Religion in the Modern Age: New Faiths, Secularisation and What People Believe Now

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Spiritual, Not Religious and Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly. Companion pieces: the Religions long reads on Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Jainism and Sikhism; Indigenous and Folk Religions; and Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It.

In 1997 one of the most famous sociologists of religion in the world told an interviewer that he had been wrong. Peter Berger had spent the 1960s explaining, as most of his colleagues did, that modern societies would become steadily less religious. Science, cities, schooling and the sheer variety of beliefs in a modern country would wear away the old certainties. Thirty years later he looked around and said this: "Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious."

He was half right, and the half he got wrong matters too. In the decade to 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of people with no religion grew by 270 million, more than any group except Muslims. In ten countries, from the Netherlands to Uruguay to New Zealand, people with no religion are now the majority. Yet the world as a whole is still about three-quarters religious, and the number of religious people keeps rising because religious families have more children. Meanwhile new faiths, from the Bahá'í Faith to the Latter-day Saints to modern Paganism, have grown from a handful of founders into communities of thousands or millions, and religion has become a central force in the politics of India, Israel, Iran, Russia, Nigeria and the United States.

This long read is about that tangled present: the theories that tried to explain it, the numbers as they stand in 2026, the new movements born in the last two centuries, the long argument about the word "cult", the rise of the "spiritual but not religious", religion and politics around the world, faith online, and what the evidence says, and does not say, about whether religion is good for you.

A note on approach: this piece describes each religious movement as its own members describe it, then adds what outside observers and historians say, keeping the two apart. It does not rank religions or argue for or against belief. Numbers are dated and sourced, and where sources disagree, both are given. Membership figures that come from a movement itself are labelled as such; they are counted in different ways and are not directly comparable.

In this long read

1. The theory that religion would fade, and its reversal
2. The world in numbers: who is growing, who is leaving
3. America: the decline that paused
4. Europe, Canada and the post-Christian West
5. What counts as a "new religious movement"?
6. The Bahá'í Faith
7. The Latter-day Saints
8. Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists
9. Old faiths in new places: Sikh and Hindu diasporas
10. Cao Đài and Rastafari: faiths born of empire's edges
11. Wicca and modern Paganism
12. The "cult" debate
13. Spiritual but not religious
14. Religion and politics around the world
15. Religion online
16. Is religion good for you? What the evidence says, and its limits

Part 1 — The theory that religion would fade, and its reversal

The secularisation thesis

The idea that modernity and religion are at odds is older than sociology: many Enlightenment and nineteenth-century thinkers expected reason, science or social progress to replace faith. But the version that shaped twentieth-century scholarship came from the German sociologist Max Weber. Weber described modern Western history as a process of rationalisation, and one part of it was what he called Entzauberung, usually translated as "disenchantment". The world, in this picture, had once been full of spirits, magic and meanings built into things. Modern science and bureaucracy explained and managed it instead. Religion did not vanish, but it lost its grip on the public world. The closing pages of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism picture the rationalised modern world as an "iron cage", and he seems to have regarded the process as close to irreversible.

By the 1960s a fuller "secularisation thesis" had become the mainstream view in the sociology of religion. It had several strands, which are worth separating because they turned out to have different fates:

• Differentiation. Institutions that the church once ran, such as schools, hospitals, welfare, law and marriage, are taken over by the state and by professions. Religion becomes one specialised sphere among many.
• Privatisation. Religion becomes a personal choice rather than a public framework everyone shares.
• Decline. Fewer people believe, belong and practise, generation after generation.

Berger's own book The Sacred Canopy (1967) gave the thesis one of its best-known forms. As its title suggests, it pictured religion as a canopy of meaning stretched over a whole society, plausible because everyone shared it, and asked what happens to that canopy when modern pluralism means everyone meets people of other faiths and none.

The reversal

By the 1990s the evidence was awkward for the strongest version. The Iranian revolution of 1979 had put clerics in power in a modernising state. Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism were exploding across Latin America, Africa and Asia (see the Christianity long read). Islamic revival movements were reshaping the Middle East and South Asia. Hindu nationalism was rising in India. The United States, the most modern society of all, remained stubbornly religious. And after the Soviet Union fell, churches and mosques reopened across the former communist world.

Berger changed his mind in public. In an interview with The Christian Century in October 1997, he said that what he and most other sociologists of religion had written about secularisation in the 1960s "was a mistake". The underlying argument, that modernisation brings secularisation, "wasn't a crazy theory", he said, but it was "basically wrong". The world was very religious; so was the United States. "The one exception to this is Western Europe." Two years later he edited a volume with a deliberately provocative title, The Desecularization of the World (1999). Berger died in June 2017, aged 88; Boston University, where he taught for decades, remembered him for path-breaking work on religion and the developing world.

"Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It's very religious. So is the U.S. The one exception to this is Western Europe."
— Peter Berger, interview in The Christian Century, 1997

The theories now on the table

The debate did not end with Berger's reversal. It split into several schools, each with real evidence behind it.

Most scholars now hold some mixture. The world is not becoming uniformly secular, but in many rich, safe, educated societies religion is fading generation by generation, while in poorer and faster-growing societies it remains strong, and differences in birth rates mean those societies are a growing share of humanity. The rest of this piece looks at what the numbers actually show.

Part 2 — The world in numbers: who is growing, who is leaving

The 2025 Pew count

In June 2025 the Pew Research Center published its most detailed global estimate yet, based on more than 2,700 sources, including censuses, surveys and population registers, and covering the decade from 2010 to 2020. It is the best single picture available, though it ends in 2020, and Pew notes that new projections past 2020 are not yet available.

Source: Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (9 June 2025). Shares are rounded.

Read carefully, this table holds two opposite stories at once. One is growth: in absolute numbers, every major group except Buddhists grew, because the world's population grew. Nearly three in four people on Earth (75.8 percent) still identify with a religion. The other is erosion: people without religion were the only group apart from Muslims to grow as a share of humanity.

Why Muslims grew fastest

Pew explains religious change through demography (fertility rates and the age of each group) and through switching. Muslim populations are, on average, younger and have more children, so each generation is larger than the last. Switching makes little difference to Islam's size: slightly more people join than leave, Pew finds, but switching into or out of Islam is relatively uncommon. Demography also drives much of Christianity's continued growth in sub-Saharan Africa.

Why the "nones" grew

The unaffiliated grew for the opposite reason: switching. Pew's surveys of adults aged 18 to 54 in 117 countries asked people what religion they were raised in and what they are now. For every adult who joined a religion after being raised without one, 3.2 left religion altogether. For Christianity, 3.1 left for every one who joined; for Buddhism, the figure was 1.8. The unaffiliated have lower birth rates, so they grow only by recruiting from religious families, and in much of the world they are doing exactly that.

Where the nones are

In total, ten countries and territories had unaffiliated majorities in 2020, up from seven in 2010. In 35 countries the unaffiliated share rose by five points or more, including the United States (up 13 points by Pew's measure) and Uruguay (up 16).

The Buddhist decline is worth pausing on, because it is not the same story as Western secularisation. Buddhist populations are concentrated in East Asian countries, such as Japan, China, Thailand and South Korea, where birth rates are very low and populations are ageing. And in places like South Korea and Japan, many people raised in Buddhist families now describe themselves as having no religion, even if they still visit temples for funerals or festivals. (The China and Japan long read explains why "religion" is a slippery category in East Asia, where many people practise without belonging.)

Development and belief

Pew found that countries with lower scores on the Human Development Index, a UN measure combining income, education and life expectancy, tend to have higher shares of religiously affiliated people. This is the pattern Norris and Inglehart predicted. But it is a correlation, not a law. The causation could run several ways: insecurity may push people towards faith, religious communities may provide services that states provide elsewhere, or both religion and development may be shaped by history and culture.

The projections, and why to hold them lightly

In 2015 Pew projected that by 2050 Muslims (about 2.8 billion, 30 percent) would nearly equal Christians (about 2.9 billion, 31 percent), and that Muslims might outnumber Christians around 2070. Those projections also expected the unaffiliated share of the world to fall, to 13 percent by 2050, because unaffiliated people have fewer children. The 2020 data show the opposite happening so far: switching out of religion outpaced the demographic effect. Other researchers project differently. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which uses different methods and counts more generously, projects up to 3.4 billion Christians by 2050. The honest summary is that birth rates favour the religious, switching favours the unaffiliated, and nobody knows for certain which force will win in the long run.

Part 3 — America: the decline that paused

For decades the United States was the great counter-example to secularisation: rich, modern and devout. Then, from the 1990s, it began to secularise quickly. In Pew's Religious Landscape Study, Christians fell from 78 percent of American adults in 2007 to 71 percent in 2014 and 62 percent in 2023–24, while the unaffiliated rose to 29 percent.

Then something unexpected happened: the decline stopped, at least for now.

Source: Pew Research Center, "Religion Remains Stable in the U.S., With Mixed Signals for Young Adults" (28 October 2026). Attendance figures from 2007 and 2014 are not comparable with later surveys because methods changed.

Pew's October 2026 report found that since 2020 the share of Americans who identify with a religion, pray daily, call religion very important and attend at least monthly has held steady. In a June 2026 survey, 34 percent said they had attended religious services in person in the last month, and 45 percent said they had attended in person or watched online or on television: both the highest levels since Pew began asking in July 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The young adults puzzle

The most talked-about part of the report concerns the youngest adults, and the picture is genuinely mixed.

• The very youngest adults (born 2004–2008, roughly 18 to 22) report relatively high attendance: 41 percent say they go to services at least once or twice a month, higher than the 33 percent of all adults in the same pooled 2025–26 surveys (the table's 34 percent for 2026 comes from one of those surveys alone).
• Their slightly older peers (born 2000–2003, roughly 23 to 26) are the least religious age group Pew measures on prayer, importance of religion and affiliation; only 27 percent attend monthly.
• Young men now attend more often than young women, among the youngest adults. Pew says it has not seen this before in its surveys; historically American women have been more religious than men.
• No cohort is getting more religious. Pew found no clear evidence that any birth cohort it can track has become more religious in recent years. The youngest adults are no more religious than people of the same age were in 2014, and less religious than their counterparts in 2007.

So a "religious revival among Gen Z", a phrase common in the media in 2025 and 2026, is not what the data show. What they show is a pause in decline, an unusual rise in attendance among the youngest men, and a great deal of uncertainty. Pew also notes that this is not the first time the youngest Americans have entered adulthood with relatively high attendance that then fell as they aged.

Part 4 — Europe, Canada and the post-Christian West

Berger's exception, Western Europe, remains the clearest case of secularisation, and it has been joined by Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

England and Wales. The 2021 census marked a threshold. For the first time in a census of England and Wales, fewer than half the population (46.2 percent, 27.5 million people) described themselves as Christian, down from 59.3 percent in 2011 and 71.7 percent in 2001. "No religion" rose to 37.2 percent (22.2 million), up from 25.2 percent in 2011. Muslims were 6.5 percent of the population, Hindus about 1.0 million (1.7 percent). The census also counted about 74,000 people who described themselves as Pagan and about 13,000 as Wiccan.

Canada. The 2021 census found that just over half of Canadians (53.3 percent) reported a Christian religion, down from 67.3 percent in 2011 and 77.1 percent in 2001. About 12.6 million people, 34.6 percent, reported no religious affiliation, more than double the 16.5 percent of 2001.

Sources: Office for National Statistics; Statistics Canada.

Grace Davie's phrase "believing without belonging" captured the British situation of the 1990s: people who rarely went to church but still believed in something and still wanted the church to be there, for christenings, weddings, funerals and national mourning. Critics such as Steve Bruce reply that belief has followed belonging downwards, only a generation later; the census numbers above suggest the trend continues.

But "post-Christian" does not mean "irreligious". Those same censuses show religion becoming more diverse, not simply fading. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs grew in both countries. Immigrant churches, often African or Latin American, Pentecostal or Catholic, have brought new congregations to many European cities. The West is becoming less Christian and more religiously plural at the same time.

Part 5 — What counts as a "new religious movement"?

Every religion was new once. Christianity was a suspicious new sect in first-century Rome; Islam was new in seventh-century Mecca; Sikhism was new in fifteenth-century Punjab. Scholars use the neutral term new religious movement (NRM) for faiths that arose relatively recently, usually in the last two centuries, and that stand apart from the established traditions around them.

The term was adopted partly to avoid the word "cult", which in everyday English has become an insult (Part 12 looks at that debate). Sociologists such as Eileen Barker, whose study The Making of a Moonie (1984) examined the Unification Church, argued that scholars should describe these movements on the basis of evidence, not alarm.

Some features recur across many NRMs, though none is universal:

• A founder with a revelation, often in living memory, whose words carry great authority.
• Claims of restoration or fulfilment: the movement presents itself as restoring an original faith or fulfilling the prophecies of older ones.
• A strong first generation of converts, followed by the harder task of passing the faith to children born into it.
• Tension with the surrounding society, which may ease over time as the movement becomes respectable, or may harden into persecution.

Many of the movements below have long since outgrown the label. The Latter-day Saints, the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses are each larger than many old denominations, and the Bahá'í Faith is often listed among the world religions in its own right.

Part 6 — The Bahá'í Faith

The story as Bahá'ís tell it

In the spring of 1844, in the Persian city of Shiraz, a young merchant who took the title the Báb ("the Gate") declared that he was the bearer of a new revelation and the herald of one greater still to come. His movement spread quickly and was fiercely suppressed; by the Bahá'í account, thousands of his followers, men, women and children, were killed, and the Báb himself was publicly executed in Tabriz on 9 July 1850.

One of his followers was a nobleman named Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí, born in Tehran on 12 November 1817, who became known as Bahá'u'lláh ("the Glory of God"). Imprisoned and then exiled from Iran to Baghdad, he spent twelve days at the end of April 1863 in a garden he named Ridván ("Paradise"), where he declared that he was the one the Báb had foretold. Further exiles followed, to Constantinople, Adrianople (Edirne) and finally the Ottoman prison city of ʻAkká, in what is now Israel, where he arrived on 31 August 1868. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner or exile, writing the works that Bahá'ís regard as scripture, and died on 29 May 1892. He named his eldest son, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, as his successor and the authorised interpreter of his writings.

What Bahá'ís believe

The Bahá'í community's official website summarises its central teachings as the oneness of God and of religion, the oneness of humanity and freedom from prejudice, the nobility of the human being, the "progressive revelation" of religious truth, the integration of worship and service, the equality of women and men, and the harmony of religion and science.

"Progressive revelation" is the key idea. Bahá'ís believe that one God has sent a line of messengers, among them Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, each suited to the needs of their age, and that Bahá'u'lláh is the messenger for this age, whose mission is the unity of humankind. Local and national communities are run by elected councils, called Local and National Spiritual Assemblies, and the worldwide community is guided by the Universal House of Justice, a nine-member body first elected in 1963 and re-elected every five years.

Bahá'í life centres on prayer, an annual fast, study circles, children's classes and devotional gatherings open to anyone, and service to the wider community. The faith's own site says it is established in more than 100,000 localities in virtually every country and territory.

Persecution in Iran

In Iran, the land of its birth, the Bahá'í Faith is not among the officially recognised religions. The US State Department's 2023 report on religious freedom in Iran, citing Human Rights Watch, says Bahá'ís in Iran number at least 300,000, making them one of the country's three largest non-Muslim minorities. The same report cites the NGO Human Rights Without Frontiers as counting more than 1,000 Bahá'ís who were imprisoned, in custody, under house arrest or awaiting a hearing, and the Bahá'í International Community as reporting that the authorities closed 59 Bahá'í-owned businesses in a single month in mid-2023, alongside raids on homes and arrests. Members of unrecognised minorities, Bahá'ís among them, are reportedly denied higher education and government jobs unless they declare themselves members of a recognised religion.

Part 7 — The Latter-day Saints

The story as Latter-day Saints tell it

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traces its origins to Joseph Smith (1805–1844), a young man in upstate New York whom his followers regard as a modern prophet. Latter-day Saints believe that through him God brought forth the Book of Mormon, translated from ancient engraved plates (its first edition carries the testimony of witnesses who said an angel showed them the plates), and restored the original Church of Jesus Christ, from which other churches had gone astray. The church was organised in April 1830, when Smith met with a small group of believers in northwestern New York; it began with six members.

"An angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates."
— The Testimony of Three Witnesses, printed in the Book of Mormon (1830)

Intense persecution drove the early Saints westward. After Joseph Smith's death in 1844, Brigham Young led the migration to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, reached in 1847, in what would become Utah. That trek remains a founding story for the church.

What Latter-day Saints believe

Latter-day Saints accept the Bible and also the Book of Mormon as scripture, and believe in continuing revelation through living prophets. As the BBC's guide summarises their distinctive teachings, they believe that human beings existed before birth, that God has a physical body, and that the faithful can become like God in the afterlife. Temples are regarded as houses of God, set apart for the most sacred ordinances. Daily life is shaped by a strong focus on family, tithing, fasting and a health code that rules out alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee and drugs. Many young members serve as full-time missionaries.

Are they Christian?

The BBC's guide put the dispute plainly in 2009: many Christian groups deny that Latter-day Saints are Christian, and Latter-day Saints disagree. Latter-day Saints answer that they worship Jesus Christ as Saviour and Son of God, and the church asks to be called by its full name precisely to emphasise this. Many Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches reply that Latter-day Saint teaching about God, in particular the rejection of the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon (see the Christianity long read), places it outside historic Christianity. Both positions are sincerely held. The question depends on whether "Christian" is defined by devotion to Christ or by the creeds.

Size

As of late 2026 the church's newsroom lists 17,887,212 members in 32,046 congregations, 78,596 full-time missionaries and 211 operating temples. The church reports that more members now live outside the United States than inside it; it took until 1947 to reach its first million. These are the church's own figures, which count everyone baptised and not formally removed, whether or not they still take part; outside surveys find smaller numbers of active members. The same is true of most churches' figures.

Part 8 — Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists

Both movements grew out of the same nineteenth-century American excitement about the Bible's prophecies of Christ's return.

The Adventists

In the 1830s and 1840s a Baptist farmer and preacher named William Miller calculated from the book of Daniel that Christ would return around 1844. Tens of thousands of "Millerites" waited. When nothing visible happened, the date became known as the Great Disappointment. Most followers drifted away, but a small group reinterpreted the prophecy as concerning an event in heaven rather than on Earth. Among them was Ellen G. White (1827–1915), whose visions and writings guided the group. They formally organised as the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863.

Adventists share most mainstream Protestant teaching, with two distinctive emphases. They keep the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day, as they read the Bible's commandment. And they treat health as a religious duty: they do not smoke or drink alcohol, and the church recommends a vegetarian diet, while permitting meat within the Bible's rules on clean and unclean food. The church opened its first health institution in 1866 and, by the BBC's count, now runs more than 700 medical facilities around the world, along with a large school system. The church's own statistics office counted 24,372,139 members at the end of 2025.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), a Pennsylvania businessman, led a Bible study group in the 1870s and in 1879 began publishing Zion's Watch Tower. His Bible Students movement grew into an international organisation; the name Jehovah's Witnesses came into wide use from 1931.

Witnesses believe that Jehovah is the one true God, that Jesus is God's son but not God himself, and that the holy spirit is God's active force, not a person. They reject the Trinity as a later, pagan-influenced idea. They believe God's Kingdom will soon replace human governments and restore the Earth to paradise. Because Christ said his kingdom was "no part of the world", Witnesses stay out of politics and refuse military service; they do not celebrate Christmas or Easter, which they regard as shaped by pagan customs. They are best known for their door-to-door preaching and literature stands.

Their count is unusually strict. The 2025 report lists 9,205,326 Jehovah's Witnesses in 119,652 congregations in 241 lands, and the movement says it counts only those who are actively preaching each month, so many more people attend its meetings than appear in the total.

Persecution. Witnesses' refusal to salute flags or bear arms has brought them into conflict with many governments. In Nazi Germany, where they refused the Nazi salute, more than half of German Witnesses had been sent to concentration camps by the second half of the Second World War, according to the BBC's history, and one in four died. In Russia today they are banned as "extremist". The US State Department's 2023 report, citing Witness representatives, said 115 Witnesses were imprisoned on extremism charges as of 18 December 2023. Human Rights Without Frontiers reported more than 2,000 Witness homes raided between early 2017 and September 2023, and 730 people prosecuted. Pew's 2026 report on religious restrictions also noted physical attacks on Witnesses in Spain and Norway in 2023.

Part 9 — Old faiths in new places: Sikh and Hindu diasporas

Not every modern religious change is a new religion. One of the biggest is old religions in new places. Migration since the 1950s has carried Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist communities to Britain, North America, Australia, East Africa, the Gulf and beyond. In their new homes these communities have often become more visibly religious, not less, as temples and gurdwaras became centres of language, food, marriage and identity for people far from home.

The numbers. In Canada, the share of the population reporting a Hindu religion rose from 1.0 percent in 2001 to 2.3 percent in 2021, and the Sikh share from 0.9 percent to 2.1 percent; the Muslim share rose from 2.0 to 4.9 percent. In England and Wales about 1.0 million people (1.7 percent) identified as Hindu in 2021. Sikhs are concentrated in particular towns: in Wolverhampton 12.0 percent of residents described their religion as Sikh, and in Sandwell 11.5 percent.

Sources: Statistics Canada; Office for National Statistics.

What changes in the diaspora. Several shifts recur:

• Temples take on new jobs. In India a Hindu temple is usually a place for individual worship (darshan) rather than a congregation. In Leicester, Toronto or New Jersey, the temple also becomes a community centre with weekly gatherings, language classes, weddings and youth camps.
• Religion becomes something to explain. Second-generation young people, asked about their faith by school friends, often learn it more self-consciously than their parents did, from books, websites and youth groups.
• Large organisations grow. Global devotional movements, such as the Swaminarayan organisations and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, founded in New York in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada), have built large temples across the Western world. ISKCON is unusual in having been founded in the West and having attracted Western converts, the "Hare Krishnas" of 1960s and 1970s city streets, before becoming a major institution for Indian diaspora families as well.
• Homeland politics travels. Diaspora communities are often deeply involved in the politics of their homelands, including debates over Hindu nationalism and over the history and future of Punjab. These debates can divide communities abroad as sharply as at home.

(For the history and beliefs of these traditions, see the Hinduism and the Jainism and Sikhism long reads.)

Part 10 — Cao Đài and Rastafari: faiths born of empire's edges

Two movements of the twentieth century grew directly from colonial experience, and both fused older traditions into something new.

Cao Đài

Cao Đài emerged in French-ruled southern Vietnam in the 1920s; its full name translates roughly as "the Great Faith for the Third Universal Redemption". The anthropologist Janet Hoskins, in her study The Divine Eye and the Diaspora (2015), calls the period from 1925 to 1934 the "age of revelations", when a circle of Vietnamese civil servants and intellectuals received messages from God and from spirits through séances. The religion was formally established in Tây Ninh in 1926, and its Holy See stands there still. Its central symbol is the Divine Eye, the left eye of God.

Cao Đài combines, in one common description, ethical precepts from Confucianism, practices from Daoism, the Buddhist teachings of karma and rebirth, and a hierarchical organisation modelled on the Catholic Church. Its honoured figures include the French novelist Victor Hugo, and Hoskins' publisher notes that Joan of Arc and even Vladimir Lenin appear among its spirit messengers. To outsiders this can seem eclectic or even comic. To Caodaists it expresses the faith's central claim: that all religions come from one source, and that the colonised could receive revelations as profound as those of the coloniser.

Size is uncertain. Hoskins' publisher speaks of four million followers worldwide. The Vietnamese government's own figures, as cited in the US State Department's 2023 report, put Cao Đài adherents at about one percent of Vietnam's population. Today the Vietnamese state registers some Cao Đài groups and not others, and independent Caodaists have reported pressure from the registered ones. Hoskins traces an "age of diaspora" from 1975, when many Caodaists left Vietnam, carrying the religion to the United States and elsewhere.

Rastafari

Rastafari began in Jamaica in the 1930s, after Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in 1930. Many poor Black Jamaicans saw his coronation as the fulfilment of a prophecy associated with the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, that a Black king would be crowned in Africa. Some came to see Haile Selassie as the returned messiah, God incarnate (Jah). Leonard Howell is usually credited with founding the first Rastafari community, in 1935.

At the heart of Rastafari is an experience of exile and return. Africans carried into slavery were scattered across the world, and the lands of their captivity became known as "Babylon", the name of the city where the Bible's Israelites were exiled; Africa, and Ethiopia above all, is the longed-for homeland. Rastafari is not a centralised church. Its groupings, such as the Bobo Shanti, the Nyahbinghi Order and the Twelve Tribes of Israel, differ on many points.

Practice includes communal "reasonings", discussion sessions in which marijuana (ganja) is smoked as a sacrament to aid insight; larger gatherings called Nyabinghi, with drumming and chanting; dreadlocks, which carry religious meaning; and food laws. Through reggae, and above all the music of Bob Marley, Rastafari became one of the best-known religious movements in the world, far out of proportion to its size; the 2021 census of England and Wales counted about 6,000 Rastafarians.

Part 11 — Wicca and modern Paganism

What Pagans mean by Paganism

"Pagan" was originally a Christian word for non-Christians, often with a sneer in it. Modern Pagans have reclaimed it for a family of religions that look to pre-Christian Europe and to nature for inspiration. The family includes Wiccans, Druids, Heathens (who honour the Norse and Germanic gods), and reconstructionists who try to revive the religions of ancient Greece, Rome or the Baltic peoples, along with many people who practise alone and eclectically. What unites them is usually a sense of the sacred in nature, a calendar of seasonal festivals, and belief in many gods, or in a goddess and a god, rather than in a single transcendent creator.

Wicca's origins

The best-known Pagan religion, Wicca, was popularised by Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), a retired tea planter and amateur archaeologist. Gardner claimed to have been initiated in 1939 into a coven of witches that met in the New Forest in Hampshire, and in Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) he presented their craft as a Pagan religion of great antiquity. His books produced a surge of interest that spread around the world.

Whether anything like Gardner's ancient survival existed is disputed. The BBC's guide describes Wicca's roots as lying in pre-Christian traditions, folklore, folk witchcraft and ritual magic, and the historian Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the standard scholarly history of how modern Pagan witchcraft took shape. Many Wiccans accept a modern origin calmly. They see Wicca as a living religion that draws on ancient themes, and judge it, as people of older faiths do, by what it gives them.

What Wiccans do

Wiccans traditionally meet in covens, which by tradition have no more than thirteen members, though many are smaller and many Wiccans practise alone. Wiccans honour a Triple Goddess, whose aspects of maiden, mother and crone are linked to the waxing, full and waning moon, and a Horned God. They mark eight festivals, or sabbats, through the year: the solstices and equinoxes, and four festivals in between, Imbolc (1–2 February), Beltane (30 April–1 May), Lughnasadh or Lammas (1–2 August) and Samhain (around 31 October). Many draw on a Book of Shadows, a book of rituals and spells.

Source: BBC Religions, "Wicca".

Modern Paganism is small but has grown in Britain, North America, Australia and parts of Europe. It appeals especially to people who want a religion that treats nature as sacred, gives women's spirituality a central place, and leaves room for personal experiment. In the 2021 census of England and Wales, about 74,000 people described themselves as Pagan and about 13,000 as Wiccan, along with about 8,000 who described their religion as Shamanism.

Part 12 — The "cult" debate

The word

In ordinary English, a "cult" is a dangerous religious group that controls its members. In older scholarly usage the word simply meant a form of worship (as in "the cult of the saints"), or a small new group. Since the 1970s the word has come to carry so much fear that most scholars of religion avoid it, preferring "new religious movement" or, for groups that demand a great deal of their members, "high-demand group". Others think that avoiding the word can soften real abuse. The disagreement is not just about vocabulary. It is about whether people who join demanding religious groups are choosing, or being manipulated.

The brainwashing controversy

In the 1970s, as young Americans and Europeans joined groups such as the Unification Church (whose members were nicknamed "Moonies"), the Hare Krishnas and the Children of God, many parents were frightened. A "brainwashing" theory held that these groups used systematic psychological techniques to strip recruits of free will. This theory supported a practice called "deprogramming", in which families hired people to seize adult members and hold them until they renounced the group.

Many sociologists who studied the groups at first hand, Eileen Barker among them, were sceptical, pointing out that most people who encounter such movements never join, and that many who join later leave of their own accord. In 1987 the American Psychological Association's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology declined to accept a report by its task force on "deceptive and indirect methods of persuasion and control", chaired by the psychologist Margaret Singer, saying it lacked "the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach" necessary for APA endorsement.

Barker's name is closely tied to Inform, an independent educational charity that now works in partnership with King's College London and gives evidence-based information about minority religions to families, journalists, governments and members themselves, with the aim of preventing harm caused by misinformation, whether that harm comes from a group or from panic about it.

Real harm

The scholars' caution about "brainwashing" was never a claim that groups cannot do harm. Some have done great harm.

Where the debate stands

Most researchers now take a middle path. They reject the idea that any group has a technique powerful enough to override free will, but they take seriously that some groups use deception in recruitment, isolate members from family, control finances and information, and punish those who leave. Many countries, rather than banning "cults", now use ordinary laws, on fraud, child protection, coercive control and abuse, against harmful behaviour wherever it occurs, including in old and respectable religions.

The strongest case on each side:

• Those who use the word "cult" say that ex-members' testimony of manipulation is real and consistent, that the harm can be lifelong, and that academic caution has sometimes protected abusive groups.
• Those who avoid it say that the label has been used to justify kidnapping, persecution and state bans, as in Russia's treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses; that it is applied mostly to new and unfamiliar faiths while similar behaviour in established religions is called devotion; and that people who join demanding faiths usually do so for reasons they can explain.

A useful test, offered in various forms by both sides: rather than asking "is it a cult?", ask concrete questions. Can members leave without punishment? Do they have access to outside information and family? Are finances transparent? Are leaders accountable? These questions can be asked of any religious group, new or old.

Part 13 — Spiritual but not religious

One of the most widespread "religious identities" in much of the West is not a religion at all. It is the self-description "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR). This library's piece Spiritual, Not Religious explores the experience from the inside; this section only places it in the wider picture.

A December 2023 Pew survey found that 70 percent of American adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way, including 22 percent who say they are spiritual but not religious. Belief in a spiritual dimension is widespread even among people who do not call themselves religious: 83 percent of all American adults said people have a soul or spirit as well as a body, and 81 percent said there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.

The historian Robert Fuller's book Spiritual, but Not Religious (2001) traced this stance back through American history, to long traditions of unchurched seeking. What is new is its scale, and the fact that many people now leave religious institutions for spirituality rather than for unbelief.

Critics from inside religious traditions say SBNR spirituality can be thin: a consumer's choice of comforting ideas without the demands, the community or the moral accountability that a tradition provides. Defenders reply that people leave institutions for real reasons, including abuse scandals, political entanglement and rigid teaching on sexuality, and that spirituality without dogma can be deep, disciplined and generous. Both critiques have force, and both describe real people.

Part 14 — Religion and politics around the world

Secularisation theory predicted that religion would retreat from public life. In politics, at least, the opposite has happened in many countries. The following snapshots are dated, and describe positions as their holders state them.

Measuring restrictions

Since 2007 the Pew Research Center has scored 198 countries and territories on two indexes: a Government Restrictions Index (GRI), which measures laws, policies and actions that restrict religion, and a Social Hostilities Index (SHI), which measures harassment and violence by private individuals and groups. Its sixteenth report, published in June 2026 and covering 2023, found:

Pew linked part of the rise in hostilities to the worldwide reverberations of Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel's military response in Gaza, including incidents of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility in many countries. The long-term trend is that governments have been restricting religion in more ways than when the study began.

Snapshots

United States. In a September 2022 Pew survey, 45 percent of American adults said the United States should be a "Christian nation", though people meant very different things by it, from a nation shaped by Christian values to one whose laws are based on the Bible. Debates about "Christian nationalism", abortion, religious exemptions and the role of religion in public schools are among the sharpest in American politics. In a May 2026 survey, published ahead of what the White House called a "large-scale revival" meeting on the National Mall, Pew found 37 percent of American adults saying religion was gaining influence in American life, the highest share since 2002, and more than half saying religion plays a positive role in society.

India. India's constitution is secular, but the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is rooted in a Hindu nationalist movement. Pew's 2021 survey found that 64 percent of Indian Hindus said it is very important to be Hindu to be "truly" Indian. Supporters see Hindu nationalism as the reassertion of a civilisation's identity after centuries of foreign rule; critics, including Indian Muslims and Christians, see it as making religious minorities second-class citizens. The US State Department's 2023 report noted that a number of states have laws restricting religious conversion by force, fraud or "allurement", which supporters defend as protecting vulnerable people and critics say are used against Christians and Muslims.

Israel. Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state. Pew's 2016 survey found Israeli Jews divided into four main groups, from Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) through Dati (religious) and Masorti (traditional) to Hiloni (secular), living largely separate social lives and disagreeing sharply about religion's role in law, marriage, military service and the state. The war after 7 October 2023 has made these questions more pressing, not less.

Iran. The Islamic Republic, founded after the revolution of 1979, gives Shia clerics supreme authority. Its defenders see it as a state built on faith rather than Western secularism; its critics, including many Iranians, see clerical rule enforced by coercion. Pew rates its government restrictions as very high. Its treatment of Bahá'ís (Part 6) is one of the most widely documented cases of religious persecution in the world.

Russia. Since the fall of communism the Russian Orthodox Church has become closely aligned with the state, and its leadership has supported the invasion of Ukraine (see the Christianity long read). Smaller groups, notably Jehovah's Witnesses, have been banned as "extremist".

China. The Chinese state allows religious practice only within limits it sets. Pew rates its government restrictions among the very highest in the world, and, as Part 2 showed, China is home to the world's largest unaffiliated population.

Nigeria. With very large Christian and Muslim populations, Nigeria ranks among the very highest in Pew's index of social hostilities involving religion, including violence by armed groups. Many Nigerians stress that the conflicts also involve ethnicity, land and politics, and are not simply religious.

The pattern across these cases is that religion and national identity have often become fused, in very different ways, in countries as unlike as India, Israel, Russia and the United States. That was not what most theorists of the 1960s expected.

Part 15 — Religion online

Religion has always used new media. The printing press spread the Reformation; radio and television made the American televangelists. The internet and the smartphone are the latest chapter.

Services online. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 forced congregations of almost every faith to stream their services. Many kept doing so. In Pew's June 2026 survey, 34 percent of American adults had attended a religious service in person in the past month, but 45 percent had attended in person or watched online or on television: a large online audience that overlaps with, and extends beyond, the people in the pews.

Scripture on phones. The YouVersion Bible app says its family of apps has been installed more than a billion times and is used in every country, and that Easter is its highest day of engagement each year. (These are the company's own figures.) Qur'an, prayer-time and Bible apps, Buddhist meditation apps and Hindu devotional channels reach audiences that no single temple or church could.

What changes. Researchers and religious leaders debate what moving online does to religion. Optimists point to access: the housebound, the isolated and the curious can now find communities and teachers that were once out of reach. Pessimists worry that worship becomes something consumed alone on a screen rather than shared with a body of people, and that online religious authority belongs to whoever is most viral rather than whoever is most learned. Many traditions hold that some things cannot be done through a screen, such as sacraments that require physical presence. Online life also allows the rapid spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories and hostility to religious minorities, as well as new ways of exposing abuse within religious institutions.

Part 16 — Is religion good for you? What the evidence says, and its limits

A large body of research finds that religious people, on average, report better health and happiness. It is worth looking at what the strongest studies show and at the serious reasons to be careful about them.

What the research finds

Why to be careful

The authors of these studies are themselves careful, and readers should be too. There are four main reasons.

1. Correlation is not causation. Religious people differ from non-religious people in many ways: age, sex, family life, region and culture. Good studies adjust for these, but no study can adjust for everything.
2. Reverse causation. Sick or depressed people may stop attending services because they are sick or depressed, making attendance look protective when it is partly a sign of health. Long-running studies like the nurses' studies try to address this by measuring attendance years before the outcomes, but cannot rule it out entirely.
3. It may be the community, not the creed. Several studies suggest that much of the benefit comes from regular attendance and belonging, rather than from private belief. Diener and colleagues found the advantage ran through social support, respect and meaning. It is possible that some of these benefits could be found in strong secular communities too, though such communities are rarer.
4. Context matters. Diener's finding that religion's well-being advantage largely disappears in prosperous, secure, more secular societies is a reminder that religion's effects depend on where you live and how your faith fits in with those around you. Being a believer among believers is different from being a believer, or an unbeliever, in a hostile environment.

And religion can harm as well as help. People who feel rejected by their religious community, for their sexuality, their doubts or their decision to leave, can suffer deeply; and the abuse crises described in the Christianity long read are a reminder that religious institutions can be the source of terrible damage. What the research supports is a modest claim: belonging to a supportive community that gives life meaning tends to be good for people, and for many people around the world that community is religious.

Open questions

• Will the American pause in decline last, or is it a temporary plateau before decline resumes? Will young men's higher attendance persist as they age?
• Will birth rates or switching shape the world's religious future more? Pew's next projections, and the 2030 census round, will help answer this.
• Can secular societies provide the community, meaning and support that religious congregations provide for so many people, or will something new arise to fill the gap?
• How will governments balance protecting people from harmful high-demand groups against protecting religious freedom for unpopular minorities?
• What will artificial intelligence do to religion: new forms of teaching and prayer, new forms of authority, or new kinds of belief altogether?

The takeaway

The prediction that modernity would dissolve religion was half right. In Western Europe, Canada, Australia, East Asia and increasingly the Americas, each generation is less religious than the last, and in the decade to 2020 the unaffiliated grew by 270 million, mostly by people leaving the religions they were raised in. But three-quarters of humanity still identifies with a religion, religious families have more children, and the United States' long decline has paused since 2020. New faiths, from the Bahá'í Faith and the Latter-day Saints to Cao Đài, Rastafari and modern Paganism, keep being born and growing. Old faiths are changing in new places. Religion has become more, not less, central to the politics of many countries. And the research on religion and well-being points less to belief itself than to what religious communities offer: belonging, support and meaning.

Try this: pick one religious community near you that you know nothing about, perhaps a gurdwara, a Kingdom Hall, an Adventist church or a Bahá'í devotional gathering. Most welcome visitors; check its website for an open event or service. Go once, as a guest, to listen rather than argue. Afterwards, write down three things that surprised you, and one question you would now ask a member.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Pew Research Center: How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (9 June 2025), with its chapters on the religiously unaffiliated and Christian population change; Religious Switching Into and Out of Christianity and Into and Out of Other Religions (26 March 2025); The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050 (2 April 2015); Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off (26 February 2025); Religion Remains Stable in the U.S., With Mixed Signals for Young Adults (28 October 2026); Spirituality Among Americans (7 December 2023); 45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a "Christian Nation" (27 October 2022); How Americans Feel About Religion's Influence in Government and Public Life (14 May 2026); Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (29 June 2021); Israel's Religiously Divided Society (8 March 2016); Religion's Relationship to Happiness, Civic Engagement and Health Around the World (31 January 2019); More Countries Had Elevated Levels of Social Hostilities Involving Religion in 2023 (15 June 2026).
- Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, "Quick Facts About Global Christianity".
- "Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger", The Christian Century, 29 October 1997 (via religion-online.org); Boston University, "BU's Peter Berger Remembered as Outstanding Sociologist" (30 June 2017); Eerdmans and the Ethics and Public Policy Center on The Desecularization of the World (1999).
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Max Weber", on rationalisation and disenchantment.
- Book details (titles, authors, years, publishers) checked through Open Library for Berger, Norris and Inglehart, Davie, Bruce, Taylor, Barker, Fuller, Hutton and Hoskins.
- Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021 (29 November 2022); Statistics Canada, The Daily, 26 October 2022 (2021 census on religion and ethnocultural diversity).
- Bahá'í Faith official website (bahai.org): pages on Bahá'í beliefs, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, the Universal House of Justice and national communities; BBC Religions archive, "Bahá'í" (2009).
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Newsroom, "Facts and Statistics" (accessed October 2026) and Joseph Smith pages; BBC Religions archive, "Mormon" and "Are Mormons Christians?" (2009).
- Jehovah's Witnesses (jw.org), "How Many of Jehovah's Witnesses Are There Worldwide?" (2025 report) and "Who Was the Founder of Jehovah's Witnesses?"; BBC Religions archive, "Jehovah's Witnesses" (2009).
- General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, 2026 Annual Statistical Report (advance release), world membership as of 31 December 2025, via adventistatlas.org.
- BBC Religions archive, "Seventh-day Adventist Church", "Rastafari" (history, Haile Selassie, worship and customs), "Paganism" and "Wicca".
- University of Hawaiʻi Press, description of Janet Hoskins, The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015).
- US Department of State, 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom: Iran, Russia, India, Japan and Vietnam chapters.
- American Psychological Association, Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology, memorandum on the DIMPAC task force report (11 May 1987), as archived by CESNUR.
- Inform (inform.ac), "About Us".
- Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University, demographic and FAQ pages on Peoples Temple and Jonestown; FBI, "Jonestown" (famous cases).
- A. Sugiyama et al., "The Tokyo subway sarin attack has long-term effects on survivors", PLOS ONE 15 (2020); K. Sakurada and H. Ohta, "No promising antidote 25 years after the Tokyo subway sarin attack", Legal Medicine 47 (2020).
- YouVersion Newsroom (youversion.com/press), company figures, October 2026.
- S. Li, M. J. Stampfer, D. R. Williams and T. J. VanderWeele, "Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women", JAMA Internal Medicine 176 (2016); Y. Chen, H. K. Koh, I. Kawachi, M. Botticelli and T. J. VanderWeele, "Religious Service Attendance and Deaths Related to Drugs, Alcohol, and Suicide Among US Health Care Professionals", JAMA Psychiatry 77 (2020); E. Diener, L. Tay and D. G. Myers, "The religion paradox: if religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2011); Y. Chen et al., "Community participation in secular and religious contexts across sociodemographic groups in 22 countries", Scientific Reports 15 (2025). All checked through Europe PMC abstracts.
- The Book of Mormon (1830), title page and testimony of the three witnesses, via Project Gutenberg.
- Wikipedia articles on Caodaism (for the 1926 date, the Divine Eye and the common description of its sources) and ISKCON (for its 1966 founding) were used as leads; these points were not confirmed on an independent page.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics — Peter L. Berger (ed.) (the book in which the leading theorist of secularisation publicly rethought it; short, readable essays on religion's resurgence around the world)
- 📘 A Secular Age — Charles Taylor (long and demanding, but the deepest account of what it feels like to believe, or not believe, when belief is one option among many)
- 📘 The Making of a Moonie — Eileen Barker (the classic fieldwork study that changed how scholars think about joining new religions)
- 📘 The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft — Ronald Hutton (a historian's sympathetic but rigorous history of how Wicca was made)
- 📘 The Divine Eye and the Diaspora — Janet Hoskins (an anthropologist's account of Cao Đài from colonial Vietnam to California)
- 🌐 Pew Research Center: How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 (the data behind Part 2, with chapters on each religious group)
- 🌐 Inform (evidence-based information on minority religions, for members, families and the curious)
- 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: Spiritual, Not Religious, Atheism, Agnosticism & Humanism, Fairly, Indigenous and Folk Religions, and the Religions long reads on Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism, and China and Japan