Atheism Peaks, While Spiritual Groups Move Toward Convergence

Globalized data shows hardliners on all sides losing, and points
to emergence of open-minded pro-science, pro-spiritual outlook

THE WORLD IS TURNING ATHEIST, the media tells us. Europe is
already dominated by non-believers and plummeting church attendance figures
elsewhere indicate that religion itself could disappear within a generation.
Christianity is shrinking fast, extremism has soured Islam, and the fastest
growing belief-system is to have no beliefs, which could lead to the world
becoming a peaceful, atheist utopia. So says conventional wisdom in some quarters.¹

Are there figures to back this up? Actually, no. Indeed, a close
examination of empirical data about world-views tells a story that is different
in almost every way—and especially in regard to humanity’s next chapter.

Atheism as a belief system has peaked and its share of
humanity is shrinking, demographic studies indicate. Win/Gallup’s 2012 global
poll on religion and atheism put atheists at 13%, while its 2015 poll saw that
category fall to 11%. Other figures suggest the changes have deep, broad roots.

Gordon Brown, Creative Commons licence 2.0

EVOLVING BELIEFS (picture by Gordon Brown, Creative Commons license 2.0)

There appear to be at least three reasons for the shrinkage.

First, a community’s possession of atheistic world-views—for whatever
reason—correlates with low or negative birth rates. The most significant
examples are East Asian and European countries, which are at “below
replacement” rates of birth, shrinking at speed.

Second, “forced” atheism has been disappearing steadily over the
past 40 years and we see a corresponding surge of people towards spiritual clusters.
In percentage terms, 1970 may be considered the high point for global atheism
and agnosticism. As communism weakened, and eventually collapsed in 1989, there
was a significant resurgence of religious belief (see chart below). The same
thing is now happening in China.

Third, the surge of popularity for a novel type of
“evangelical atheism” which began about a decade ago appears to be losing some
of its steam. The movement’s celebrity leaders have fallen out of the
bestseller lists, and are often now criticized by their former cheerleaders in
newspaper columns. After a high-publicity start in 2013, Sunday Assemblies have
plummeted out of the limelight and growth has been glacial.

And the near future? The latest global data also shows that
young people, classified as those under 34, tend to be measurably more
religious (66%) than older ones (60%). “With the trend of an increasingly
religious youth globally, we can assume that the number of people who consider
themselves religious will only continue to increase,” said Jean-Marc Leger, President of WIN/Gallup International
Association.

"NOT SO MUCH RELIGIOUS, BUT SPIRITUAL"

As atheistic countries shrink, religious regions globally are
growing: Asia and Africa now make up three out of four members of humanity. Yet
there are numerous signs that they are not following the old-fashioned, “walled
compounds” model of religion, but a different stance in which adherents often
avoid even the word “religion” (they prefer to talk of being “spiritual”). These
individuals are flexible in terms of meeting places (often gathering in homes
and coffee shops instead of conventional places of worship), and are far more
likely to focus on what humanity shares rather than what sets people apart (all
the major world view groups now have active interfaith organizations and
science-focused offshoots). Revered texts are not seen as “inerrant” law books
but as historical documents containing statements that must be seen as
“context-specific”, even by devout believers.

Why is there such a contrast between the popular media story
of rising atheism and the actual facts on the ground of popular spirituality? (We define spirituality not as simply feeling awe when looking at the stars, but in the classic sense of the inner person having some kind of primacy over outer reality.) There
are many reasons for the confusion, but the biggest one is the Western-centric model used by most
media-savvy research organizations, plus the related attitudes of the
international press. In truth, the statistics of global belief make no sense
unless they are examined from a global perspective, in particular, bringing in data
and world-views from Asia, the most populous part of the planet.

HARD DATA

But first, the numbers. Atheism is growing and church
attendance falling, the media has been saying for years, quoting regular
research findings. “Atheism is on the rise around the world,” said a BBC news
report on 19 December 2014, one of dozens of similar reports.

At the same time, we also find solid statistics that the
world’s popular belief systems appear to be growing steadily. Looking at various
measures, it appears that Christianity adds about 25 million people a year,
giving it a 1.56% growth rate. Islam has been growing at 1.5% to 1.84% but from
a smaller base, adding 22 million people a year.²

That’s in terms of absolute numbers. A more scientific question
to ask is: are religious populations growing in proportion to the rest of the world population? The answer
appears again to be yes. If we blend in figures from the smaller faiths, we
find that organized spiritual groups are growing on average at 1.2% a year,
while world population growth is about 1.1% a year.³ So religions
are growing in absolute and
proportional terms, with Islam and Christianity expanding faster than the
others.

GROWING NUMBERS, GROWING IDEAS

So how can atheism and religion both be growing? We need to
consider people changing their ideas or evolving their belief systems. Such
factors are notoriously difficult to measure but will give us a richer image of
what is happening. How do we get such facts?

The newspaper reports about shrinking churches tend to come
from surveys undertaken by respected research firms headquartered in the
Western world, such as WIN/Gallup, the Pew Research Center and others. In
general, the surveys show a dramatic contrast between two sides, indicating
that some 63% to 84% of the world’s population is religious, while the
remaining 27% to 18% isn’t⁴.

Whichever surveys we go with, we have a pretty clear
dichotomy to start with, right? But in fact, we don’t. And that’s where this strange
and winding journey really begins.

ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION

There’s one huge problem with the statistics favored by the
media. They are based on answers to questions which are, at heart, binary: are
you a religious person or an atheist? Even in the surveys which allow you to be
in-between or neither, those two points are presented as contrasts: and that’s
where the major problem lies.

A system in which “religious” and “atheist” are presented as
opposites may make sense in 2015 in a pub debate in London or a panel
discussion in the United States. But it makes none at all in Asia. The most
popular codes of belief in the region lead people to be atheists as a key part of being religious. (We
will define “atheist” in the most popular way, as “people who don’t believe in
God”⁵.)

In Asia, we find Buddhists, Taoists, Jainists and
Confucians, all representing huge numbers of people, showing up for gatherings
to mark World Religion Day—yet ALL these would be counted as atheists under
many systems of analysis. For members of groups which follow these world-views,
there is no supreme being who goes under names such as God, Allah, or the Force.
Some have no deities at all, and are clearly atheistic in tone. Yet are these
individuals religious? Look at the Jainist in his robes and beads, or the
Confucian, enthusiastically joining in with the group prayer at a World
Religion Day meeting, and most people would say: yes, definitely. (The major
schools of Hinduism also include groups who specifically consider themselves
atheistic, as a key belief of their religious practice.)

Furthermore, much of the analysis for this paper was done in
Hong Kong, China: a city and region where large numbers of residents classified
as atheist have a very, very long list of what many people would describe as
“superstitions” or examples of “magical thinking”, while people listed as
religious preach regularly about the harmfulness of superstition.

Also, the researchers live in the (claimed) missile range of
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who runs a regime and community that is a
textbook example of all that is quoted as being bad about religion—except he
and it are atheist.

The situation in East Asia is the direct opposite of what
the Western-designed binary model would lead us to believe should be the case.

pic by Hartwig HKD Flickr Creative Commons licence 2.0

LARGEST PART OF THE HUMAN WORLD

Does it matter that one region of the world produces facts
which make complete nonsense of the statistics? Actually, yes. There are more
individuals in Asia than all the other regions on the planet put together. The
people of Asia make up more than 60% of the world’s population⁶. If
we ignore or fudge the data in this region, our global figures are by no
measure global figures, but minority ones. This is not just a case of ignoring
nuances, but a case of “A equals B” being read as “A equals not B”.

What do we do about this? Clearly, we must look at factors
that make up people’s entire world-views as the only way to avoid smashing
round pegs into square holes and creating artificial dichotomies. We can also
re-examine the available data, and see what we can learn from it by taking a
global perspective rather than a Western one. After all, the figures come from expert
survey firms with good reputations, and—crucially—we can now compare them with
the many additional surveys done within Asia itself.

THE MYSTERY OF THE “NONS”

Clues to solving the mystery can be found by looking at the
“nons”. While the majority of researchers agree that at least 16% of the world’s
population is non-religious, the number of people who actually call themselves atheists
remains a curiously small separate group—at between 2% and 8%, in most surveys,
11% in the WIN/Gallup poll quoted above. (Non-religious people and atheists are
usually counted separately.)

Let’s leave this small group of atheists aside for a moment,
and look at the “in-betweens”. Who are the “non-religious”, if they are not comfortably
to declare themselves as atheists? Are they agnostics, in the sense of people
who don’t know or believe you can’t know whether a universal mind exists? They
could be, although the most common term for them in the surveys is
“unaffiliated”.

They seem to be a rather uniform group in size across
different polls. Taking a big picture view of all the surveys, we see we always
have a very large number of religious people (59% to 84%, so let’s think of it
as about 70%), a smaller but still sizeable number of “nons” (averaging 20%),
and a much smaller number of atheists (in single digits or low double digits,
so let’s call it 10% to 15%).

The proportions we see in these global figures are roughly reflected
in certain country-specific polls, although some have markedly fewer atheists. Some
countries organize their census data so as to have none at all (in the Egyptian
census, “atheist” is not presented as a belief choice). A less unreasonable
example would be the US, where an ARIS report of beliefs in 2008 said 85% of
people were religious, while 15% claimed to have no religion.⁷ Of
that 15%, only 0.9% said they were agnostic and 0.7% atheist. So the US believers
are believers, and the vast majority of the “nons”, 13% of the 15%, are also convinced believers in
something—but what? We’ll hold that question for a while, too. Other surveys,
such as the aforementioned BBC one in 2004, put the number of US atheists
higher, but rarely does the figure surmount 13%.

The indication is that the vast majority of the planet’s people,
the religious and the nons, believe in something non-material as a key part of
their world-view.

RUNNING CONTRADICTIONS

In all the surveys, the number of atheists is relatively small,
perhaps surprisingly so, considering their enormous prominence in media debates
and on the internet, where they often feel like the majority. (This may be partly
due to a confusion between atheism and secularism, which are not the same thing:
people often forget that the separation of church and state, and the spread of
secularism were historical movements led by Christians, not atheists.)

When we take a closer look, we find puzzling data that shrinks
that small number of atheists further. In one of the most comprehensive US
surveys, 38% of atheists and agnostics went on to say that they DID believe in
a higher consciousness. And 14% of people who identified
themselves as atheists added that they believed specifically in God or a
universal spirit. That percentage included 5% who said they were
“absolutely certain” that God or a universal spirit existed.⁸

Confused? Hold on, we’re just getting started. Of the
atheists, “a quarter (26%) say they think of themselves as spiritual people, and 3%
consider themselves religious people,” says Michael Lipka of the Pew Research
Centre. So a proportion of people listed
as atheists are religious people who are more sure of a deity’s existence than some
of the people listed as believers! A further puzzle: In that US survey, more
people (7%) say they do not believe in God or a universal spirit than say they
are atheist (2.4%). So some people listed as believers are also non-believers.

Many media outlets repeatedly group the nons with the
atheists to justify headlines on the rise of atheism. This is clearly unsafe. The
one thing we know for sure about the unaffiliated is that they have chosen not
to tick the box that identifies them as atheists. Other journalists choose to
use the word “irreligious”, although this is misleading: the word does not have
the same meaning or associations as “unaffiliated”. The Pew Forum’s 2007 US
Religious Landscape Survey revealed that 42% of the unaffiliated pray at least
once a month, and 41% considered religion to be somewhat or very important in
their lives. Those are not small percentages.

It’s clear that to many people, the concepts of atheism and non-belief
in God come across as only tangentially connected, if related at all. It is
very hard to escape the conclusion that the non-binary, non-opposite system that
applies to Asia also applies to the
Western world. If you position religion and atheism as opposites, you’re
asking the wrong questions. Humanity’s chosen world views are far more complex
than the summaries in popular media indicate.

SHUTTERED CHURCHES

Similar puzzles appear in other well-studied communities.
The UK is often painted as an irreligious place, and visitors can see shuttered
churches in big cities. Various sociological studies indicate that between 30% and
40% of British people do not believe in God. Yet in a major survey, only 8%
identify themselves as “convinced atheists”—again, it appears that in the UK, “not
believing in God” and “being an atheist” are not considered the same thing.⁹For the majority of people, “not believing in God” actually appears to
mean “not believing in God the way grandma does”.

Look at other questions in that country and things blur
further. Three out of four adults (77%) and three fifths (61%) of self-declared
non-religious people in the UK said they believe that “there are things in life
that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means”. In other
words, the majority of people find the narrow materialistic interpretation of
some scientists unappealing. (We are using the word “materialistic” in the
scientific sense of holding a belief that reality is entirely explicable in
material terms of physics and chemistry).

The statistics specifically of the beliefs of UK atheists
found that nearly one in four (23%) believe in the human soul, and 15% in life
after death. Fourteen per cent believe in reincarnation. Whoever these atheists
are, they are not Richard Dawkins.

ENTER THE EUROZONE

Crunch more data and glaring contradictions multiply at high
speed. When we move our strictly-by-the-numbers probe across the rest of Europe,
we find it is not the atheistic continent it is painted to be. Surveys across
the 27 member countries indicate that 77% of people believe in a God-like higher
consciousness.¹⁰ Only 20% of people said they did not believe in God
or any type of over-arching spirit. And again we see the definition gap: alongside
these figures, we get a separate number which tells us that only 7% of
Europeans said they were atheists.

Not believing in God does not make you an atheist, the
public keeps telling us, not just all over Asia (where it’s obvious), but in
many places, including Europe. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that
the word “atheist” is regularly understood to mean “not an active churchgoer”, “not
a member of a specific congregation”, or have other similar meanings.

(History-lovers will be reminded of the ancient Roman word
for Christian, which was “atheist”. Early Christian leader Justin Martyr happily
embraced the term, because he felt that there was a world of difference between
the multiple deity ideas of the Romans and the concept of the one great underlying
mind that his people had. Justin had surprisingly modern attitudes for a man
born circa 100 AD.)

A PASSAGE ON INDIA

What about the numbers we find in the rest of the world? India,
it is often said, has a long tradition of supporting atheism, as the birthplace
of Jainism and Buddhism, both of which are thriving Supreme Being-free traditions
more than two millennia old. Are Indian results different?

The most widely cited results are those from the WIN/Gallup
Global Index of Religion and Atheism (the uncomfortably binary nature of which
is indicated in its title). This tells us that 81% of Indians identified themselves
as “religious”. And what of the remaining 19%? By now, you can guess the pattern.
The remaining groups were “not religious” at 13% and “convinced atheists” at
just 3%.¹¹ So even if we take
a largely “either/or” view of the issue, the intriguing middle group is as strongly
present in India as it is in the West.

If we take a more nuanced view—recognizing that many Indians
are fundamentally atheistic AND religious at the same time, the world’s middle
group (i.e., those who are not specifically atheist nor theist) becomes immeasurably
larger. There are a lot of people in India! And it isn’t just Buddhism and
Jainism that we are talking about. We can also consider the fact that Hindu
philosophy has different schools, and some do not include the concept of any
type of monotheistic Almighty God or similar supreme power. Some ancient Hindu
traditions, such as the Carvaka school, produce views which are atheistic and
materialistic in ways which are remarkably similar to those in modern schools
of atheism. Many people in what will soon be the world’s most populous country
are technically atheists, yet that doesn’t clash with the fact that in the
Indian government census of 2001, the number of people listed as religious was
99.9%, against 0.1% “religion not stated”.

HUGE ATHEIST KINGDOM, OR IS IT?

In China, it’s hard to get at the facts, not because they
are so few of them, but because there are so many, and they contradict each
other. It’s generally assumed that most of the population does not belong to
any religion, which is not surprising, given the Chinese communist party’s
origins in the strictest forms of Marxist secular humanism, and the resultant
hostility to organized worship. Party members are not allowed to join a faith. The
WIN/Gallop 2015 poll suggested that 61% of people in China claim to be convinced atheists. Next
highest was Hong Kong (34% atheist) and Japan (31% atheist).

Or could this be another case in which the “tick one box ”
nature of typical surveys fails to capture complex attitudes? If we turn to
more subtle surveys of beliefs by scholars actually based in China and its
special administrative region Hong Kong, tests which include detailed questions
about ancestor worship and folk-religious practices, we end up with very different
figures.

In 2012, researchers in China did a survey of 25 provinces
on this basis¹², and it indicated that while 90% claimed to belong to
no religion, only 6.3% were definable as non-religious, in the sense of people
who did not build regular acts of spiritual worship into their lives. Chinese
people tend to be classified as non-religious, while clearly this is not the
case. An academic study in 2010 concluded that there were 436 million followers of “Chinese folk
religion” in China, making it a significantly large group of believers.
(Compare the number of Jewish people in the world, which is about 16.5
million.) The various Chinese surveys produce a strong indication that
numerous people exist who simultaneously claim to disbelieve in any form of formal
faith system while sticking rigidly to schedules of folk-religion and ancestor
worship.

Hong Kong is said to be 34% atheist by the poll quoted above
and about half “non-religious” by official government measures. But when we
look closely at local polls, we find a different, non-binary story. Much of the
population is aligned to spiritual organizations (21% Buddhist, 14% Taoist and
12% Christian, adding up to 47%), but it is the ones who are “not religious”
who are most strongly associated with traditional Chinese beliefs, such as the burning
of spirit money and other folk-religion practices. The city’s population has a
surprisingly rich and widespread spiritual life.

LOOKING AT OUTLIERS

What about the “poster-boy” countries for atheism that many
of us have all read about? Isn’t Sweden a majority atheist country? And weren’t
there big headlines about Australians being 70% atheist? And isn’t the same
true for some place in Europe, like Estonia or something?

The answer is: Yes, the popular media do print headlines like
this regularly. One of the most widely-quoted surveys on this topic was a Gallup
poll which produced outliers, particularly in regard to Australia¹³.
It posed an unusually broad key question: “Is religion an important part of
your daily life?” Note the word “daily”. With the question set like this, people
could only truthfully answer “yes” if they did something religious every day. Thus it appears possible that
folk who went to church or temple every weekend of their lives could end up
listed in figures which commentators could take to mean “atheist”. As for Sweden and Estonia, we’ll travel thence
shortly.

Other survey data oft quoted in newspapers and on the
internet comes from Phil Zuckerman¹⁴, who is an academic, but is
also a pro-secular activist.

DEALING WITH THE ANOMALIES

A simple way to help deal with the anomalies is to fix the
critical problems inherent in the terminology. To take a leaf from the books of
psychology and the social sciences, we can remove unhelpful terms such as
“religion” and “atheism”, used as false opposites, and replace them with
“world-views”, defining the term as referring to an individual’s understanding
of reality, incorporating both physical and non-tangible aspects. This gives us
more scientific, analytical tools to solve the myriad problems in the data
above, and equips us with a system that can cope with people who have a mixed
view of reality, from Confucianists to quantum physics theorists.

What exactly do we mean by world-view? This can perhaps be best
explained using a narrative analogy. Imagine two people: Subject A is an
Anglican Church minister and Subject B is a Hindu software engineer. We lazily
label both “religious”. Yet a scientific study of the data points which make up
their world-views might reveal they have, perhaps, only 1,875 overlapping
beliefs in the, say, 3,000 data points we might specify as making up their
world views.

At the same time, Subject C, a Parisian economics teacher,
tells us he is an atheist. But a scientific study of the data points in his
world-view reveals he has identical views to Subject A except for perhaps one
single point (“Does a personal God exist?”). Thus instead of A and B being
alike, we find that A and C are virtually twin souls, despite one being a
church minister and the other an atheist.

By considering world-views instead of the “religious or
atheist” false dichotomy, we can cope with the levels of complexity in the real
world—and the simplification problems that beset the data above disappear. No
longer does the Communist Party official performing ancestor worship rites
cause our research to stop making sense. He doesn’t believe in Christianity’s
God (he is not allowed to), but heaven and the unseen world are very real to
him. He is an atheist, a Confucian, a secular humanist, and deeply religious.
He has a complex world-view, as indeed do people everywhere.

THE LAWS OF NATURE

A related side-point: One of the world’s most respected theoretical
physicists, Lee Smolin, has argued convincingly that anybody who believes in
the laws of physics is displaying religious thinking.¹⁵ That person
is assuming that over-arching principles exist over and above the world of
facts explicable by materialist explanations of science. We “modern” people are
happy to say that the entire universe erupted out of a miniscule disturbance in
quantum foam but we ignore the fact that no one can tell us how to imprint the
laws of physics on a quantum particle. Indeed, the very words used in
discussions of the laws of nature, such as “fundamental” and “absolute” are
identical to those used in philosophical debates about divinity, pantheism and
the like. (Ironically, one popular scientist who argues that the laws of
physics should not be seen as fundamental and unchanging, Rupert Sheldrake, has
been criticized as being too sympathetic to religious ideas.)¹⁶

MANY NUMBERS, ONE STORY

The story so far: interestingly similar data is appearing in
surveys to describe world-views in very different regions of the world, and
these appear to tell a tale about a large and expanding group with “middle”
views, views which are not religious or atheist as defined in surveys organized
by Western market research organizations. Let’s go for more numbers.

There is widespread agreement that significant numbers of
people are peeling themselves away from traditional belief groups, which
explain the reports about drops in church attendance, particularly in North
America and Europe. Recent data suggests that while most Americans still consider
themselves religious, only about 37% to 40% of US citizens are regular
churchgoers. In the UK, numbers of churchgoers are estimated to have fallen to
6% to 10% of the population.¹⁷

But the fact that the number of self-described atheists is
still small suggests that these “church backsliders”, in general, are not
becoming atheistic. The majority of them are forming a third group: they are
joining a middle-ground cluster which is arguably humanity’s fastest growing
world view group.

For reasons of inoffensiveness, let’s call this cluster of
people “the middle grounders”. This group is clearly in expansion mode, and
looking at the figures, may be growing faster than any other high profile world-view cluster, including Islam, Christianity and atheism. Pro-secularists often
claim ownership of the “nons” group to bolster their arguments about the
collapse of theistic beliefs—but, as mentioned above, this is an unsafe
assumption. (Nor should they be added to the “regular churchgoers” category.)

Who exactly are these people? It appears safe to assume that
members of this group will range from people we might define as “new agers”, to
people who have drifted away from traditional religion, but have not drifted
particularly far. People who travel frequently or have a wide range of contacts
probably meet members of this group on a daily basis. This researcher has a
Facebook post in front of him in which a friend writes: “Don't believe in God,
but I am praying to the universe today.”

A CURIOUSLY LARGE SMALL GROUP

How big is the middle grounders group? Is it just the
“nons”, the 16% to 36% who define themselves as “non-religious” or “none of the
above” in global surveys of world views? Now here’s where it gets interesting. When
we look at detailed findings of world-views, it appears that we may have to add
to this group a number of people we list on the religious side—and perhaps a
very large number.

For example, going back to the details of the survey of
world-views in the “atheistic” 27 European Community countries, we see that 77%
are believers in a higher consciousness. Of these, we find that 51% of people “believe
in God”, while 26% believe in some sort of force or great spirit.¹⁸
Clearly, a large proportion of spiritual people are not conventional believers,
but are modern “in-betweenies”.

So another element of our emerging hypothesis could be to say
that an unknown proportion of people who are listed as believers may actually also
be middle grounders. To see whether this might be true, we need more numbers.

LIGHT DAWNS IN EASTERN EUROPE

Let’s start our search in the most unlikely place. Outside
East Asia, the three countries often listed as the least religious in the world, the places where (the media tells us)
atheists dominate, are Estonia, Sweden and the Czech Republic.

In support of this assertion, we usually find the
Eurobarometer Poll 2010 quoted, which shows that only 18% of people in Sweden
and Estonia believe in God, and only 16% of people in the Czech Republic have
that particular belief. That seems clear enough. These are atheist countries,
right?

But no. That same poll also asked respondents whether they
believe in some sort of ultimate force or great spirit. “Yes” answers came from
44% in the Czech Republic, 45% in Sweden and 50% in Estonia.

So then we do the math: the number of citizens who believe
in the existence of some sort of deity-like presence, called God or The Force
or something else, is actually 60% in Estonia, 63% in Sweden, and 68% in
Estonia, according to the exact same survey. They are certainly not all
churchgoers. But contrary to conventional wisdom, in all three countries,
atheists were a minority, and the dominant groups were the middle grounders –
people whose beliefs are hard to define except for one thing: they don’t think
of themselves as atheists.

Could a universal mind be possible? Pic: Pixabay, public domain

TIME FOR A RE-THINK (picture from Pixabay, public domain, CC license 2.0)

RELIGIOUS ATHEISTS

Broad-ranging reviews of data indicate that even the most
solid-seeming traditional religions may be quietly full of middle-grounders,
who may even be a majority.

For example, our default assumption may be that Jews are
Jewish people belonging to the Jewish faith. We would be wrong. One study of their world-views found that 50% of Jewish
people in America admitted to doubts about the existence of God, suggesting one in two are middle grounders
or atheists¹⁹. The 2012 WIN/Gallup
poll found even starker contrasts. Researchers concluded that only 38% of
the Jewish population worldwide considered itself religious, while 54% saw
itself as non-religious. (And just 2% categorized itself as atheist.)

In other words, it appears that the MAJORITY of Jewish
people worldwide should be classified not in the “religious” section of our
demographic charts, but in the middle grounders section, people with flexible,
shifting, or hard-to-define beliefs.

TRANSFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY

A similar change appears to
have taken place in Christianity, with progressive, liberal Christians drifting
away from the hardline values of older generations. In recent decades, it is
generally accepted that the faith has been swept by a quiet wave of
universalism, in which belief in a literal version of “hell” for
non-Christians, has been replaced by a respectful, non-judgmental view of
people of other faiths. It is difficult to estimate how many Christians have
moved to this position, since the broad, flexible nature of Christianity means
that in any individual congregation there may be members from the full spectrum
of belief, from conservative to liberal to atheistic.

But what we can say is that Christian
movements with very modern views are much in evidence and in growth mode. For
example, members of a US movement called Progressive Christianity emphasize
their passion for ecology and science (and particularly Big Bang cosmological evolution,
a theory which of course came from a church minister, George LeMaitre). Many members
of this group are supportive of gay rights. In Europe, Australia, China and other places,
we find fast-growing non-standard groups meeting outside traditional church
services: consider the creation of huge networks of house churches, the “Messy
Church” movement, the “Fresh Expressions” group of the UK (which meets in
offbeat areas such as skateboard parks) and so on. At several locations these
groups are growing faster than traditional churches are shrinking.

This appears to be a move by mainstream
Christians into the middle ground, or at least positions characterized by
generosity and openness of view. Again, we cannot rely on anecdotal evidence
but need to look for empirical data.

A 2013 survey on religion and
politics in the United States from the Public Religion Research Institute gives
us some figures to work with, at least for that country.²⁰ With each
generation, the popularity of religious conservatism has clearly declined as
people move towards a liberal or progressive attitude, it says. The study
indicates that 47% of the generation aged 66 to 88 are religious conservatives.
Only 34% of Baby Boomers feel the same. The number for Gen Xers is 23%. And
Millennials? Only 17% are conservatives.²⁰ In other words, the majority of US Christians appears to be
already moving into the middle ground. They are people who are likely to love orthodox
science and spend time fighting for the rights of their gay friends.

In the UK, a movement called
Christian Atheists, centred around Oxford, quickly grew into from nothing into
a solid movement with several books explaining the details of their faith.²¹
A similar but separate movement, called Sea of Faith, is reported to have
hundreds of members, including up to 50 church ministers.²²

A poll released in Canada in
2011 indicated that 53% of respondents said they believe in God. “Interestingly, 28% of those identified as
Protestants, 33% of Catholics, and 23% of those who attend weekly religious
services do not,” the National Post reported. So the list of people who are
churchgoers includes many with religious views which are non-standard to say
the least. Walled-off Christianity has been replaced by an open-door version of
the faith.

There was also a
significant difference between the number of Canadian people who believed in
heaven and those who believed in hell, a clear marker that universalism has
quietly spread. The survey said that 89% of Canadians were “completely
comfortable” with being in the company of individuals with beliefs different to
theirs, the defining characteristic of universalists.²³

While it is natural to assume
that a Christian universalist outlook can be found mainly in the intellectual, non-fundamentalist
branches of that faith, there is growing evidence that it also is growing
rapidly in mainstream evangelical Christianity. Arguably the best known
evangelical leader in the world is Rob Bell, named by Time magazine in 2011 as
one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In a 2011 bestseller, he
held up Christian universalism as something all Christians should “long for”.²⁴

ISLAMIC PUZZLES

What about Islam? News
reports so often focus on the fact that Muslims are not allowed to convert to
other beliefs that one could be forgiven for assuming that all of them must be
religious in the most hardline sense. And there have been stories about Muslims
in some countries who expressed support for atheism and were jailed.²⁵
But on reviewing reports of actual practices, it appears that in most places, the
non-conversion rule is so rarely applied that when action is taken on it, the
story makes headlines. One in four human
beings is Muslim, and they do not appear to be the “separate” people that conventional
Western wisdom paints them to be.

In this paper, our aim has
been to use empirical data at every point. But here we fail. It’s hard to find
solid figures for what people in Muslim countries actually believe, compared to
what their governments want us to think they believe. In the world’s most
populous Muslim country, Indonesia, citizens are only allowed to have one of
six official faiths. The country may have as many “nons” as other countries,
but we would never know. Our suspicion is that when governments (or clerics)
try to force their citizens into hardline positions, what they actually do is
push them towards the middle ground. There are certainly discussions taking
place within Islam about the taking of a tolerant, universalist attitude, as is
evidence by the existence of academic papers and on-line discussions of the
subject. Furthermore, we’ve all met Muslims with extremely modern,
sophisticated views.

But what figures we do have for
followers of Islam indicate that that groups falls in line with other groups. The
2012 WIN/Gallop poll found that 74% of Muslims consider themselves religious, 20%
do not consider themselves religious and 3% said they were atheists. Even if we
just go with these figures, the indication is that the middle ground exists
there in numbers almost identical to those in the rest of the world.

Furthermore, there is
evidence that a liberal universalist attitude is present within groups of
Islamic religious practitioners. It can be seen, as mentioned above, in
academic discourse.²⁶ Long before “ISIS” was associated with a
murderous group in the Middle East, it was the acronym for the Institute
for the Secularisation of Islamic Society. Another
example: a Muslim-originated faith group called Subud (originally from Java,
Indonesia) has branches all over the world—and is entirely universalistic, with
Muslims and people of other faiths engaging in joint acts of spiritual
transcendence twice a week.²⁶

HUMANITY’S GEOGRAPHICAL HEART

As mentioned at the start of
this paper, most of the world’s population lives in Asia. What’s the situation
with middle-grounders there?

We have already noted that several
of the major cultural groups in India, from Buddhism to Jainism to schools of
Hinduism, do not have the concept of a monotheistic God that we find in most other
world views considered spiritual. Many have no gods. Does this make them non-religious
or atheistic in the Western sense of the words? Clearly not. The festivals of
these groups feel very religious indeed, with rituals, ceremonies, high
priests, and the acknowledgement of the existence of other dimensions. They
have complex world views. For example, Jainists are atheists who believe that 63
“illustrious persons” have appeared on earth, and include chakravatins, who are
“lords of the material realm” and have golden skin.

A further illustration can be found in a reference to North
Korea. Amusingly, during the writing of this paper, an atheist zealot group sent
us a meme showing how ridiculous people’s religious beliefs were, using an
image showing outrageous supernatural claims made by the country’s leaders, and
apparently accepted by the highly gullible population. The distributors of the
meme seemed to think they were doing what they normally do, poking fun at
religious people, while being unaware that they were discussing an atheist
leader in an atheist society.

Which leads us to an observation. It could be argued that members
of most Asian world-views have always
been in the middle ground. They have never fitted into the “religious or
atheist?” dichotomy pushed by Western pollsters. Both Hinduism (1 billion
people) and Buddhism (490 million people) in practice leave copious amounts of space
for people to hover flexibly between a more austere, religious style and a more
liberal, secular style of practice, to have a belief in an ultimate deity or a
belief that no ultimate deity exists. The same flexibility can be seen in
Taoism, Zen practices and the world views which are dominant in ostensibly
atheist East Asia.

COMING FROM LEFT FIELD

There is yet another area in which we see very large numbers
of people moving towards the middle ground, the part that is neither
traditional religion nor atheism—although they are approaching from a different
direction. China has officially been atheist for more than six decades. But
changes are afoot.

As recently as 1997, the number of Christians in China was calculated
at being less than 20 million. The Chinese government estimates the number of
Christians today at about 90 million (which upsets them, since membership of
the Chinese community party is only 87 million).²⁷ (Other surveys
indicate it is already well above 100 million.) This rate of growth is
astonishing by any measure. One forecast for 2030 is 250 million²⁸.
Given their starting point, in a strictly atheist society, it is hard to
picture these new Christians adopting the full panoply of elements which go
with the most conservative branches of US Christianity. They are more likely to
reach the middle ground and stop somewhere along the path, with plenty of
unique elements of their own.

One final example: the growth of Christianity in Africa,
with a full range of beliefs, from conservative to liberal, is well documented.

OPENING THE MIND (Picture by Hartwig HKD Flickr, Creative Commons license 2.0)

THE GREAT CONVERGENCE

“The great convergence has begun,” says Scott Lawson, a
former church pastor who now works with a trade-aid organization in Asia.
“People everywhere are focusing on what we share, not what divides us.”²⁹

It’s not just individuals who are moving to the middle
ground, but organizations too. Major charities, such as Save the Children and
Oxfam, started as Christian organizations, but have quietly excised references
to religion in their articles of association. The International Red Cross
adopted its name and symbol from a famous group of Roman Catholic volunteer
healthcare workers, but don’t feel the need to mention this in their paperwork.
Groups such as these are still motivated by the same strong humanist
convictions they started with, but see the advantages of removing any elements
that could be interpreted as walls.

Yet we should ask ourselves, is it right to think of people
involved in this convergence as anything like a united group? To answer that,
we’d have to know exactly what they are thinking. The simplistic nature of the
surveys which have taken place make that difficult.

The present researchers, having pored over documents around
this area of study for some months, can offer some general conclusions.

Middle-grounders are a group made up of various elements.
Some are not members of a specific church or temple, but are also not atheist.
Others have a background that may be thought to be religious, such as Judaism,
Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, but which they consider largely cultural.
Still others have a religious background, but choose to interpret their faith
in a modern, liberal way.

The over-riding characteristic of the middle grounders is
that they have genuine respect for those with other world-views. Whereas both religious
fundamentalists and people in “pro-skeptic” groups take a harsh, inflexible
view that other people’s beliefs are simply wrong, evil or poisonous to society,
middle-grounders are by definition open-minded and tolerant. For example, the US
movement called Progressive Christians has “respect for other religions” built
into its charter³⁰, and attendance is encouraged from seekers,
skeptics and agnostics—who are not preached at, but encouraged to share their
views.

“The middle ground rocks,” a Muslim who does a lot of charity
work tells a researcher. She tells the story of a group of Muslims who took
over a church soup kitchen on Christmas Day, so that the Christian volunteers
could take a break. In turn, the Christian volunteers signed up to work at a
Muslim charity when the Islamic Eid holiday came around.³¹

THE PLACE OF SCIENCE

One of the most interesting areas of study (and perhaps
least researched) is the attitude of the converging middle group towards
science. Middle grounders with an intellectual bent evidently love science as
much as they love spirituality. In 2014 in the US, representatives of 551
church congregations met for an “evolution weekend” to celebrate hard science³². In India, scientists successfully launch
rockets to Mars and give puja (blessings) for their success.³³

Judging by the literature, the science establishment is
increasingly non-hostile to views of reality that are not narrowly
materialistic. These days, many scientists and science writers, whether atheist
or otherwise, appear to have taken to heart Einstein’s dictum that: “All
physics is metaphysics.”³⁴ The ultimate non-reality of the physical world
around us, the existence of unseen dimensions, the questions that generate
discussion of the cosmological anthropic principle—these are all areas of lively,
open discussion. While the science community remains as allergic as ever to
anything that smacks of “pseudoscience”, we are honest enough to admit that there
are numerous aspects of quantum theory that appear to move beyond that which
can be explained by purely physical factors (such as the measurement problem,
action at a distance, entanglement and so on). Since the confirmation of Bell’s
Inequality, there is no doubt there exists a mysterious extra dimension outside
our concept of time and space.

Consciousness is another area of open-mindedness, where many
scientists say the you-are-your-brain hypothesis required by strict materialism
feels inadequate.And there is very little gap between popular scientific
hypotheses such as simulationism (the “we live in the matrix” concept)³⁵,
or the “alien intelligence designed this universe” discussion³⁶ and
ideas of the possible existence of some sort of higher consciousness.

In other words, today we all agree that the story of the
development of the universe and organic life reads like an astonishing piece of
science fiction. There’s simply no good reason to say that Sir Isaac Newton’s
understanding of reality (he believed that the indications showed that a higher
consciousness created us and we can call it God) is “wrong”, while the version
offered by a respected modern science writer like John Gribbin³⁶ (he
says that the indications are that a higher consciousness created us and we can
call it alien intelligence) is allowable.

They do not substantially contradict
each other. Indeed, they are not even different.

Some of the world’s most respected scientists, including top
astrophysicist Martin Rees, president emeritus of the Royal Society, have led
the way to more openness in cosmological discussions. Like Charles Darwin and
Albert Einstein, he promotes non-hostility to spiritual practices. The concept
that “matter is made of ideas” comes from discussions in quantum physics rooted
in the work of Werner Heisenberg, but could easily come from the spiritual
world-view of progressive Christians in New York or Hindu programmers in Chennai.
Other scientists who have championed a non-hostile view towards organized
spiritual groups include cosmologists John D. Barrow, Paul Davies and Freeman
Dyson.

CONCLUSION: THE POST-ATHEIST WORLD

After reviewing a large amount of data on this subject, what
can we say about humanity’s main world-views, now and in the future? It’s
almost inevitable that the media will continue to take a Western-centric stance
and report that atheism is growing and people are falling away from churches.
Pollsters will continue to ask people if they are religious or atheist, as if
the two terms were opposites, and will continue to get answers that do not bear
close examination.

But while the rise of atheism has certainly been a key theme
in the development of human culture in the West over the past half-century, the
view that atheism will sweep the globe to produce a non-believing utopia is
extremely unlikely. The shrinking of the skeptical share of humanity is
inevitable, as Welsh geneticist Steve Jones has stated³⁷. The data
gives us no reason to believe otherwise than that atheism will continue to be profoundly
less popular than a more solidly middle view, characterized by an open spiritual
stance combined with a growing respect for the beliefs of others. (This generosity
of attitude appears to chime in with other analyses of sociological trends,
such as the fall in societal violence described in Steven Pinker’s The Better
Angels of Our Nature.)

As described above, the data suggests that the global
proportion of atheists will fall, while the number of pro-spiritual,
pro-science middle group will grow, its numbers boosted by a center-ward drift
from both sides. They will come from extremely large religious groups which are
moving at high speed away from hardline attitudes to liberal ones, and from
ostensibly atheist groups such as the fifth of the world’s population which is
China, re-opening up to a wider range of spiritual practices. This can be seen
as a global convergence.

NAMING THE CENTER

How should we refer to the central group? Above, we have
used terms such as “middle-grounders” and “convergence”.

However, it could be argued that this group already has a
name, as mentioned earlier. Christians use the word “universalism”, a name and
concept with a long history, to refer to the liberal belief that God ultimately
draws all people to himself, not just those who subscribe to a specific set of
doctrines. (They quote many Bible verses to back this view, including the words
of Jesus as quoted in The Gospel of John 12:32: “And when I am lifted up from
the earth, I will draw all men to myself.”) Some historians suggest that the
early church took a universalist view for several centuries, from Christ’s
death to the fifth or sixth centuries. The modern growth of the current brand
of universalism indicates that it is already widespread as a generally accepted
mode of belief. Since the chief characteristic of universalism is respect for
other world-views, it is already being used to refer to open-minded beliefs in
a wider context.

Furthermore, by coincidence or subconscious design, many of
the groups we have been calling the “nons”, people who don’t belong to either a
religious or atheist world-view cluster, frequently use the term “The Universe”
to describe their view of God. While we may associate this use of the word with
new age trends, the idea of identifying God and the Universe is very ancient.
Pantheism underlies much of the thinking in Hinduism, and Einstein declared
himself a follower of Baruch Spinoza, a 17^th century philosopher
identified with the spread of pantheism in the West. (In Spinozan thought, The
Universe or nature is God, but God is more than nature.)

In science, too, we talk about universalistic concepts with
similar terms. Most famously, we have Charles Darwin’s views on religion as a
receptacle of ideas that enabled man to live on a higher moral plane. Darwin
noted that while tribes of “savages” did exist with no notion of a specific God
or gods, a spiritual view of life was “universal”. He wrote that the God of
Western religion was not found in remote climes; “If, however, we include under
the term ‘religion’ the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is
wholly different: for this belief seems to be universal with the less civilized
races.”³⁸

This may ultimately imply that humanity itself has a deep
need to believe that reality has an extra dimension to it. As in so many
things, Darwin appears to have got to this idea before the rest of us.
Influenced by his friend, social evolutionist Herbert Spencer, Darwin wrote in
1870 that man was “led through dreams, shadows, and other causes, to look at
himself as a double essence, corporeal and spiritual”.³⁸

Although Darwin lost the simple, literal faith that he had
in his youth, he later chose to raise his children as universalists (his wife
was a Unitarian), sending them to church on Sundays. In his final years, he
offered the use of his reading room for Christian gatherings.

SUMMARY AND FINAL THOUGHT

Atheism as a proportion of humanity’s belief systems appears to have peaked, while spiritual groups are undergoing convergence, as shown by a review
of world-view data which includes a more nuanced examination of belief
statistics from Asia, the world’s most populous region. Humanity is entering a
post-atheist era featuring a global convergence of people with an open-minded, pro-science,
pro-spiritual outlook.

Media suggestions that humanity is turning into an atheist
utopia are unfounded. Such beliefs appear to come from an unhelpful understanding
of spiritual beliefs as religious at one end and atheistic at the other. A form
of universalism, defined as an inclusive spirituality in which all world-views, including skepticism, are respected, may already be the largest cluster.

Poet W. H. Auden would be pleased with the spread of
openness and tolerance. Talking of humanity as a whole, he said: “We must love
one another or die.”

But in terms of acknowledging the move to converge on what
we share rather than what divides us, perhaps a quote variously attributed to
Ferenc David, a Unitarian minister, and John Wesley, a Christian preacher, is more
appropriate: “We need not think alike to love alike.”

***

A NOTE ON THE
AUTHOR’S STANCE: The lead researcher on this project has mixed influences. He
lives in a culture generally classified as highly atheistic and works with
atheist friends and colleagues, but had a Muslim father and a Buddhist mother
and has a Christian wife. He finds much to like in all major belief systems, especially science.

***

REFERENCES

1) For an example of atheistic triumphalism, consider this
quote from Salon, a web-based magazine: “Like a fresh-baked loaf of sanity
resting on the window of human possibility, atheism is on the rise in the
United States.”

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/04/five_most_awful_atheists_salpart/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

2) Most authorities indicate there are about 2.3 billion
Christians, or about 33% of the world’s population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_population_growth#Absolute_growth