religion is NOT going extinct

Religion is dying out in nine countries, according to a study published recently.  The BBC reports that religion may go virtually extinct in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.  (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.)

The authors–Abrams, Yaple and Wiener–used nonlinear dynamics and group social behavior to make their prediction. Dr Weiner notes, “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.”

That’s where I challenge the headline: religion is not dying out, but people are no longer affiliating with traditional religious organizations.  The mysteries of life and death, and our human hunger for purpose, will not die out.  Our desire to make meaning together will not go extinct.  We are finding new forms of meaning-making, and some old forms may well go extinct, but organized religion will not disappear.

Part of the study assumes “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.” Their second assumption is that there are social, political and economic advantages to being unaffiliated with a religion, in a country where that religion is in decline.

The CNN article reports ”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.”

This study is not the first such prediction.  In 1968, Peter Berger, of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, said that, “People will become so bored with what religious groups have to offer that they will look elsewhere.”

Some of my favorite UU ministers are experimenting with sermon topics and liturgies which are not boring, but speak to the traditional religious questions as we are living them in the nontraditional 21st century.  Some of my favorite UU congregations are challenging themselves to live their values in ways that stretch them past boring obligation into meaningful participation.

In the Facebook UU Growth Lab group, the Rev. Ms. Naomi King recently asked, “what if we treated religion as an open-source project?” One answer is that we always have been–it may have been slow, but we have always collaborated on lifting up the rituals and metaphors that have the most meaning, in a particular place and time.  So, what is working for us now?  What is keeping us interested and engaged?