.

The first point to make is that belief in God isn't a simple yes/no matter. We need to consider three distinct, but

related issues. The first concerns the substance of belief: what sort of God are we talking about? Even in the West, people

have different images of God. The second is its salience: how important is our belief, both personally and to society?

For some people, faith matters more than anything else; for others, their beliefs really don't make much difference.

Finally, there's the strength of belief. Some believers have convictions that are intense and certain; others are subject

to extreme doubt. So, there are degrees of belief. But in any case, this God that we do or don't believe in has changed over

time. What's also changed is how important he is to what we do, to how we make sense of the world, to how and by

whom we're governed, and so on. Let's start with the substance of belief. Is the Pope Catholic?  It's the epitome of the silly

question, but does the Pope believe in God? By the standards of centuries past, perhaps not. The Pope today doesn't

believe in a God who sends plagues as a judgment on human sin, who actively supports one side or another in battle,

or who presides over an enchanted world of spirits, demons, and everyday miracles. The popular concepts of God are highly

varied, but fewer people now than in the past believe in a judgmental deity engaged with everyday life. God has

increasingly come to be seen as distant rather than active in the world. The growing distance and abstractness of God

has diminished the importance of belief. The endpoint of the process is doubt, indifference, and outright atheism. The idea that science and

technology have reduced the scope for divine action is familiar. It's difficult for us to realize, though, how different the world

seemed just 200 years ago, before Lyell explained the history of the earth and Darwin explained the Origin of Species.

Now, it's almost impossible for someone raised in a highly developed society to believe in an enchanted world in which

God or spiritual forces are constantly interacting with our daily lives, though American football players seem to credit the deity on a regular basis.

The situation is different elsewhere; see, for example, Paul Gody's fascinating account of how pervasive the supernatural worldview continues to be in much of

sub-Saharan Africa. But it's hard to see magic and spirits coming back in the West. God has come to be seen as

less personal, less involved, more abstract, and more distant. And as people view God as indifferent to them, they

become indifferent to God. There's concrete evidence for this hypothesis from the Baylor Religion Survey in the

United States: the less involved God seems to be in daily life, the less frequently people pray. Take the statement, "God is concerned

with my personal well-being." Survey respondents could strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. Even excluding non-believers, among respondents who

strongly disagreed that God was concerned about them, a majority never pray. Of those who strongly agreed that

God is concerned, nearly half pray several times a day. There's a close connection between how confident

people feel that God is concerned about them and how much they pray. And similarly, those who don't see God as

engaged in the world tend to think of themselves as less religious and to attend church less often. They have more

doubts. The substance of belief is changing; its salience is declining along with its strength. Well, so far this story

is consistent with what you might call the folk theory of secularization: religious belief is disrupted by modern science and

technology. But unbelief isn't just about facts; values matter as well. People not only stop believing in a

divine watchmaker, they also stop believing that God is the source of morality, that religious organizations

tell us what he wants. Paul Froese and Chris Bader have produced a marvelous analysis of four different concepts of God.

derived from answers to two questions: to what extent does God interact with the world, and to what extent does God judge the world?

I've talked about the first question; let's focus now on the second one: how judgmental is God, and what's the

impact on belief? People have stopped accepting that the church, or indeed any institution, should be in the business of

defining social norms and impelling obedience to them. The insistence that God has opinions on gender roles,

contraception, premarital sex, cohabitation, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and assisted dying has created a problem for religion because there's a

growing consensus: these are matters of personal choice. Individuals are increasingly confident that they know what counts as good or bad, right or

wrong. Who is God to judge? Some people would like to see him instead as kind, accepting, and benevolent, but it's

hard to square that with natural disasters that kill thousands of children. It's easier to imagine that he

isn't involved in the world or concerned about private choices. The upshot is that God is in a bind: if he's active and

strict, people don't believe in him; but if he's distant and impersonal, then people don't care about him. At some

point, skepticism becomes complete. In a paper originally presented at a conference in the year 2000, I argued that what I called the

secular transition is inseparable from other transitions that constitute modernization. I predicted that secularization would spread across the

world in essentially the same order as the demographic transition, pointing out that the regional pattern of secularization in Europe corresponds

closely to that of declining birth rates. The same is true in South America, where Uruguay led the way in both the

fertility and secular transitions. And note that Ireland entered the 1980s with the highest marital fertility in

the developed world, but has subsequently undergone a compressed demographic transition and rapid secularization. I suggested that

secularization is analogous to fertility decline, without proposing a direct causal connection, except insofar as

both are products of modernization. The historian Callum Brown went further in 2012, claiming that

the 1960s saw three of the greatest social changes in the West: secularization, falls in fertility and

marriage, and a revolution in women's lives. To quote him, the hypothesis of this book is that the incidence and

spread of these three trends from the 1960s were intimately and actively interconnected. Another historian, Philip

Jenkins, has shown how declines in fertility have been accompanied by declines in religious faith around the

world. To quote him, changes in sexual morality, above all, were powerful drivers in the movement away from

religion. The harder the churches fought to resist those changes, the more they undermined their own prestige and

power. And finally, the late great Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist and leader of the World Values Survey, wrote

that, to quote, "if pro-fertility norms come to be seen as outmoded and repressive, their rejection also brings

rejection of religion." Inglehart suggested that while in the past religious adherence promoted traditional values, especially around gender, family

formation, and sexuality, today the rejection of traditional values undermines religious commitment. So let's sum up: religious belief can vary in its

strength, its sense, and its substance. Even believers recognize that the concept of God has changed over time, but

the image of God—active and judgmental or distant and detached—connects to how important he seems, and indifference

leads to unbelief; we find it increasingly hard to conceive of a Divine being who intervenes in everyday life or world

affairs, but we also dislike the idea of being dictated to by agents of a higher power who doesn't share our values. There

are many other reasons that religion is in decline, but erosion of belief is one of them. God is fading out of view.

Appropriately, it's time to say goodbye—a word that derives from 'God be with you.' That's a phrase from which God has

disappeared. Goodbye. If you'd like to support me in creating more of these types of videos, you can do so by donating to the channel

through our Patreon page. This will also give you early access to videos and channel updates. You will also get access

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Why Belief in God Is Disappearing in the West | David Voas

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